Skippool Creek is a place of marshes and mud banks, shelducks and mallards, reed warblers and redshanks and it’s the home to an eclectic collection of boats. Converted lifeboats, elegant wooden sloops, hardy little motorboats and modern, ocean going yachts cling to docks poking into the creek from its grassy banks. To accommodate the huge tidal …
Remember the Subrella? I don’t know if it’s still available but it was a plastic umbrella that you pushed through a breach in your hull, opened it like a brolly and then pulled it back over the hole – water pressure would hold its canopy against the external surface of the hull and you’d be …
I missed the movie Captain Phillips when it was first released last year but managed to see it just recently. It’s about the capture of a ship by Somali pirates and it prompted me to investigate how big the pirate problem remains in that part of the world. Well, it seems we have a EU …
I’m mulling over the sail plan and particularly the headsail set up on my ideal cruising boat. I’ve sailed cutters but never owned one so my experience is limited. It’s difficult to get a handle on what the sailing benefits might be in ‘normal’ conditions – clearly it’s important to get the two headsails working …
Full time cruising on a small boat is a wonderful pastime and it’s made particularly appealing by the people you meet. You might think there’d be a single demographic binding cruising folk but you’d be wrong. The motivation to go cruising might be common – freedom, adventure, nude deck-dancing – but the people that actually …
Salty John Boat Products will be unmanned for the month of November because we’ll be taking our annual holiday in the USA. Yippee! This means that you can make purchases but nothing will be shipped between 29 October and 1 December. There will be notices on the site to this effect. We will be monitoring …
My favourite philosopher has to be Anonymous, or Anon as he’s known to his friends. He’s the guy who said: The final test of fame is to have a crazy person imagine he is you. But it was another of Anon’s pearls of wisdom that sprang to mind as I was pondering how the cruising …
Not long after you begin a life on the ocean waves, cruising full time on a small boat, you will start to notice symptoms of mental disorder directly related to this new life style. Most commonly it relates to having been deprived of a plug-in electricity supply: Ampaphobia is an obsession with hoarding battery capacity. The …
A very good sailor once told me that racing was the best way to hone my sailing skills. I have to agree with him. The racer’s attention to detail in setting up and trimming the boat and the tactical aspects of navigation really do help you get from A to B faster and more efficiently. …
Allow me a little commercial break on behalf of Salty John, it may be of benefit to some of my readers: Salty John doesn’t sell rigging blocks anymore – they take up a lot of room, you need a huge inventory, and they can hardly be called ‘uncommon cruising kit’. So, no more blocks. The …