The Idiot Farm: Sailing Painfully Slowly Round Britain’s ‘Big Island’ in a Small Boat, with a Side Order of Low Countries

“The Idiot Farm” is the story of my sailing trip round what most people would probably call Mainland Britain in my wee 27ft long keeled yacht. I never really set out to go round the whole thing, so the journey was incredibly slow, sporadic, and and not in any particular order. I started out in 2006 and didn’t really finish until 2018. Had a garden snail started out on the same 3000 mile journey at the same time as me, he’d have finished only a few days after I did, which I don’t count as a particularly triumphant victory.

So most of this volume is just about extended holidays sailing around the bulk of Britain. It’s not a gripping, terrifying adventure yarn about braving the savage elements or being dismasted in unforecast hurricanes. In fact it’s all quite sedate, easy and achievable by a congenital wimp in a small boat. Hopefully this volume is mostly a fairly light and – with luck – amusing tale about a fairly ordinary journey. It’s by no stretch of the imagination a pilot book. In fact much of the information in it that isn’t fairly ancient is entirely subjective and only there because it annoyed or amused me. But it might give you a few clues about where’s worth stopping off around the coast and where isn’t.

As well as the coast of the UK and a tiny bit of eastern Ireland, I bang on quite a bit about cruising the fantastic, sheltered inland waters of the Netherlands and bits of the Frisian Islands as far as the Elbe

During the ridiculously long period spanned by my trip, the UK was changing a hell of a lot faster than I was sailing. It was impossible to ignore that fact that the world of 2018 felt like a completely different place to the world of 2006. So I’m afraid I haven’t ignored it. In fact I’ve rather tended to rant on about the difference and the dreadful, parlous state that the UK finds itself in as this book is published in early 2020. I know that a book about sailing isn’t supposed to have politics in it, so this is just a warning. Not an apology, because I think they need to be there, but a warning to the sensitive and the idiotic.

If you do choose to buy this book I sincerely hope you enjoy it and that, should we meet at some point in the future as we sail aimlessly about, you’ll at least not offer me any violence.