Three Men in a Boat

Jerome K Jerome

Jerome K Jerome

It seems a little odd to post a link to an eBook of a classic Victorian English novel, but that’s what I’m going to do tonight.

Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat… To Say Nothing of the Dog describes a journey on the Thames by three young men and a small dog in a Thames skiff equipped for camping. It’s a classic of boating literature and of Victorian English life, and seems to me to be a prototype for every road movie I’ve ever seen. If you haven’t had occasion to read it yet, I strongly recommend it Continue reading “Three Men in a Boat”

Harrison Butler and the Harrison Butlerians

Harrison Butler and the Harrison Butlerians ha Harrison Butler and the Harrison Butlerians

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Sailing has many enthusiasms within it, ranging from the wild, dangerous and strange to the charming and sensible. One of the latter groups is the group I call the Harrison Butlerians, a collection of people who care for the remaining yachts built from the designs of Thomas Harrison Butler.

Harrison Butler, as he’s always called, was an ophthalmologist by day and a designer of very distinctive yachts by night. They’re distinctive because Continue reading “Harrison Butler and the Harrison Butlerians”

From dinghies to the Architectura Navalis and back

It’s funny how some things in life go round and round in one’s mind.

This morning over my porage I idly read a copy of Cruising & Ocean Racing by EG Martin and John Irving that I managed to buy for a song at the weekend. I turned to a chapter by John Irving about dinghies and their design, and found that he had some remarkably trenchant things to say about pram dinghies as tenders. He strongly dislikes them – so much so that one might think he was frightened by one at a young age.

Now the people who wrote that book could afford sizeable yachts, and could perhaps live with with tenders lashed to their decks that were long enough to have sharp bows – but that isn’t true for most of us. Prams can be a fact of life, so I was interested in what he had to say about what made a good and what made a bad pram. Continue reading “From dinghies to the Architectura Navalis and back”