John Passmore

No, it’s not a pretty sight. But this is what I found in the chain locker after I had emptied all the sails out of the forepeak – and the big ball fender – and wrestled with the fastenings of the access hatch … while drifting around outside the anchorage at two o’clock in the … Read more

I would like to introduce you to my bean sprouts. I would give them all names if this wasn’t a proper farming enterprise in which sentimentality has no place. Anyway, they’re destined for the pot after three days so there’s hardly time to get to know them as there would be with chicks or piglets. … Read more

  Preston is back in Lockdown, more face-covering regulations are about to come into force for the rest of the country. I’ve had enough of this. I’m off. I’m supposed to meet my family in Porto in ten days. There’s a following wind. I could be there in five. The question is: Will they be … Read more

Well, that’s it. The book is finished. After my ten minutes of fame on the Jeremy Vine show, his agent contacted me and said he was convinced there was a book in it – if only he could get in the shops before people stopped talking about Lockdown and moved on to the next big … Read more

How very odd. I’ve got a book about that. I wrote it in 1983 and published it on Amazon in 2017.  This was the review by Geoffrey Wansell in the Daily Mail: Former Daily Mail reporter Passmore first wrote this novel in 1983, when it was dismissed by publishers as ‘a little far-fetched’. How wrong … Read more

The land is complicated. Life is simpler at sea. I have now been in Falmouth for 42 days – exactly as many as I spent going nowhere and back again. It just seems longer. The boat is loaded with food (another 49 cans of sardines). All I need to do is fill the water tanks … Read more

They do say that one small, spur-of-the-moment decision can change your life. The last 48 hours have been like nothing I have ever experienced before. It all began very innocently: I was underneath the galley trying to stop the water pump squirting all over the ready-use stores when Jeremy Vine popped up on Radio Two … Read more

What is it they use to make sardine cans? You’d think they were boxing up nuclear waste, the weight of metal in those things. Admittedly, this is not something that had occurred to me until I read that the Golden Globe racers were committed to throwing nothing into the ocean unless it was fully biodegradable. … Read more