There are precious few places in The Solent where you can anchor for nothing – certainly not with shelter from all quarters. Of course, you can be a cheapskate and refuse to give a fiver to the National Trust in the Newtown River – but the volunteers are so charming when they come round in … Read more
You don’t appreciate just how big Poole Harbour really is until you row from Pottery Pier to the little beach in the fishing boat marina. That’s 1.3 nautical miles (Poole Harbour being the second biggest natural harbour in the world – second only to Sydney, apparently). I row at two knots – but then, I … Read more
The trouble with being smug is that sooner or later, you get your comeuppance. For instance, I am well aware that I can be annoyingly smug about having nothing wrong with me at the age of 74 – well, nothing physical anyway: No aches and pains, no stick, no specs, no dentist’s bills and so … Read more
Be very careful about inviting a single-hander onto your boat – they’ll drink all your gin, and then you have to throw them over the side to get rid of them. I grew up with this – it was my parents’ philosophy whenever a scruffy old boat ghosted into the anchorage with a single, scruffy … Read more
My clever plan to promote the French translation of my book Old Man Sailing turned out to be not so clever after all. Arriving in Les Sables d’Olonne, the singlehanded sailing capital of the world, I envisaged becoming the epicentre of some sort of media storm. It turns out there is far more sailing news … Read more
Why do we do it? Why do we live on boats? Particularly, why do some of us live on boats alone? Don’t you get lonely? Don’t you get bored? What about when the weather’s bad? When stuff goes wrong… Well, all of that goes to make up days like today. For today is a good … Read more
Dateline: L’Aber Wra’ch Middle of the Night Yes. It is 0030hrs, the smell of fresh-ground coffee fills the cabin, and I am wide awake, washed and dressed (in fresh clothes). Mozart’s Romeo and Juliet is playing on the Bluetooth speaker – and so, the day begins. Maybe this takes a bit of explaining. My body … Read more
This is the big news. Forget meeting Kirsten Neuschäfer in the Marina office. Forget the local paper coming to interview me today – they did. The big news is that I have a cockpit table! Being able to sit up for breakfast in the sunshine with your plate in front of you and not drop … Read more
Does everyone have those days when everything goes wrong? When, in fact, things go wrong from breakfast through ‘til suppertime for days on end? And yet, while the catalogue of disasters piles up like unopened bills on the hall table, a tiny voice at the back of your mind keeps insisting that at any moment … Read more
It is a law of nature in France (maybe it is a law of the Fifth Republic) that nowhere in the country is more than ten minutes’ walk from a bakery. This means that at 7.00 a.m, as another blazing day began in Les Sables d’Olonne, the town was up and out for the morning’s … Read more
