What will cruising look like in the next decade or so? Practical Boat Owner editor, Katy Stickland, has spoken to experts and looked at trends to find out how pathways into sailing and boating have changed, looking at models of boat ownership and how this will impact the type of cruising people will be doing, as well as what boats and gear might look like by 2050.
The talk will be followed by the award of the CA’s log competition prizes.
"Earth is pear-shaped" became headline news in March 1958 when the Vanguard satellite’s orbit deviated from expectations, irreparably confusing a generation of schoolchildren and their geography teachers.
That the Earth is round had been known for centuries; that it might also be (very) slightly oval was also long-suspected, although we disagreed with the French as to which way the oval went. How did we work it out?
Bob will talk about some of the stand-out places to visit and some of the much less well known. He will also suggest ways of making the very best of the time available to you, including exploiting the weather, whatever it serves up, and everything else the West Coast has to offer. He will illustrate his talk with photos but also with his charts and with anecdotes from his 15 years of surveying in West Coast waters.
This is a joint event with the Mediterranean Section. Charles and Elizabeth brought their twin-keel Westerly Ocean 33 Aura across France to the Med in 2012 and after exploring Med Spain, France and Italy they arrived in Croatia for the first time in 2015. Other cruisers said they should go to Greece, and in 2017 they did, and also to Istanbul and south-west Turkey. Then in 2023, notwithstanding Croatia’s reputation for crowds and cost, they came back.
For almost a century, gangs of men called Muddies sailed Thames barges to the remote salt marshes of the Medway estuary, to dig tons of mud to satisfy the relentless demands of the cement industry. They worked hard, drank hard, got into fights, and changed the tidal flow of a river, forever. An entertaining journey through an almost forgotten piece of unique history.
Nine years ago, Paul Eedle became obsessed with owning a historic wooden boat even though he could hardly sail. He found his 1907 Looe lugger Guiding Star so rewarding despite the challenges that he asked a shipwright friend in Cornwall to design and build him a new wooden boat. Hopeful, a 30’ gaff ketch, was launched this summer. Paul tells the story of two boats which transported him to a new world.
Birds do it, bees do it, even educated salmon do it – and all with a precision that we have only just begun to match. The contributions to navigation made by Galileo and John Harrison are well-known, and the work of others – such as Michael Faraday and Elmer Sperry – can at least be guessed at. But what about Igor Sikorsky, Arthur C. Clarke and Albert Einstein? If the back-staff was such an improvement over the cross-staff, why did the Dutch East India Company ban it from their ships?
Ian Herbert Jones has recently returned from both the Ocean Globe Race and the Golden Globe Race. In this talk, he describes his Golden Globe journey for which he used a unique blend of traditional navigation and cutting edge satellite technology that ultimately saved his life. Ian blends his passion for adventure sailing with a long career in the tech industry. With more than 100,000 sea miles experience, he has completed what he describes as 2.75 circumnavigations under sail.
In a field in land-locked Armenia, there lies a full-scale replica of a 13th century merchant ship. She was modelled from a time when the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia had a coastline and a mercantile fleet. Amazingly, the project was conceived when Armenia was part of the Soviet Union and built in a time of turmoil and war. When Armenia found itself a free country, the ship was transported to the Black Sea and launched.
