John Passmore It seems ages since I did this: I’m sitting on the lee berth, laptop on my knees, feet braced against the windward – the hatch is just managing to keep the sun off the screen. Dyna-mite by Mud is playing on Spotify and the beer in the little electric cooler I picked up second hand … Read more
Old Man Sailing, the book, included accounts of some extraordinarily vivid dreams which I started having once I had been on my own for a while. Whether these were a direct consequence of the enforced solitude, I have no idea – but they went down rather well. Since this blog is an exercise in pure … Read more
Tell me if I’m being patronising. The other day, I wrote about the desperate situation for people in The Gambia – the economy on the floor, everyone scrabbling for just the basics of life – and how I felt obliged to take on all manner of guides and interpreters and pay over the odds. Here’s … Read more
His name was Ibrahim. He was a Baghdad taxi driver, and he drove an ancient orange Toyota the size of a tank. He drove it like a tank too. However, as far as I remember, Saddam Hussein’s Russian-built T54s did not boast detachable dashboards. It was behind the dashboard that Ibrahim kept his international … Read more
I was going to be a Spitfire pilot. We all were – backs to the wall, fighting to the death against a merciless invader… This was 1959, an English prep school; War Picture Library with a torch after lights out. For the price of a Mars Bar, you could borrow Boddington’s flying helmet. It had … Read more
What does an old man, sailing on his own, do for an outboard? Well, l’ll tell you what a young man does – at least, what I did when I was in my 40’s on Largo: I had a little two-stroke Suzuki and I took it in one hand and climbed into the dinghy with … Read more
This is nice: Yachting Monthly has reviewed Old Man Sailing and called it a “word-of-mouth bestseller”. And there’s some evidence for that: the daily sales from Amazon tend to be higher than they were a couple of months ago – with a higher proportion coming from overseas. Now a Dutch sailing magazine has asked for … Read more
Everybody’s waiting. That’s what you do in the Canary Islands at this time of year. The boats have to get across the Bay of Biscay by the middle of September to avoid the equinoctial gales – but they mustn’t reach the Caribbean until the end of the hurricane season, and that means not setting … Read more
Like most of the world’s great discoveries, the perfect solution to the antifouling problem turned up when I was looking for something else. I could tell you what it is right now – in a few words, as it happens. But that would be a waste of a good story – and it is a … Read more
Every year up until now, October has been the turning point. Time to start making my way home for Christmas – three months holed up in the Walton Backwaters with the seals and the geese, slowly poisoning myself with carbon monoxide as the charcoal heater leaked more and more smoke into the cabin. Out would … Read more
