Authors Electric

  It was late in the evening and we were still sitting round the kitchen table in Yorkshire, finishing our red wine, knowing we should have gone to bed but relishing the time with our youngest son Archie and his wife Steph. We’d come up from Essex to this small West Riding town watch Archie’s pupils perform Mary Poppins . Steph had met us earlier with our granddaughter Ada, now sweetly asleep upstairs. It had been a lovely day away. Then my phone rang. It was Bertie, our son who lives as our ‘next door neighbour’ at home. This means a small separate building in the same space - 'the shed'. He and his dogs had unexpectedly left home that day, to visit a friend in distress. An unplanned absence.. He’d just returned, seen upstairs lights left on, discovered the back door open and our bedroom in chaos. Understandably he was shocked and upset. No, not normal mess ‘Call the police,’ we said. ‘You have to call the police.’ He did so and was told he mustn’t touch anything, mustn...

It should have been an achievable adventure, an old-style family jolly, nicely within the capacity of different-aged adults, an old wooden boat, visiting children and dogs. Three of my grandchildren would be sailing from the Mount Batten Centre in Plymouth for the Cadet dinghy national and world championships. My son Frank and daughter-in-law Alice were lead organisers; Francis and I were among the sponsors. This would also be my oldest granddaughter’s last event. Retirement comes at 17 in the uniquely child-centred Cadet dinghy class. What could be more fun for me, my brother Ned, son Bertie, dogs Nellie and Solo, than to spend a week or two sailing Peter Duck to Plymouth from Suffolk, so we could show our support for the young sailors and watch the racing from on deck? Yes, it’s 300 miles – we could reach Scotland for that, or the entrance to the Keil Canal – but, taken in stages, it would be a matter of six long days or eleven shorter ones. Time on land for the dogs to empty thei...

  Wake up, check the clock, sit up, drag laptop onto duvet, open it up, find the file, check the word count and write it down.   63762 this morning. It’ll need to be 64+++ by tomorrow. 64762 I hear you say - well no, not every day. Anything beyond 64000 will do. There’s a cheating get out clause whereby as long as the first two numbers have changed there’s a little less stress about the others. Okay that’s not so admirable but there has to be a little bit of slack in the system, doesn’t there?  If I was offshore racing and suggested a little bit of slack in the system, the answer from any serious competitor would be a shocked NO! I’ve recently been reading the section of Tracy Edwards' autobiography Living Every Second where she and legendary navigator Adrienne Cahalan made their 1998 attempt at the Jules Verne Trophy. That’s the prize for the fastest circumnavigation of the world by any type of sailing yacht. The starting line is between Ushant and the Lizard and...

This blog post is going to start with a whinge about KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing). Then it’s going to tell a proper tale of courage. Both are connected by My Ship is So Small , Ann Davison’s account of her solo Atlantic crossing.  She’d left Plymouth on May 18 1952 frightened stiff, alone on her 23’ yacht Felicity Ann . ‘I wondered why I had let a dream run away with me. Why, for heaven’s sake, why?’ Ann had told the press that she'd be heading for Madeira but stopped at Douarnenez, Vigo, Gibraltar, Casablanca, Las Palmas, Dominica (and other Caribbean Islands) and Nassau. Then she had followed the Intracoastal Waterway to her final destination.  Ann and her small ship arrived in New York seventy years ago this month (November 1953) She was the first woman to have sailed alone across the Atlantic.  I wanted to mark the occasion. Simon Kiln, Ann’s closest surviving relative agreed. He and his sisters gave their permission for Golden Duck to publish a new edition of My Sh...

  An odd quirk in the human brain allows us to feel that the things we love are living, even when they are manufactured objects – like boats, for instance. Things that live can also die. I’ve just been reading the writer and sailor, Peter Nichols, mourning the death of his yacht, Toad . Toad is gone. I know this absolutely as I sit here in the cockpit on what is now becoming rather a nice day. The sun is out, the sea is going down. Knowing this I look at the boat around me, the teak vent boxes I built on the cabin roof. The stainless-steel guard rail stanchions I installed. The winches, the rigging. The new compass Martin and I hooked up. The slight imperfection beneath the paint on the cabin side that I know is my plug of a hole made by Harry’s useless depth gauge. I look up and down the boat and I cannot see an inch of it that I haven’t remade according to my idea of what would make Toad the best it could be. Now I know that the leak will not get better but worse, that I mus...