Lots of jobs on your boat are relatively straightforward and don’t need a great deal of skill. However, if you haven’t tackled a certain job before, you may not know…
Yachting Monthly
Jeanneau Sun Light 30 Review: A Family Cruiser With Racing Influence
When the big French production builders started launching boats like the Jeanneau Sun Light 30 in the mid-to-late 1980s, they got the British builders worried. I was working in the…
‘Why I went over to the dark side’ – Pete Goss
Falling off a ladder teaches you many things. For a start the NHS treats a one-metre fall as serious, so my fall, from above first-floor level, should have had spectacular…
Isles of Scilly Storm Dodging: ‘We had to gain steerage way from a standing start while neighbouring boats were dancing around wildly’
Mary and I are very fond of the Isles of Scilly. In fact, we regard the archipelago as the most delightful cruising destination to be found anywhere around the British…
‘If someone had offered me a third of the asking price to buy the boat back, I would have bitten their hand off’ – Monty Halls
I sat back on the saloon roof, leaned against the mast, sipped my beer, and revelled in the moment. Here I was, at long last, perched on my very own…
How to survive in a liferaft should the worst happen
You have no idea how frightening it is to step off a sinking yacht and into a liferaft. There is just you, the raft and whatever you have managed to…
‘Boat builders seem to take pride in making stuff tricky to get to’
They say that the definition of cruising is ‘fixing your boat in exotic locations’. Well, crouched, sweating, in the aft heads using a head torch and a mirror to extract…
‘Never before have I sailed in such wild weather’ – struck by a ‘weather bomb’ near New Zealand
Sammy, my sister, was ready to go. She couldn’t wait to put on her skipper’s hat and head off on a great adventure. It was 1998 when offshore sailing was…
The secret of yachts that hold their value
Yachts seem to be evolving faster and faster these days, with fashions changing and and ideas about what makes a good sailing boat shooting off in all sorts of directions.…
Excess 11 review: A very rare sub-40ft cruising catamaran
Catamarans don’t belong in the UK, I hear you cry. If you’ve been put off by towering topsides, the vast beam and ideas about how much it might cost to…