Sail's Pace: A Slow Float from the Arctic to the Caribbean

'Sail's Pace' describes my trip, on a number of different boats, over quite a few years, from Arctic Norway of to the Guna Yala islands of Panama. It's the first volume in a series, entitled 'Å to Oz', which documents my very slow, sporadic attempts to sail from north of Tromsø to Australia.

It, and its companion volume, 'Nautical Tortoise', are about the sort of sailing that anyone can do, given enough time and an appropriate boat. They are definitely not about superhuman feats of endurance. There are no near-death experiences, cyclones or sea monsters. All of it was done the prosaic, easy way. 'Nautical Tortoise' goes on to describe my journey as far as the Marquesas Islands of French Polynesia. To my eternal shame, the rest of the trip, from Tahiti to Oz, has yet to be completed.

My previous writings have been about sailing my own wee boat. But this, and the volume that follows, is mostly about bumming lifts, as crew, on a number of other people's boats.

So, if you want to read about people braving mountainous seas and hurricane force winds, you'll need to look elsewhere. If you like your rugged, indomitable heroes fighting nature, tooth and claw, you'll be disappointed. If you get your kicks from stories about people barely surviving, against all the odds, by clinging to the wreckage of their tiny, upturned coracles, so emaciated after months at sea that the circling great whites can't be arsed even to nibble at them, you're in the wrong place.

If, on the other hand, you want to find out how a congenital nautical wimp might get his or herself across oceans, with the minimum of expense and hazard, by the easy, puny, pedestrian route, you might take a chance on 'Sail's Pace'.

I have to confess that Part One of this volume is disgracefully shambolic. It dots back and forth, in both space and time, as I try to piece together a collection of unconnected jaunts into a single story. Parts Two and Three, however, are at least single stories, told in the right direction and the right chronological order. So please feel free to skip forward to them.