Sam LlewellynFlotsam and jetsam Sam Llewellyn is editor of and author of nautical thrillers. Three years ago he bought a Corribee on eBayThe Marine Quarterly, http://www.marinequarterly.com,T
he solstice is upon us getting fat, and the boat is either , the goose is
on the hard developing green slime. It is time to turn the mind in the water breeding mould or
away from the harsh wind blowing out of the horizon and do a bit of reading.During summer gales, it is
soothing to peruse gardening books. At this time of year, though, withdrawal symptoms are kicking in, and it is
essential to read things based on boats. Luckily, there is plenty to be going on with, and some fi ne titles to demand
for Christmas. publisher called Lodestar Books, who have made it their First stop is an excellent
business to haul most of the signifithe past 100 years back into print. Go cruising with cant yachting titles of
Albert Strange, 19th century Minimum Boat enthusiast out in his canoe yawl in all weathers. Stiffen the upper lip
and visit the Mediterranean in the company of George Millar, a babyfaced war hero who, having made life deeply
awkward for the Nazi occupiers of France in WWII, decided to go sailing. He is best known
for war books like Bruneval Raidand The Horned
Pigeonfibook, and the Sea rst sailing. His Isabel
(story of a late-1940s cruise to Greece via French canals in which they ran aground on the Dovecote Press, £12) tells the
debris of wartime bombing. His slightly later Englandrepublished by Lodestar. He is a has just been A White Boat from
writer of great skill, and his books are full of excitement, atmosphere, and the kind of characters who turn up in
James Bond novels.Lodestar’s is to republish the works of Harold ‘Bill’ Tilman, Another excellent thought of
who combined sailing withclimbing in a heroically uncomfortable manner. Roughly half Tilman’s books are about climbing, and half
about sailing. Lodestar are publishing sailing and climbing books alternately, starting with Mischief in Patagonia, which
combines the two activities in an alarming fashion. Tilman was not much of a sailor when he bought Mischief, a Bristol
Channel pilot cutter, refiher in Mallorca and advertised in the personal column of the Times for a crew (‘Hands tted
wanted for long voyage in small boat: no pay, no prospects, not much pleasure’).He had learned a lot by the
time he arrived in her at the Straits of Magellan, and even more by the time he was dodging ice and headwinds to
land himself on a Patagonian glacier. The idea was to explore this glacier, on which he had read that there were lofty trees
swarming with hummingbirds, while on the ice at their bases (said the books) penguins paced solemnly to and fro.
a freezing chaos of crevasses and rubble. Meanwhile his boat had run aground on an What he actually found wasunmarked reef, and was under assault from ice fldown on a three-knot tide. All this and more besides makes oes sweeping
this an ideal book to read in a really comfortable chair by a really hot fiMessing about in Boats re. by
Surgeon Rear-Admiral John R Muir, long out of print but available from Abebooks, gives the lie to the well-known adage
that the three most useless things on a boat are an umbrella, a ladder and a naval offi cer. Muir was a fanatical
sailor, who spent his leaves from the navy at sea in sailing boats. Not for him a read of Heavy Weather Sailing by
K. Adlard Coles or the nasal cooing of an RYA instructor. Muir’s technique was to go sailing with the Bristol Channel
pilots in their cutters, hanging around to pick up inward-bound ships in February Force 9s west of Lundy, eating
hardtack and sleeping in a verminous box bunk. And managing, in the process, to be funny enough to knock
you out of your chair laughing. A life-changerFinally, another Lodestar
necessity. Ben Crawshaw’s Catalan Castawayworth that may change your life. Ben lives in northeast is a tenner’s
Spain, and fl(with luck) sapphire Med in a Light Trow he built himself. His remarks on life, sailing, the oats around the
pursuit of the wily octopus, making passages and building boats, will yank open your windows and let in fl oods of
sunshine. When you get up to shut them, the view will still be the khaki creek in a green-drab marsh. But there
will be a boat in it somewhere, and pending the arrival of longer days and warmer breezes, that will be
something to dream about.Assume the recovery position... in a really comfortable chair by a really hot fi re, with a boat-related page-turner
Ben Crawshaw’s Light Trow, Onawind Blue http://www.theinvisibleworkshop.blogspot.co.uk