[Sea-Country is now out of print but we thought you’d still enjoy this extract]Tony Smith is now the keep­er of Charlie Stock’s game little 16-foot gaff cut­ter Shoal Waters, and has made it his busi­ness to take her the length and breadth of the Thames estu­ary, and into…

Our first book had sold out a few years before, and we had the feel­ing it was time for a new edi­tion in our now-stand­ard robust soft­cov­er format, and that there remained an unplumbed audi­ence among people who, though per­haps not habitu­al read­ers of sail­ing books,…

Someone, some­where wrote that George Millar was incap­able of writ­ing a dull sen­tence, and never was that more true than in his three books of sail­ing mem­oirs. Oyster River, set in the Morbihan in Brittany, and Isabel and the Sea, relat­ing a voy­age through the French…

Perhaps the most curi­ous craft which is found in use by the fish­er­men round the coasts of Britain is the Yorkshire coble [writes George Holmes in 1912]. Along with the Sheringham boat—referred to and described in a former number—this type is used for crab­bing by the…

Most people read­ing this have enjoyed lives markedly more com­fort­able than those of their par­ents or grand­par­ents. My own fath­er served at sea when a teen­ager dur­ing World War II, as a stoker and coal trim­mer on tramp steam­ers and later on deep-sea res­cue tugs, on…

The Albert Strange Association (bear with me), in which I am heav­ily implic­ated, held its Annual General Meeting in Lincoln a few years ago, and our very enga­ging guest speak­er was Dr Robb Robinson, a mari­time his­tor­i­an at the University of Hull. His sub­ject was…