Reviews of current and new sailing titles
This is a magical tale – which should be on all parents’ (and grandparents’!) books list as a classic story of fantasy sailing for children. It centres around a boy, a keen sailor, who takes his gaff-rigged cabin boat out in all weathers, risking all to be thought of as the best sailor of his little home port. One night [...]
Seven years after it first appeared in print we find ourselves going back to this book. Invariably the need to cross reference a detail or check something on the design list (complete and concise!) gets side-channelled into a happy half hour of reading or re-reading about one or other of the beautiful yachts featured here. [...]
Open boat or dinghy cruising has held a perennial interest for a special type of sailor since yachting began. And in the 1970s the handy Drascombe Lugger was a great boat to be getting afloat and sailing off along the coast if not sometimes over the horizon. If you were lucky your best girl came [...]
Meandering about the Essex and Suffolk tidal creeks of the Thames Estuary in his Finesse 24, Nick Ardley has picked up all sorts of tales and snippets over the years, and relates them here in an appropriately leisurely and discursive manner. Reading it is a bit like drifting on a slack tide of a warm [...]
Memoirs of a Racing Skipper First published in 1950 this is a welcome reprint of a professional skipper's experiences from the days of late Victorian and Edwardian sailing – days of the Big Class, through to the interwar period. In 1867 Tom Diaper was born into a family of yacht crew, occasional fishermen and one-time [...]
To delve into this book is to yearn to be making passage across the Channel and close with the magical parts of coast described in this valuable book. Peter Cumberlidge has done more than a basic pilotage book here - although the chartlets and descriptions for this third edition are all updated; he includes a [...]
by Maynard Bray, Benjamin Mendlowitz, Claas Van Der Linde, Kurt Hasselbalch This handsome, large format, 288-page, full-colour book features the finest examples of the Herreshoff Manufacturing Company’s boats, along with 200 of the most sumptuous maritime photographs ever put to paper by the renowned nautical photographer Benjamin Mendlowitz who often uses the early or late [...]
While some of us go sailing for sanity it is also well known that the sea can have the opposite effect, as this well-written volume explores. It’s a mix of general stories, such as the effects of scurvy, cramped conditions aboard ship and naval battles with individual stories of some of the more heinous happenings [...]
Sub-headed: " A yachtsman's gossip" There is 'nothing of high mark' in any of these pages Alker Tripp, quoting Dickens, says of this book in the introduction... but he does hope they carry the smell of salt water and the wind. And they do just that. This has become one of the classics of sailing [...]
