Tag: conor o’brien

Fabulous new publications from Lodestar Books include classic yachting authors Conor O’Brien, H Alker Tripp, H Lewis Jones and WE Sinclair

Inshore of the Goodwins sample

Shoalwater and Fairway - H Alker Tripp - Christmas gifts from Lodestar Books Swin, Swale and Swatchway - H Lewis Jones - Christmas gifts from Lodestar Books On Going to Sea in Yachts - Conor O'Brien - Christmas gifts from Lodestar Books Cruises of the Joan - W E Sinclair - Christmas gifts from Lodestar Books

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!

Restoration work on Conor O’Brien’s coastal trader AK Ilen begins in Ireland

Photos from the first Big Boat Workshop working
on the Ilen restoration


The loss of Conor O’Brien’s famous Saoirse is long in the past, but another boat commissioned by the round-the-world voyager from Ireland is very much alive and is being restored at Hegarty’s Boatyard, in Oldcourt, Ireland.

She is being refitted in a series of week-long workshops under the expert guidance of three of the few remaining traditional shipwrights in Ireland today, Liam Hegarty, his brother John Hegarty and Fachtna O’Sullivan.

The Ilen was built by the Fisheries School in Baltimore – Ireland’s first vocational school – in the mid-1920s, and when she was launched in 1926, O’Brien and two Cadogan brothers from Cape Clear Island sailed her to the Falkland Islands, where she was delivered to the Falkland Island Company for inter-island trading.

For the next seventy years, Ilen served in the South Atlantic until the mid-1990s, when Limerick man Gary McMahon located her abandoned in the Falklands and brough her back to Baltimore in 1998.

McMahon hopes that the Ilen could help to lead the way to a new era of sustainable development through demonstrating that trading under sail is still viable.

The project has attracted a lot of interest in Ireland – recently a small crowd of celebrities turned up to see work start on her, including film producer Lord David Putnam and award-winning actor Jeremy Irons.

The refitting of the Ilen is now being used as an opportunity for people to experience first-hand the skills of wooden boat building through a series of five-day workshops in which anyone can apply to take part. The first, which took place at the beginning of November began with a talk by Glenstal Abbey forester Brother Anthony Keane on the types of timber used in boat building, and an introduction to wooden boat construction by Liam Hegarty and McMahon.

Further five-day workshops are planned for next year – see the project websites http://www.bigboatbuild.com and http://www.ilen.ie/. Gary can be reached at gary@ilen.ie or (Eire) 086 2640479.