A photo essay of the book on Brest. It covers 30 years of the Brest Festival which held every four years (but not 2020) since 1992 in Brittany. Some 2,000 vessels – from canoes to Tall Ships take part bringing 10,000 crew into this operational naval port. The organisers expect anything from 750,000 to 1m [...]
All our back issues are now digitised and can be downloaded (for a modest sum) from our online Shop. They were free on issuu for a while but the site became commercial and we couldn't afford to do it that way. See more of these - full contents etc in our ARCHIVE section. Some [...]
Tasmania - from the organisers: Well, the venues are booked, the program is out, the boats are lined up and more than 268 volunteers have already signed up to be part of the largest wooden boat festival in Australia (well, actually one of the largest in the world!). With 427 registered boats being painted sanded, [...]
Can you remember getting into boating? Chances are a wooden boat made sense because you could pick one up in quite good condition for a few thousand pounds, and that is still true. I remember buying Salote, a 30ft (9m) 1953 Scarborough Sloop at a fabulous bargain price – shared between three of us. The [...]
It’s often after an event at sea that you can look back with clear perspective and see things in the light of personal experience. We got caught out in a high gale in the Arctic a few years back and when I think on it now it feels like a trophy sail. The trophy sail [...]
Our April issue is out with a cover story on Cleone - the claim is that she is Britain's oldest, or one Britain's oldest yachts... so naturally we look into that. Beautiful boat nonetheless! Nigel Irens is a naval architect who has designed the fastest power and sailing craft in the world. He is also [...]
Meet Giovanni Belgrano - one of our featured classic sailors in the December edition, who takes racing his 1939 Giles one-off design to new heights as he tweaks her rig and systems, and trains his crew with an almost Olympic approach to get her winning against much more modern yachts in IRC classes – including [...]
We have some news from the Stella Association in our December issue - the class is mainly east coast based and has eschewed GRP since it was designed by Kim Holman in 1959. Elsewhere in the issue, in an article about the Folkboat-derived GRP boats we ask our readers which is their favourite classic glassfibre [...]
Author and fishing industry historian Mike Smylie has a regular spot in Classic Sailor where each month he describes one of the archetypal craft that were developed to fish off the British coast. We started with Cornish luggers and then the Scottish Scaffie; this month we are round on the north east coast with the [...]
