The first two editions have sold over 10,000 copies and this, the third edition, sees the book return to hardback with a stunning cover image of Suhaili in the Southern Ocean during the 1968/9 Golden Globe Race under Sir Robin Knox-Johnston. The stories here are collected from around the world and across centuries and continents. Gale-whipped headlands, mountainous seas, island-hopping in a tropical paradise, square-riggers and self-built yachts; they’re all here, and described in the author’s voice, which is highly descriptive and emotionally engaged.
The subtitle, Words of Wisdom from 50 Years Afloat, gives you a clue about what to expect here. Author Skip Novak has spent his life afloat, and is known to many for his long-standing column in Yachting World, and to many others for his cruised in Antarctic waters in the steel yacht Pelagic that he built himself in 1987, a yacht that featured when he took Sir Robin Knox Johnston, John Simpson and Ranulph Fiennes around Cape Horn in the BBC 2 series Top Dogs. Novak has had his share of racing experience too, starting as a small boy in Chicago’s Belmont Harbour racing “tippy” Lehman 10 dinghies summer and winter, and culminating four Whitbread races (three as skipper), and skippering the 110ft maxi multihull Innovation Explorer in The Race (around the world) in 2001 – a 64-day, non-stop circumnavigation. You can rest assured that this collection of essays, grouped by subject rather than chronology to encourage dipping in and out, is by someone who really knows what he’s talking about. So far, Novak has underlined the need for new, adult sailors to get some dinghy experience; and to learn how to fix stuff when it breaks. Later topics take on when it is time to give up sail for power; the great lifejacket debate (worth buying the book for this treatise alone); and scores more. It’s very readable; but you’ll learn a lot too.
London life as an editor at The Guardian and the wild disunity and uncertainty that followed Brexit were two triggers that prompted Susan Smillie to simply sail away in 2016, aboard her Nicholson 26 Isean. What started as a part-time British voyage was soon followed by voluntary redundancy from work, and that voyage became a solo odyessey to Greece, reaching the Mediterranean via the Bay of Biscay. This is more travel narrative rather than sailing memoir, with the author’s own inner journey taking equal prominence to the physical voyage, but as a relative newcomer to sailing (having been mentored by our own erstwhile boat tester Jeff Howlett, as it happens), the prose is full of the adventure, joy and fear of setting to sea in a small boat, as in her description of arriving at a new place by boat: “You’re neither local nor tourist, but more than a visitor. Blown in by the wind, you’re a mariner, part of an ancient tradition.” The balance is well struck, with grief, purpose, identity, friendship, tidal races and the flashing patterns of lighthouses all sharing the stage
nicely.
By Joshua Slocum
In 1893, the retired American/Canadian sea captain Joshua Slocum bought what we might now call “a project boat” – the 37ft (11m) oyster sloop Spray – spent a year restoring her, then became the first person in history to, as the title has it, sail around the world alone, from 1895-8. His voyage memoir is probably the most famous sailing book of all time, and tells of fog, fear, loneliness, gear failure, pirates, strandings and more. The haphazard, 46,000-mile voyage, starting in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, took boat and skipper east across the Atlantic before heading west again at Gibraltar, to circle the globe west-about through the Straits of Magellan. The route bears little comparison to the many east-about circumnavigations that have followed; and the tableaus he describes – such as setting sharp tacks on the deck at night to fend off native marauders in the night and beholding a ghost at the helm – are similarly from a different era. Slocum was later lost at sea aboard Spray, but his legacy lives on in the many circumnavigations that have followed and the innumerable Spray replicas built over the years. The book has never been out of print. This latest version from obooko.com is in pdf format and free, so we’ll forgive the alteration of the title to Spray. The real title is, and will always be, Sailing Alone Around the World.
Former Fleet Street photographer Bob Aylott has snapped humankind from politicians and soldiers to serial killers, film stars and models the world over. The world of wooden hulls and gaff rig was love at first sight and he started his own YouTube channel myclassicboat and he has since shipped aboard every class of classic from Victorian gaffers, Folkboats and Fifes to Thames sailing barges, Morecambe Bay Prawners and West Solent One Designs. This book is a remarkable slice of British yachting history, including Nancy Blackett, Lively Lady, Morning Cloud, Jolie Brise, Lone Wolf, Peggy Bawn and scores of others. The people include Tom Cunliffe, Ming-Ming sailor Roger Taylor and OSTAR sailor Val Howells, Royal Yacht Squadron artist Martyn Mackrill, and Martin Thomas, former Ocean Cruising Club commodore. The places include the Cowes and Hamble Classics; and the West Country, Whitby and Wales are among many locations where Bob’s camera has focused on Britain’s beautiful boats. Review by Dick Durham.
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