Authors Electric

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...

  last book Next month I publish the final volume in the Strong Winds series. It’s called Voyage North,  It’s number 7 and it’s been a long time coming.  At the end of Pebble , the sixth volume in the series, Donny the  central character took a reckless decision to leave school, abandon his beautiful junk Strong Winds , fail to say goodbye to his mother and head north with a couple of dodgy Russians on a superyacht. Well, that was back in 2018 and, as you can imagine, I’ve been worrying about him ever since.... Why worry? Why not get on and write the next story, you might reasonably ask. What use was lockdown except to get everyone  completing projects that had lain forgotten for decades? What could be more enjoyable than to stow away on the former Soviet spy ship MY (Motor Yacht) Raisa , now a luxury, automated, expedition vessel and discover what’s really going on between the morally suspect oligarch Arkady Ivanov and the carefully un-named Russian Presiden...

Master Mariner (Cally & Hetty) As a writer of sailing adventures where the main protagonists are older children and young teenagers (with a seasoning of redoubtable geriatrics) I wonder sometimes whether I’m stretching credulity too far as I put them through the trials and tribulations of my somewhat melodramatic plots. It was immensely reassuring therefore to spend a few days in late July at the Cadet World Championships in Bodstedt, Northern Germany in the company of approximately 242 young sailors in my target age group.           The Cadet is a granddaddy of a dinghy. Commissioned by Yachting World magazine from legendary boat builder Jack Holt in 1947 it was a rapid success in the more family-friendly, less class-divided world of postwar Britain and soon went international. As a 1950s child learning to sail in a classic 12’ clinker-built dinghy with plenty of room for Mum or Dad, I looked with awe and envy at my contempor...