About Me
My Story- Early days
My love of the water started in kayaks at a young age. I did some paddling on local rivers with Scouts. I went on to build my first boat, a 14ft kayak in the late 60’s while still at school and paddled it down the river Stour (Essex/Suffolk UK). Took about 3 days canoe camping and had to stop just before reaching the sea when my paddle came apart, well I thought that glue was waterproof! I survived those early trips through a mix of good luck and quick thinking. Looking back I am horrified by some of the things I did, attitudes to risk have certainly changed over my life. For the next 10 years I got on the water whenever I could, sailing dinghies and canoeing and by the early ’70s was teaching both sailing and canoeing at kids’ summer camps. This was back before the time when everyone had to have certification, if you could demonstrate to the chief instructor that you knew what you were doing that was good enough. I sailed everything from Olympic class 407s and Finn’s to leaky old wooden clinker-built tubs.
Starting Cruising
I got my first taste of cruising when back in Essex. Can’t remember the exact date, it was 50-odd years ago! There was an active community of cruisers along the coast all with small, usually old wooden boats. They were pretty experienced sailors but hardly anyone knew one end of an engine from the other. I had learned mechanics messing around with motorbikes and a part-time job in a garage so when word got out that I could fix diesel engines I was a popular crew for boats going across to Holland, Belgium and France for the summer. In those days crossing the southern North Sea was seen as a serious trip, it was too. Remember this was in old wooden boats and 28ft was considered a substantial craft! Also this was before the days of GPS so navigation was done on paper charts and dead reckoning. I remember getting lost on the way to Holland on a very dark windy night and waking in the morning to find the skipper had no clue where we were. We tried calling the Coast Guard on VHF to see if they could triangulate our position from the signal but no joy. OK so we sailed into the coast, it was straight and safe for miles until we got close enough to read the name on a seafront chip shop, problem solved. Knowing your position to within 20 miles when out of sight of land was considered highly accurate back then!
My first boat followed this apprenticeship. She was the Atlefolk in the picture, a variation on the classic Folkboat but with a raised doghouse giving standing headroom at the galley and chart table. This was my first project. Rewiring, new bulkhead and doors at the back of the cabin, new cockpt. I also stripped everything down to the wood for a full refinish.
Moving On
In the late 80s I moved up to a 32-foot boat, SV Voya. Still a traditionally built wooden boat, she had been built to the, then new, junior offshore racing rules which allowed smaller boats for the first time. She had originally raced in the first few Fastnet races and the Santander (UK to Spain across the Bay of Biscay) so she was definitely seaworthy. When I got her she had been sitting at the dock for about 15 years due to the previous owner’s failing health and was still ‘as built’. She was set up for racing not cruising so I spent about 5 years completely refitting her. This included everything from a new engine, electrics, a redesigned interior, and even making my own sails. During this period I did my first official course, the RYA Coastal Skipper. The instructor was great, the boat was a 1930s schooner with a square sail and he had worked as first mate on a tall ship, boy did I learn a lot in just a week! I was completely sold on the square sail so fitted one to Voya. I published my first article describing that project.
We sailed the new boat up and down the UK’s west coast and out to the south coast of Ireland, even entering the Brest Wooden Boat Festival with her and spent a few years based in Brittany. In one of the big financial crashes I got made redundant and the government offered to pay for any training course we wanted to do! I was by now a qualified nurse and had a master’s degree so there weren’t any work courses I was interested in. They literally meant any course as long as it related to some form of work so I took the RYA Yachtmaster, adding the commercial endorsement so that I could call it a work course. It opened some new possibilities and I did some deliveries both as crew and then as Skipper. I saw my first real storm at that time. We were delivering a 60ft Swan from Spain to the UK in the middle of winter (nobody pays you to do fun trips). We had gales all the way and 58kn crossing Biscay. No problems, she was a solid boat so we just reefed down and jogged along. We did get knocked down once with water coming in through the deck vents and tore the foot of the head sail when a tape caught in the furling gear.
Crossing Oceans
During this time I had gone through a divorce and moved to South Wales and was living on the boat full time when I met my second wife. She had lived in Quebec through the 80s and 90s and then a few years in the USA. She also had 2 kids and had moved back to the UK to get them better opportunities in school, USA public schools suck! She hated what the UK was becoming and I was getting equally fed up with the place so when she suggested moving back to Canada I jumped at the chance. The only thing was I either had to sell the boat or sail it across. The UK economy was still in a mess and boats were next to impossible to sell so no real choice. She flew out in 2010 and I set off in Voya expecting to do the trip in a year. Yes, I was pretty naive about ocean sailing and completely underestimated the trip. Although I had visited almost every port between Gibraltar and Holland I was a newbie when it came to ocean sailing and underestimated both the time it takes and the stress on the boat. The trip as far as Portugal was done solo and was a lovely cruise, mostly day sailing due to lobster pots and fishing fleets. By the time I got to the south of Portugal for the jump across to the Canaries, it was getting a bit late and I hit the worst winter they had had in living memory. Knee-deep snow is not what you expect in Portugal in November! They closed the port to small boats for a month so I packed up, flew to Canada and planned to come back next year. Got back to the boat the following year with crew for the Atlantic crossing and set off from the Canaries a week before the ARC, didn’t want to get tangled up with them. You may remember the storm of that year, they made the film ‘A Perfect Storm’ based on it! The ARC, setting out a week later, saw it coming and stayed in port but there had been no sign of it when we left. The storm center may have been the other side of the Atlantic but we certainly felt the effects, spent 3 weeks triple reefed doing 3kn to windward in an average of 35kn, I think I slept in oilskins the entire time. Not what you expect sailing the trades. We eventually made it to St Lucia but the passage took 2 months and by the time we got there the boat needed a serious refit, she was after all a small 50-year-old wooden boat. Eventually I got across the Caribbean and through the canal to the north of Panama doing it in stages and going back to Canada for work. By now I was getting seriously worried about the condition of the boat, she was leaking quite a bit and the engine had died because of it. She needed some serious work before the trip up the west coast. That trip is either 6000 miles of open ocean via Hawaii or 5000 up the coast against the prevailing weather and current. So I got her into a yard and was all set to do the refit. This never happened because COVID did! They closed all the borders and Voya sat in a hot humid jungle for 2 1/2 years with no maintenance. By the time they let me back in the only option was to cut her up for scrap and salvage her gear. I now have my 3rd boat, Brigid. Go to her page if you want to see my latest project.