Superdocious!

Rodney Pattisson with Barry Pickthall

Adlard Coles 

£20

‘Yachting as a sport […] is never boring’. Rodney Pattisson reflects on a career that has taken him from a home-built Cadet dinghy to record-breaking, multihulls. The Cadet remains a family possession: Superdocious, the Flying Dutchman with which he gained his first Olympic gold, is a museum exhibit; most of the other water-based speed machines in which Pattisson has displayed his legendary gifts as a helmsman have passed in their bewildering variety. His dedicated competitiveness and attention to detail makes gripping reading and his wife Jane brings him endearingly to life with her account of their annual, wind-blown trip to the prestigious Yachting Journalists’ dinner in Cowes, which Pattisson sees mainly ‘as an opportunity to exercise his beloved F-27 trimaran.’