Katy Stickland reviews the latest books for sailors
The Voyage of the Aegre
This tale charts a young couple’s voyage to becoming small boat offshore adventurers. In the 1970s Julie and Nicholas Grainger sailed their 21ft wooden Shetland fishing boat from Scotland to American Samoa. This was before modern instruments and GPS, and although the story of their time afloat, including their capsize off Tahiti which left the boat dismasted, is a gripping read about survival at sea, it is the details of the preparation of the boat that many PBO readers will find the most fascinating.
Nicholas and Julie both worked for John Ridgeway at his Ardmore adventure school before leaving and based their concept of simple sailing–no electrics, toilet, shower or engine, but built-in buoyancy to make the Aegre unsinkable –on Ridgeway’s 20ft open dory, which he rowed across the Atlantic with Sir Chay Blyth. These meticulous preparations saved the Graingers’ lives.
The Voyage of the Aegre has all the hallmarks of a sailing adventure classic. Storytelling at its finest.
We Fought Them in Gunboats
This is a wartsand-all tale about the gunboats and their crew who played a vital role in World War II. It was a new kind of warfare, where the tactical use of the MGBs and MTBs were critical in defending convoy routes. A dinghy and racing sailor, Robert Hichens also had a love of high speed engines and didn’t hold back his criticism of the poorly trained gunboat maintenance staff, or indeed the decisions of his commanding officers.
Heavily redacted due to wartime censorship when originally published in 1944, this new edition is Hichens’s words in full. A rare breed of war diary.
Sailing Alone: A History
What motivates a person to sail alone? Richard King sets out to answer that question after his own transatlantic solo crossing in a 28ft 6in Pearson Triton left him ‘paralytically rattled’, proud of his achievement and questioning why he’d set out initially.
By examining the voyages of a diverse range of sailors including Ann Davison, Ellen MacArthur, Bernard Moitessier and Joshua Slocum among others, King, with an academic’s skill, lays out the history and the philosophy of the men and women who broke the mould and set out to explore the seas to find what many of us crave: the meaning of existence.
Ultimately, he concludes with Ann Davison’s philosophy, that courage is to accept our lives for what they are, without resignation; each small hurdle overcome is a triumph.
Brilliantly written, I have been drawn back to Sailing Alone again and again; each reading brings a new perspective and has introduced me to remarkable sailors I really should have known about.
