Mike Peyton – tide by tide

David Fairhall, 1934-2026

David Fairhall, Guardian defence correspondent, sailing author and a very good friend, died last month at the age of 91.

Below is a link to an obituary I wrote for the Guardian, where David was a senior journalist for 38 years, and a colleague for the 15 years I worked there.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/apr/30/david-fairhall-obituary?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

David lived in Maldon, Essex, and was a friend of many east coast sailors, including the cartoonist Mike Peyton, who illustrated David’s Pass Your Yachtmaster and Pass your Day Skipper. (I updated both for their most recent editions). As a young man, David crewed on yacht deliveries for Peter Haward, who wrote All Weather Yachtsman, a book whose title says it all about the kind of passage making they did.

David’s books covered a much wider range than sailing, from his first on Russian sea power to his last on US and Russian competition for the arctic as the ice melts. He covered conflict from the 1967 Six Day War through the Falklands to the first Gulf War and Bosnia.

My favourite book of David’s is East Anglian Shores, about the creeks, estuaries and harbours of Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk, an east coast classic that should be on every shelf.

I published a post on this blog a few years ago commemorating the 25th anniversary of a memorable Guardian Fastnet challenge in 1989, skippered by David. We persuaded the paper to finance us to charter a yacht and train a crew of novice Guardian staffers. Here is a link to the post.

Aimless cruising

Mike Peyton’s annual cruise with his club had a simple policy: don’t discuss where to go, don’t collaborate on planning and all set off about the same time. It seems that at the dictate of wind and tides, the club members would invariably end up in the same place anyway.

I can understand how that happens, after 10 days of this July’s weather. If you are a cruising sailor of a certain age who does not want to exhaust yourself and your crew to windward, the options for where to go narrow right down as soon as you check tides and wind.

*Dartmouth entrance in better weather, last time we visited*

Just out – the new Pass Your Day Skipper

The new edition of Pass Your Day Skipper by David Fairhall and Peter Rodgers is now on sale. The book was originally by David but – at his invitation – I’ve expanded it and added lots of new material on electronic navigation, weather, and safety. The illustrations are by the famous sailing cartoonist Mike Peyton.

Yachtmaster book out

The new, updated and expanded edition of Pass Your Yachtmaster is in the bookshops. It’s the best primer around for the RYA sailing qualification, and the only one with jokes – the serious stuff by David Fairhall and myself is leavened with lots of hilarious cartoons about sailing by the late Mike Peyton.

There’s a new chapter on electronic charts and fresh material on weather forecasting, safety equipment and other aspects of sailing offshore that have been changing in recent years as the technology improves.

Back to the future – electronics on board

I was intrigued by the equipment list below, which is more than three decades old, because it was a reminder of how long we have been arguing about the risks and rewards of electronic navigation. I found the list in some old files I was checking last year for the sixth edition of Pass Your Yachtmaster by David Fairhall and Mike Peyton, which I was commissioned to update by Adlard Coles*.

*A 1989 list of yacht electronics talked about at the Boat Show*

The list was part of an article I produced for the Guardian newspaper about electronics for small boat navigation, under the headline ‘And a satellite to steer her by’, researched by talking to manufacturers due to appear at that year’s London Boat Show. I had forgotten all about it.

July – launch date at last

So far the only boating I’ve done the entire year is rowing my little dinghy to harvest some luscious but otherwise inaccessible early blackberries hanging over the water.

This lovely little lapstrake boat, a Roger Oughtred design called a feather pram, is too fragile to want to knock it about on beaches as a yacht tender, so I keep it safe on our pond.

April – sea fever

It’s the time of year when we recommission Spring Fever, paint the bottom, ready the gear and sails, update the charts and clean and polish the hull. These essential rituals lead up to that perfect moment when we head out from the harbour and the bow first rises to the swell from the sea – a cliché, I know, but it is a spring-time experience always to savour.

That’s impossible with the boatyard shut and we, the owners – as a slightly-older category of person – banned from leaving home. It’s only when I can’t get on a boat as the summer approaches that I realise quite how much it still means after all these years. Sitting here in Suffolk, 20 miles from the coast, the east wind smells of the sea and, if I’m not careful, I’ll soon be reciting John Masefield.