The first night on an unfamiliar boat can be a bit restless. You listen to the creaks and groans of the boat, the waves lapping onto the hull, the temperature…
Cruising life
‘They watched a narwhal give birth, tracked polar bears and wrestled with ice’ – Pete Goss
One of life’s pleasures is to support others as they tackle their dreams and remotely sweep you aboard to share both triumph and disaster. For some reason I seem to…
Sailing though the British winter with the Little Ship Club
And then there was light, most welcome it was, too after a gruelling drive via several motorways into the pitch black New Forest. I drove on, motivated by the thought…
Shared boat ownership: All the fun at a fraction of the cost?
Many sailors dream of owning their own boat, with heady dreams of a seafaring life, but the mundane reality is that many yachts sit unused for the majority of the…
Conquering the Northwest Passage
The Atlantic passage had been strange. The crossing from Scotland to the west coast of Greenland, or vice versa, is usually ‘the meanest Atlantic crossing of them all’, fraught with…
Sailing in the Atlantic: ‘Fog, gales, hurricanes and calms in one voyage’
Zen Again, our Japanese designed and built 1980s IOR ¾ tonner, is a well-equipped ‘pocket’ blue-water cruiser. She has over 50,000 miles under her keel with us and about twice…
Sailing a 100 year old Brixham Sailing Trawler from Scotland to the South Coast
Eight days after leaving Oban on the west coast of Scotland, we arrived at the Fowey estuary on the Cornish coast. The guests and crew on board were oblivious to…
A cross-channel adventure from Suffolk to the Netherlands
With apologies to Shakespeare – our dilemma could hardly be compared to Hamlet’s, but it was real. Once again, though for the first time since Brexit, we were heading for…
‘Do people charter to go sailing, or to travel to interesting places by yacht?’ – Lu Heikell
When researching ports and anchorages to include in our pilot books, Rod and I tend to spend a lot of our time in some of the most popular places, making…
‘Mayday, Grandad overboard!’: A race turned lifeboat rescue
Henry, my grandson, and I decided to sail together for the Fowey Sailing Opal series, the last yacht race series of the season, as his dinghy season was complete and…