“Heavy Weather Sailing”, Martin Thomas and Peter Bruce, Adlard Coles Nautical, 8th edition, published 2022.

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I may be obsessive. A glance at my bookcase suggests so:


(Why did I miss the third and the sixth editions?)

Anyway, it’s always been a jolly good book, and it has certainly changed over time!

 

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Here’s the list of chapters from the current edition. What a brains trust!

 

[Scomber]

H W Dick ?? Traders and Tramps?

 

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H W Dick ?? Traders and Tramps?

Well spotted, next to “Beancaker to Boxboat”.



This of course is two cockroaches fighting over a beancake, and I claim half the credit, with my old pal David Ewings, for bringing the old crest back into use, in 1990, in what is now, by a country mile, and much to its own surprise, Britain’s largest shipowning concern.

 

[davidaprice]

I've a few of his books myself, though being based in Finland I've focused on his (and others') books set in the northern Baltic. (Coincidentally, my copy of Heavy Weather Sailing is the missing 6th edition). I've retraced some of his steps in my own boat, it was he who inspired my to follow the south-east approach to Kökar in the Åland Islands

 

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Next trivial fact, Adlard Cole’s’ ketch “Annette II”, one of the heroines of the First Edition:



was in fact Arthur Ransome’s “Racundra”, renamed by Coles out of “publishers’ courtesy”.

 

[davidaprice]

His book "Close-Hauled" on my bookshelf tells of the trip returning the newly-bought Racundra / Annette II from Riga to England. He tells the same story in "Sailing Years".

 

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She survived to be rediscovered by the “Yachting Monthly” when I was first a reader (1970 onwards) but subsequently was broken up; had she stayed around just a little longer she would have been as carefully looked after as his other boats are!

 

[Frank Holden]

3rd Edition?
Just leafed through it.
I'm rather glad I hadn't opened it in 30 odd years.
Terrifying!
I would have sold my boat and gone cowherding in Mongolia.

 

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3rd Edition?
Just leafed through it.
I'm rather glad I hadn't opened it in 30 odd years.
Terrifying!
View attachment 183468 I would have sold my boat and gone cowherding in Mongolia.

Very fine book at the top there. Should anyone need to know how to navigate a high powered coal burning steamship up a rapid, here’s how! Also a memorable last sentence, when he has escaped to Thailand and the waiter comes up to his table and says “Ikky Soad?”
“He had recognised an Empire Builder”!

I met the author a couple of times.

There is, according to a Bristol Channel pilot cutter owning friend who has been there, a lake in Mongolia, containing trout, a tug and a lighter. He asked the tug skipper if there was a chart of the lake and the skipper replied that he had once had one, but the Government had taken it away on the grounds of national security!

STS Lecky would have known what to do about that!