Along with the 1979 Fastnet Race, the 1998 Sydney Hobart has become a byword for disaster at sea. Unless a writer was actually on board one of the boats and…
Great Seamanship
A bit aground: Extract from Nick Imber’s Travels With My Nan
A satisfying feature of looking after this column for the last 16 years has been the latitude granted me by editors for selecting material. This has delivered enough slack to…
Exumas to New York in a 33ft boat: Dick Carter’s extraordinary east coast voyage
In 1965 a young American designer, Dick Carter, met up with Bernard Hayman of Yachting World in the cockpit of Dick’s new race boat Rabbit. Yachting World recognised a mould-breaking…
Night fall: An extract from Cully Pettigrew’s Yachting Journal of a Hebridean Sailor
Yachting Journal of a Hebridean Sailor by Cully Pettigrew offers an unusual insight into the mind of a deep-thinking man. His relationship with a small yacht over 30 years and…
Solo overboard: An extract from Miles Hordern’s Sailing The Pacific
Back in the early 1990s, a young man called Miles Hordern sailed his 28ft Kim Holman-designed Twister single-handed from the UK to New Zealand. He lived aboard in Auckland for…
The amazing voyage of Laura Dekker, the 15-year-old who sailed round the world alone
In 2009, the English sailing community was galvanised by the arrival on the East Coast of a 14-year-old single-hander from Holland, writes Tom Cunliffe. This was Laura Dekker, skippering a…
Rammed by a trawler off the coast of Brittany: “There was no-one at the wheel”
The 90-ton ketch Johanne was launched in 1929 as a Baltic trader, writes Tom Cunliffe. Bought out of Denmark in the late 1960s, she sailed to Lymington on the west…
‘Force Unlucky’ mid-Atlantic: surviving a truly ferocious winter gale
Today’s sailing world is well stocked with sponsored heroes, performing remarkable feats in the cause of being fastest on some great endeavour, writes Tom Cunliffe. John Kretschmer is a different…