About

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This is a blog for family and friends about sailing. It’s not all about going offshore: there are posts about building a lapstrake pram dinghy, about nerdish technical issues that I’m interested in, such as electronic navigation and chart accuracy, about barge cruises including the Venice lagoon, and we also intend to canoe the lengths of the Stour (for the fourth time) and the Waveney, the southern and northern borders of Suffolk.

The sea is still the main objective. We’ve sailed to Scotland and Ireland in two extended round Britain cruises, been countless times to France and Holland, and chartered often in the Mediterranean and as far as the Seychelles. There are lots more places we plan to go. If you are interested in why we obsessively spend so much time on this leisure pursuit, here is a link to an attempt at an explanation.

As well as the chronological list of posts under ‘All Posts’, they are collected into categories through links at the top right on a computer or underneath the posts on a phone screen. So you can go straight to navigation issues, cruises, or indeed to long reads and essays, which include tales from the 1950s to today, among them the rows we once had at the Guardian, my one-time employer, when the former Tory Prime Minister Ted Heath launched the paper’s sponsored racing yacht. We also tell how the Bank of England’s yacht was sunk, in a manner of speaking, and I got the blame. For those who like the classics, I also had a fascinating opportunity to study the 2,500 year old argument about the settings for Homer’s Odyssey, which you can read about in ‘Greek pilotage puzzle: where’s Ithaca?’

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