And finally...

Voyage North has arrived and the set is complete. These are file copies, sculling around the study for ready reference. When I get a moment I will pull new stock out of boxes and arrange them somewhere classier than a recycled Amazon box. On Peter Duck’s bookshelf perhaps….

She’s currently in Shotley Marina where The Salt-Strained Book achieved its happy ending. I hesitate to mention that she’s moored on the linear pontoon in the centre of the marina where A Ravelled Flag began so disastrously…

But no disasters are forecast for publication day tomorrow (15.10.2022). Instead we are joining with the GB Cadet world team, who we are sponsoring. They’ll be training in Dovercourt Bay during the day, then in the evening, joining us for a Paying It Forward celebration.

There’s more to be reflected on and written but just for now I’d like to share how wonderful it feels to have completed the series of books which I began, so unwittingly, sitting beside Alton Water reservoir sometime around 2005-6. Peter Willis has written a review for Yachting Monthly which begins ‘The seventh (and last) of what began as Julia Jones’s Ransome-inspired ‘Strong Winds’ trilogy has come a long way from a Mirror dinghy on the Orwell, We’re now on a Russian oligarch’s superyacht off Norway, and Donny’s foes now include the Russian President himself.’

Yes, I could never have conceived Voyage North when I was writing The Salt-Stained Book but we don’t know where life will take us and it’s been a adventure travelling with my teenage characters.

I’ll miss them but they’re older now, they don’t need me hanging over them like a clucking granny. They need to travel on their independent paths.

What a pleasure it is, instead, to be supporting the Cadet sailors as they set off for Australia this winter. (They’d best keep right away from the Russian President though…)