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I just reviewed a book for the Ocean Cruising Club – Happy Hooking: The Art of Anchoring by Alex and Daria Blackwell. It’s over 350 pages long – and this is the third edition! Clearly, if you want to grab a yachtie’s attention, just bring up the subject of anchoring. Take a look at the … Read more

Passing Through – The Scilly Isles  (2,300 words) There is no closer bond than the one between the singlehanded sailor and his boat – until he rows ashore, that is. Then he wants to be joined at the hip to his dinghy. Mine was on the beach at The Gugh, the smallest and least-populated island … Read more

Back in the early 90’s when I used to write the Dogwatch column in Yachting World and had just moved aboard for what was supposed to be a life-long cruise (for what happened to that see “The Old Man’s Story” page) the then editor, Andrew Bray, came up with the idea for a second column … Read more

I don’t like towing a dinghy. It slows you down, it gets itself into trouble. In the worst-case scenario, you can end up losing it. That’s why I carry the smallest, lightest (only 10kg) I could find – you can deflate and stow it in five minutes so who needs to tow it? But what … Read more

Years and years ago, I wrote a piece for Yachting World called Real Men don’t use spinnaker squeezers. It centred around the Mother of All Broaches in Largo off the Grand Banks towards the end of the 1988 OSTAR – which, that year, was sponsored by Carlsberg (although the beer was all gone before we … Read more

It’s a delicate decision; when to call in the experts. A couple of weeks ago, I had this weird problem with the cooling water for the engine. Sometimes it would flow, sometimes it wouldn’t. There seemed to be no logic to it. I’d inspected the filter, tested the seacock – easy now that I have … Read more

I was fast asleep when the boat turned turtle. Being a catamaran, she stayed that way. They pulled me off with a helicopter. I had been asleep at the time. There, that’s out of the way. If I’m going to write about sleep management for singlehanded sailors, I had better admit to the embarrassing moment … Read more

It seems only yesterday that I wrote with such pride about pulling up the anchor by hand – and me 70 years old if I’m a day (imagine how impressive it will be when I’m 80!). You might have guessed I would live to regret this. But from Falmouth to the Hebrides – the Isle … Read more