Spectacular scenery, clear waters, friendly people, castles, great live music, dolphins and superb sailing – what’s not to love?! Come and hear about Ann and Steve’s circumnavigation of Ireland in China Girl. They will talk about rounding the various well known headlands, dealing with the Atlantic swell, the notorious Irish weather and learning about Irish history and culture.
Floods, droughts, large barges, weed, locks, hundreds of them big and small, canal closures all at times present challenges. Cruisers need to be on the qui vive constantly. These challenges fade when compared with the pleasures of exploring the vast wealth of inland Europe, the culture, the history, magnificent buildings and of course the culinary delights.
Mark left Dartmouth in March 2019 to sail round the UK and Ireland, attempting to meet every Harbour Master. Five years later, on 28 September 2023, he completed the challenge having sailed 9,000 NM, visited 310 harbours, met a total of 256 Harbour Masters, been helped by 90 different crew and having raised over £25,000 for The Seafarers' Charity.
After sailing in Turkey for three years, Colin and Maggie Walsh fulfilled a long-held ambition and ventured into the Black Sea as part of a Turkish friendship rally: a two-month long cruise along the north coast to Georgia and back following the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts. The hectic schedule included ziplining, white water rafting and learning a traditional dance as well as the more expected local attractions of mosques, museums and wildlife sanctuaries.
In 2023, the OGA, the association for gaff rigged sailing, reached its 60th Anniversary. The celebrations included a Round Britain Cruise, with boats taking part that ranged from a 19ft Cornish Shrimper, several centenarian yachts, and a one hundred-year-old motor lifeboat. A similar event 10 years earlier had shown how important a common understanding of the timetable would be.
"I can dive off the eastern coast of the United States and surface again in the Mediterranean within five hundred yards of where I expect to be," says Rock Hudson to Patrick McGoohan in Ice Station Zebra. We would take that for granted today, but how was it even imaginable in 1963 when Alistair Maclean wrote the book, and was the captain (or the author) exaggerating?
Claudia Myatt is a marine illustrator and cartoonist with a passion for sketchbook voyaging. In 2019 she sailed round Cape Horn on a traditional Dutch sailing ship, taking sketchbooks but no camera on her two month voyage. Two years later she was back in the Southern Ocean as an Artist in Residence and guest of the Royal Navy on board icebreaker, HMS Protector, on a tour of duty to South Georgia and Antarctica. She returned with tales to tell of life on board two very different ships and the challenges of sketching at sea.
After several years cruising the Baltic in their sailing yacht, Viv and Linda bought a motor boat and spent their first full season on Ruby in 2022 doing an English channel loop during the hottest summer ever, then spending October's unprecedented warmth and sun on the Thames. As cautious boaters, Viv will describe the challenges and joys (mostly joys!) of cruising the Normandy coast, Guernsey and the southwest of England.
In June 2022, our most recent Hanson Cup winner, James and his wife Jenny joined the ARC Portugal rally to sail their Regina 43 Arkyla from the UK south to the sun, to base the boat for a season in Lagos, Portugal. James will briefly talk about the advantages of joining the rally for crossing Biscay and making passage down the Atlantic Portugal coast. He will then discuss in more detail cruising the Algarve, and the pros and cons of basing a boat in Lagos in terms of both sailing and maintenance.
The winners of the Lacey Trophy will describe voyages they made in 2021 in southern Denmark, in 2022 along the Baltic Coast of Germany and eastern Sweden, and in 2023 to the Åland Islands and the Gulf of Bothnia. En route, they explored the old Hanseatic League cities of Lübeck, Wismar, Rostok, Stralsund and Greifswald, which were part of a vast trading network stretching from Britain to Russia back in medieval times, and many Viking sites, including the former Viking trading centre at Birka in Lake Mälaren.
