Tom Cunliffe

Life used to be so simple, didn’t it! It wasn’t all roses though. Back in the days before the general comforts of electronics, I had a few bad trips in…

Dick Durham

A tiny screw nestling in a part of my engine has defeated all my passage plans. By now I should be bowling northwards with the wheel’s kick and the wind’s…

Tom Cunliffe

I have a charcoal filter on the foot-powered drinking-water pump in my galley. It normally catches everything and I never suffer a bad cup of tea. At Easter, I was…

Good to have the pilotage notes on going round Land’s End (p40). No headland is without its nervous moments, especially with cliffs involved, and off-lying rocks suggesting that the land…

Dick Durham

Most people don’t ‘get’ Roger D Taylor. At one time, blinded by sunny photographs of exotic ports in over-written pilot books, nor did I. Roger sails round in ever-increasing circles…

Tom Cunliffe

In this month’s ‘Skipper’s Tips’ I’ve mentioned how I hate blundering around strange harbours at night. The most colourful near miss to join the lexicon of frights leading to this…

Dick Durham

I went to Mike Peyton’s wake recently. Not surprisingly, because he’s still world- renowned for his wry humour, it was not a gloomy affair. There were about 60 of us…

Years ago when we were young, we went to a few yacht club meets in our Contessa 26, Barnacle Goose. All the other boats were much bigger and grander, with…

North or South, that is the question: whether ’tis nobler in the yachtsman to seek the sleet and icebergs of outrageous Northlands? Or to bare arms upon a sea of…

Tom Cunliffe

This was my log entry for 25 March 1977: ‘1400 – Horrified to witness the formation of a waterspout about a mile to leeward. Started like a cloud on the…