High adventure by dinghy can be addictive
Fascinated to read lately of the adventures of Sandy Mackinnon, who some time ago rowed and sailed, Heaven help us, from Shropshire to the Black Sea, and more recently from the Black Sea to Venice, in a Mirror dinghy called Jack de Crow. On hearing this kind of news, wise folk sitting in the cockpitsof their Bavarias may shake their heads, tap their brows, and wonder whether to get another beer out of the fridge or make themselves a nice double espresso from the machine in the galley. Less wise folk nod and ponder. I’m one of the nodders, but I don’t have to waste any time pondering. This is because I am the earliest known link between Jack de Crow and PBO.
In the early chapters of Mackinnon's book, The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow, the author points out that a thought similar to his perfectly sensible idea of ditching a teaching career and rowing to the Black Sea occurred in a book called The Worst Journey in the Midlands by someone called Llewellyn, ie me. My book tells the story of a voyage that involved pulling a derelict clinker rowing boat out of the brambles on Ringstead dunes, patching it up with a gallon or two of Sikaflex and rowing it from the source of the Severn to London via the Severn, various canals and the Thames.
The boat being heavy, this took a month, the month being October, one of the wettest on record. This made the currents of the Severn and Thames sprightly, and allowed me to conquer a lifelong objection to sleeping in six inches of water. The route lay through parts of Britain of which until then I’d had very little experience. As all cruising folk know, travelling by water is the best way of seeing places. I saw plenty, developing in the process an only moderately hostile relationship with the Midlands.
Mackinnon carts his reader across England, up the Rhine and down the Danube in an amusing and sometimes ecstatic style. Ecstasy is, however, a commodity in short supply in the Midlands in a wet October, so it is largely absent from my own narrative. Tribulation is thicker on the ground. Mackinnon's account of sailing his Mirror off Kent in semi-lethal conditions is nail-biting stuff. So is his more recent Black-Sea-to-Venice adventure, part of which seems to have involved rowing a swamped d
