Retronaut continues to be just wonderful. This clip is a real coup!
Tag: boating
A great little online primer on boating – from the Sea Scouts in Ireland
The Sea Scouts in Ireland have made a great little boating book aimed at teenagers available online.
I hope they don’t mind me passing the link on! The Scouts’ boating manual includes useful amounts of information on nautical traditions, heaving a line, first aid and artificial respiration, rowing drill, rowing (including boat drill), sailing, power boating, canoeing, ship types, rafting, boat maintenance, anchoring, tides and currents, use of distress signals and a lot more besides – no doubt, by now you’re getting the message.
Unlike the educational output we see from some sailing organisations, there’s no sense at all that the only boats are new boats – the maintenance section contains material about looking after both wooden craft and glassfibre.’
I’d be pleased to think that any teenager knew half of this material, and we’d be living in a safer, better ordered world if every adult boat user knew 90 per cent of it.
My thanks to regular contributor Paul Mullings for pointing this one out!
Fabulous new publications from Lodestar Books include classic yachting authors Conor O’Brien, H Alker Tripp, H Lewis Jones and WE Sinclair
I have good news as we come up to the Christmas season – Dick Wynne’s wonderful Lodestar Books is republishing four more sailing classics that will make great gifts for the sailing man or woman:
- Shoalwater and Fairway – The casual explorations of a sailing main in the shoal seas and tidal waters of Essex and Kent by H Alker Tripp, illustrated by the author. Click on a the image at the top of this post for a sample chapter
- Swin, Swale and Swatchway by H Lewis Jones – Jones pre-dates both Maurice Griffiths and Francis B Cooke, and gives us the the Thames Estuary and the boats and characters inhabiting it in late Victorian times. His charming adventures and human encounters have an engaging immediacy, and are enhanced by the author’s many photographs, which provide a priceless glimpse of a time long gone
- Cruises of the Joan by WE Sinclair – the cruises of an engineless, 22-ft Falmouth quay punt in the 1920s, first around Britain, then to Madeira and to the Baltic, and finally across the North Atlantic to Iceland and Greenland. Sinclair’s dry, phlegmatic humour and observation makes his accounts highly entertaining account – and one we might not have today if luck had not played its part
- On Going to Sea in Yachts – Conor O’Brien’s distilled experience in selecting, equipping and handling sailing craft from the smallest beach cruiser to the ocean-going yacht. The author’s choice of topics and anecdotes, all related in a characteristically down-to-earth manner, makes valuable and engaging reading. His many clear drawings leave us in no doubt as to the practical details, which are born of his own experience over many years and many thousands of sea miles
If these aren’t quite what’s needed, don’t forget Lodestar’s previous publications, Francis B Cooke’s classic Cruising Hints – The Traditional Yachtsman’s Compendium and the outstanding Holmes of the Humber collection of material by and about legendary canoe yawl sailor, boat designer, artist Humber Estuary figure, George Holmes. Get your great boating reading here!