John Passmore 27th June 2018 Flannan Islands are uninhabited. I’m not surprised. They’ve got an automatic lighthouse and two landing places with concrete steps but one set was washed away years ago and the other is no longer maintained and might not be there even now – but who’s to say? All the same, I’m beginning to … Read more
26th June 2018 We made three miles towards our destination last night. It wasn’t as bad as it sounds. In the same eleven hours, we sailed six miles through the water. It’s just that we weren’t going in the right direction. Yes, you guessed it, on the hottest day of the year in England, there … Read more
21st June 2018 I may never come back to Fair Isle. After all, how many people visit Fair Isle in the first place: A tiny lump of rock midway between the Orkney Islands and the Shetlands off the North coast of Scotland, it is barely more than a mile long and famous for two thing: … Read more
24th June 2018 Day Eleven and I’ve settled into the voyage. I know this because this is the fourth day of strong headwinds and, I just got the clarinet out for half an hour and now I’m sitting here writing this. In effect, life goes on. Until now, I would spend hours at the chart … Read more
June 19th 2018 This is me being philosophical. Five days into a passage from Suffolk to the Outer Hebrides (which is about as far as you can go without leaving the country) and I am off the North East corner of Scotland, have been listening to gale warnings for the past 48 hours and the … Read more
When a seabird wants a rest, it just lands on the water. How convenient. You can see them sitting happily on the roughest seas. Only when a breaking crest threatens to swamp them do they lift off and fly to another, untroubled patch of water – sometimes it’s just on the next wave. But that’s … Read more
It all started with the geraniums. I was about to start a 1,200-mile race and somebody gave me a geranium. Now this might not seem particularly sensible but it was a nice thought: Something homely, something that I could love and nurture… It should be noted at this point that the donor was not a … Read more
Bosham Channel in Chichester harbour, after the pubs shut, sometime in 1934: A young man in an enormous clinker dinghy rowed backwards and forwards in the pitch darkness looking for his boat. The young man was my father and this was a story that was told and re-told so that it became the stuff of … Read more
The anchor windlass has now worked perfectly half a dozen times in a row. I cannot tell you what a relief this is. I may have mentioned that last autumn, on the trip round from Wales to the English East Coast, periodically it would simply refuse to move: All I got on pressing the button … Read more
The mother of all broaches played out to the accompaniment of Maurice Chevalier singing “Thank Heaven for Little Girls”. It happened somewhere off the Grand Banks during the 1988 Singlehanded Transatlantic Race. I was having a clear-out recently and found the article I wrote for Yachting World. That was in the days when you cut … Read more
