“What started out as a single-handed voyage had become anything but.” A single-handed circumnavigation had been Adrian Flanagan’s dream since he was 15 and read Francis Chichester. His story begins with intense individualism; separating from his wife, determined to achieve something unique, swept overboard after neglecting his promise to wear a harness. It develops much more interestingly as he is forced to accept his dependence on others; on his yacht Barrabas, on his ex-wife, Louise, on all the people who enable his passage westwards round the Horn and through Russia’s Northern Sea Route. Even the murder of dissident Litvinenko may have contributed to achieving the necessary permissions. Flanagan’s experiences are dramatically recounted and his reflections are impressively honest.
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This is the second, updated edition of a book first published in Australia, and it’s excellent. Gavin Le Sueur and his co-skipper Catherine have a lifetime’s experience of cruising, racing and bringing up their children in multihulls. Le Sueur’s approach is both passionate and scientific. His wealth of hard-won experience is organised alphabetically: C, for instance, includes Capsize Prevention, Capsize Survival, Cargo, Children, Cyclones. ‘Babies in bassinets can be gimballed in a net bag secured strongly to the hull,’ is a sentence to be relished. There’s S for Sinking, W for Whales and a huge amount of day-to-day lore in between. Le Sueur conveys eloquently why multihulls are special. His ‘Seamanship Rules’ should be learned by heart.
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For the first-time sailor dreaming of the Med, this book is a must. Rod Heikell’s initiation was in 1976 in a 20ft plywood yacht. Since then, he’s upsized and up-skilled, producing an extensive series of detailed cruising guides with wife Lu. This book offers the overview, including ways to get there if you don’t want to sail. Checklists and regulations are brought up to date, as are costings. There’s plenty of shrewd advice for the longstay sailor as well as the summer holidaymaker and, for the returner, the passage-planning section may inspire more unexpected explorations into the diversity of this inland sea.
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It’s described as a ‘real-life Swallows and Amazons’ but there are no inland lakes or green-feathered arrows here. Clutterbuck’s late 1960s teen adventures in the Wayfarer dinghy Calypso involved high-octane sea sailing; running for shelter through rocks and breakers in the Bay of Biscay with the wind rising Force 7 is several notches up from being caught in the dark off a fictionalised Bo’ness on Windermere. From age 14, Clutterbuck set himself and his intrepid companions extraordinary challenges as they braved the Atlantic coast via Bordeaux to the Med and voyaged north as far as Oslo. The sailing is white-knuckled, the resourcefulness breathtaking. Arthur Ransome would have been in awe.
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There are cloud formations and atmospheric zones that one swots up to pass the RYA exams: there are skies that give good or bad feelings when viewed from the cockpit but the value of Oliver Perkins jacket-pocket-sized book is in his success at bringing the two together. Gnomic mutterings about “if the goose honks high” won’t be more than briefly effective in alerting or reassuring one’s crew and are of little use in passage planning. The Message of the Clouds provides the science to back up such empirical observations – and it works even when the internet is Off. Definitely one for the Christmas gift locker.
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Columbus was delusional and manic-depressive; Nelson’s sailors were brain-damaged from hitting their heads on Victory’s low deck beams and drinking too much rum; Slocum was dysfunctional and unemployable and the methodical insanity of Donald Crowhurst continues to fascinate sailors and non-sailors alike. Nic Compton’s wide-ranging survey of madness at sea goes beyond these headline grabbing stories. He investigates the records of patients in the Navy’s Haslar asylum and teases out the psychological implications as the Age of Sail became the Age of Diesel. Perhaps most interesting of all to yachtsman are the chapters on hallucinations, cabin fever and outbreaks of violence on board. Highly recommended.
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Turn to Starboard, the charity that runs the Merseyside pilot schooner Spirit of Falmouth, aims to use the power of the sea and sailing to heal those who have been mentally damaged by war. It’s impressively well-organised and it works. This account of Spirit’s 2016 circumnavigation of the British Isles has a great line in banter and the sort of team-building that thrives on practical jokes, trips to the pub and water fights. Threaded through are the stories of individuals who have seen human cruelties beyond imagination. “Sailing,” wrote one of them “gives my brain a chance to rest. Everything else can go fuck itself.”
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“You’d have to be mad to want to go there” is a possible reaction to the complex and dangerous business of high latitude cruising in the Southern hemisphere. Paul Heiney and the RCCPF’s book however is a masterpiece of clear thinking, advance planning (start getting the paperwork for Antarctica nine months ahead), exceptional seamanship and wide ranging interest in the natural world. It’s a composite work, bringing previous publications together and drawing on the observations of many intrepid adventurers as well as Heiney’s personal experience (as described in One Wild Song). The section on Antarctica is limited – one guesses there’ll be more to come from the RCCPF here. Meanwhile this is a must-have book, indispensable for expedition planning but also eye-openingly interesting to those remaining firmly in home waters.
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