Sailing Without an Engine

You’re more likely to see a seagull smoking a cigar than a solo skipper sailing without an engine these days, but for martin o’scannall, removing the engine from his yacht was the beginning of an even more beautiful friendship with the sea

For the Love of Sauntress – a Forty-year Affair  published as recently as 2014 by the ever-creative Lodestar Books tells the story of Martin O’Scannall’s life with a notably beautiful gaff cutter, mainly on England’s East Anglian coast. The book is exquisitely written, and one can only imagine Dick Wynne at Lodestar rubbing his hands in delight when it came his way. In his own unique way, O’Scannall shows us how a man ready to listen to lessons taught in the classroom of the creeks and the open sea can learn as much about himself as he can the way of a sailing boat on salt water. These two extracts reveal the dramatic personal results of the radical decision to scrap a perfectly good engine and let his old yacht live again. While entertaining delightfully, he quietly slips us some priceless hints about how to manoeuvre under sail in tight waters while sharing the secrets of discovering that self-reliance which is the ultimate hallmark of the sailor.

At long last comes that moment when you stop sawing, hoover out the shavings and start on the paint and the varnish. That final touch before the season starts.

And for those who say that varnish is too much trouble, or that paint is too much trouble, or that wooden boats are too much trouble, well each to his own. But you cannot help wondering just what else might be too much trouble, the things which not only beautify your boat but on which her safety relies.

Having applied the last lick of varnish, cleaned your brushes and tidied all away, you now have to get out of the impossible ditch that is Toosey Creek, at the top of the tide; and this, as the denizens of the yard know all too well, is the moment for some good clean fun.