A teacher who spent 171 days sailing a wooden Mirror dinghy from Romania to Italy has advised would-be adventurers following in his wake: “Don’t do it.”
Former Ellesmere College deputy housemaster Sandy Mackinnon, 60, who now teaches at Timbertop in Victoria, Australia, “nearly came to grief” a dozen times while coastal hopping from Sulina, in the Black Sea, to Venice via the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits, Aegean, Ionian and Adriatic seas.
Sailing into the historic waterside city on 22 September was every bit as fantastic as he had imagined, yet the amateur sailor said: “Once I started I was determined to finish but there were 11 or 12 times where I thought I’m actually lucky to have got through the day.
“Various people, like my sister, said early on, ‘It’s a lovely idea but I just don’t think a Mirror dinghy is suitable for coastal sailing in deep, unpredictable seas in unpredictable weather.’ And she was dead right.
“Although I can certainly recommend the Mirror for a long adventure in inland waterways, they’re relatively roomy, really stable and very buoyant. The Mirror is a superb cruising boat: you can ride up and over even the biggest waves and they’re the perfect size to pull up on any beach. When I was bailing water occasionally, I would duck into a lagoon to escape the weather. And I could sail along in literally four inches of water, and if I did ground it was then light enough to hop out and pull over the next mud bank.
“But I think my sister was right, I shouldn’t have been sailing out in really heavy seas, in places where the wind could come up very quickly and unpredictably.”
Sandy’s journey began in 1998, when he left the Shropshire college in a similar Mirror dinghy, intending to sail for a few days down the River Severn but “got carried away” and ended up in Sulina, Romania. He left Jack de Crow with the harbour master and wrote a book called The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow.
Twenty-five years later, Sandy was daydreaming about whether the boat might still be there, and if he could sail it to Venice. A friend in Romania checked and it wasn’t but Sandy said: “That very night, by sheer coincidence, a man in England contacted me and said: ‘Hi, you don’t know me. But I’ve read your book and loved it. I’ve just bought a bright yellow Mirror dinghy identical to your boat. Please can I call it Jack de Crow after your original boat?’
“I’d had a few whiskies, so I said, ‘Let me borrow it for six months to journey to Venice, then I’ll give it back to you and it’ll have the right to be called Jack de Crow with a real adventure und
