Tag: lodestar books

Alker Tripp trilogy now available from Lodestar Books

The beautiful 1920s Alker Tripp trilogy of books about sailing on the South Coast, coastal Suffolk and the Thames Estuary is now available to order from Lodestar Books. Deliveries will begin in early June.

If you happen to be going to the Beale Park Thames Boat Show on the 8th to 10th June, do drop by the Lodestar stall to have a look, as there’s a good chance they will have arrived.

The books – Solent & the Southern Waters, Suffolk Sea Borders and Shoalwater and Fairway – add up to 550 pages of  writing describing sailing these waters at a time when working sail was still common, and their place in English history.

But more than that, Tripp was a gifted illustrator who filled his books with pen drawings and  miniature monchrome paintings, which in these books are laid out with a between-the-wars art deco sensibility.

To show what I mean, here’s a sample chapter Down on the Blackwater ebb, from Shoalwater and Fairway – though what you can’t see here is the lovely thick creamy paper on which they have been printed.

The books are available singly at £20 each, with all three together priced at £45. To make sure you receive yours click here!

Still on the topic of the wonderful Lodestar catalogue, the FB Cooke compendium Cruising Hints is now available in a compact paperback format – only a few copies of the hardcover edition still remain.

Finally, I gather Lodestar’s reprint of Ken Duxbury’s trilogy The Lugworm Chronicles (Lugworm on the Loose, Lugworm Homeward Bound and Lugworm Island Hopping) is selling strongly having had a great reception right around the world.

I can see why it should sell – I’m mightily impressed by first of the trilogy about sailing through the Greek islands, and I now have no doubt how the reputation of the Drascombe Lugger was sealed.

Cruises of the Joan by WE Sinclair

Cruises of the Joan is a well made and often very funny account of WE Sinclair’s travels in his tiny 22ft Falmouth Quay punt, Joan.  It’s published by Lodestar Books.

The cruises described took place in the 1920s, and are a circumnavigation of Great Britain, a trip to Vigo and back, and an attempt at crossing the Atlantic to North America via the northern route.

It’s a good read and I enjoyed it greatly – but can’t recommend it for everyone, as I’ll explain in a moment.

For some reason I particularly enjoy whacky stories about unusual people, and this has a few good ones – for example, there’s a great tale about a man who keeps crabs in his hat. Arguably, though, the most eccentric character to be found in this book is its author.

But while I enjoyed Cruises, I will be very careful about lending it to anyone: it really can be recommended only for the historically minded, tolerant and somewhat experienced sailor.

One reason is that in one or two places Sinclair uses language that seems quite appalling in these days. Some might consider that it was normal for his time and therefore something to be quietly ignored – but others will be less forgiving. Both groups will have a point.

Another cause for concern is his tendency to do stupidly dangerous things. Sailing huge distances in a tiny boat in the days before small yachts had radio was daft enough, but he often without charts and always using a wristwatch in place of a chronometer.

It’s just the kind of thing that gets some of my sailing friends very heated indeed, and it was one of these mad exploits that led to Sinclair and his crewman known only as Jackson finally losing Joan in the North Atlantic after being damaged by a particularly large wave. They very nearly lost their own lives in the process.

The Joan seems to have been an excellent boat in bad weather, but nevertheless there are limits to what a small timber-built cruising boat can reasonably be expected to withstand.

I really fear for what might happen if a copy of Cruises of the Joan ever falls into the hands of someone who has only done a little sailing. The nervous might decide to restrict themselves to the local boating lake, while the more intrepid might decide Sinclair has a point when he decides cross the Irish Sea and sail down the coast until he sees somewhere that looks like a port…

There’s a sample chapter here that provides a nice example of his style.

Sinclair is an intriguing character, and someone I’d like to find out more about. Those who have read Bob Roberts will know that he crewed with the barge skipper on an epic journey to the island of Fernando Pó off the West Coast of Africa, but what I hadn’t realised is that Sinclair himself also wrote and published an account of it. My hope is that it will reveal a little more about the man himself. Also, I wonder – do any readers have memories to share of Sinclair as a man and sailor?

Cruises of the Joan is the second of a series of uniform volumes now available from the Lodestar Library – the others are Swin, Swale and Swatchway by H Lewis Jones (which I read a little while ago and thoroughly recommend) and On Going to Sea in Yachts by Conor O’Brien. I gather many more are to come.

The books are priced at £15 each including postage – but Lodestar is currently offering them a three for the price of two offer that seems hard to resist.

Ken Duxbury’s Lugworm Drascombe Lugger adventures in print again

Lodestar Books is reprinting three classics of open boat cruising originally published in the 1970s, the Lugworm Chronicles.

Ken Duxbury and his wife B set out on a series of adventures in a Drascombe Lugger named Lugworm some 40 years ago, long before today’s explosion of interest in open boat sailing, and the books he wrote have become hard-to-find classics:

  • Lugworm on the Loose describes how Ken and B quit the rat race and explored the Greek Islands under sail
  • Lugworm Homeward Bound recounts their voyage home from Greece to England
  • Lugworm Island Hopping has Ken and B exploring the Scilly Isles and the Hebrides

For a sample from Lugworm on the Loose, click here.

Lodestar Books proprieter Dick Wynne enjoyed the books when they came out, and when he decided to try to reprint them, he was thrilled to discover that Duxbury still going strong, working as an artist  and enjoying his eighties at home in Cornwall with B.

The author was thrilled at the prospect of his books in print once again, and was able to provide negatives for most of the photographs.

The Lugworm Chronicles are a set of three hardcover volumes adding up to 600 pages, complete with original photographs, and maps and drawings by Duxbury himself. The complete package price is £36, and will be available from mid-April. They can be ordered from the Lodestar website now.

For more from intheboatshed.net about good stuff from Lodestar, click here and follow the ‘older posts’ link.