When Adrian Hayter set out single-handed from Lymington, England on his thirty-two-foot Albert Strange-designed yawl Sheila II, local betting was seven to one that he would get no further than the English Channel. His destination was New Zealand, and the odds were definitely against him. In 1949 perhaps only eight people had sailed solo around the world, and single-handed long-distance sailing voyages were rare. Adrian, then thirty-four, was a soldier, not a sailor. In the previous decade he had been a close observer of the Partition of India and fought as a soldier in the Second World War and the Malayan Emergency. The latter, Britain's brutal reaction to the Communist uprising of 1948, had driven his decision to sail halfway around the world, single-handed. More than sixty years later, and in the thirtieth anniversary year of Adrian's death, Lodestar Books is republishing the story of that voyage, Sheila in the Wind, first published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1959. As a sailor, Adrian recounts his foray into celestial navigation, a back-street appendix operation in India, armed escort by Indonesian authorities at sea, and eating barnacles off the hull to avoid starvation. As a writer he is trying to make sense of the humanitarian disasters that brought him to this voyage. Sheila in the Wind is more than a report of a 13,000-mile adventure; it's a story of the human spirit.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 336

Dimensions: 156 x 216 mm

Publication Date: 16-12-2020

Dr Thomas Harrison Butler was a skilled, yet amateur, designer responsible for some hundreds of classic English cruising yachts which still grace our seas. Cruising Yachts, his design manifesto, first appeared in 1945—the year of his death—and last appeared in print in 1995. This long overdue Fifth Edition has been produced in collaboration with the Harrison Butler Association, and is a complete re-setting of the original text, drawings and mono photographs, documenting in detail HB’s approach to the design and equipping of a yacht, providing an annotated catalogue of notable designs, and including a biographical portrait by HB’s daughter, the late Joan Jardine-Brown. New for this edition are a modern gallery of colour photographs of HB yachts, and a thoughtful and illuminating Foreword by the late Ed Burnett, who was our foremost designer of modern yachts in the classic English idiom.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 184

Publication Date: 04-09-2015

In this first biography of David Henry Lewis, Ben Lowings examines his lifetime of adventure forensically yet sympathetically, and unlocks the secrets of his determination. This British-born New Zealander was the first person to sail a catamaran around the world, the first - in Ice Bird - to reach Antarctica solo under sail, and the first to make known to Westerners how ancient navigators reached - and could reach again - the Pacific islands. His many voyages resulted in thirteen books published and translated worldwide; many were bestsellers - We, the Navigators has not been out of print since first publication in 1972. David Lewis's achievements have been acknowledged with a series of awards, including that of Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit. But the price of David Lewis's adventures had ultimately to be paid by others in the succession of families he created, then broke apart; and many of his actions brought him into conflict with the feelings of friends and contemporaries. We may legitimately ask 'was it really all worth it?' For the first time his six marriages are revealed, through more than a year of original research in Britain, Australia and New Zealand - including interviews with all surviving family members, as well as friends and fellow voyagers. Events thinly-sketched or omitted in his own writings, such as his father's own failings, are investigated. His kayaking, mountain-climbing and sailing were struggles all the more difficult because of a fractured backbone, shattered elbow and impaired vision. David Lewis's early years get the comprehensive documentation they deserve - in his own memoir he jumps straight from child to fully-fledged explorer. Inaccuracies are corrected in his tale of kayaking four hundred miles home from school. As playboy medical student, British paratrooper fighting in Normandy, and political activist in Palestine, Jamaica and London, he grappled with academic and colonial prejudice, and fought anti-Semitism and inequality; all is examined. As a general practitioner in the East End's impure 1950s air he worked where the new National Health Service was most needed. Professional frustrations and marital disappointments were not soothed by weekend sailing. He would join a pioneering single-handed yacht race to America in 1960, leaving his first daughter to find him on board in Plymouth to say farewell only at the last minute. In 1964 he would race again, but this time in a catamaran, and then, with Fiona, his new wife, and their daughters, girdle the earth in it. For the first time, their circumnavigation is described in part from Fiona's perspective. Media accounts and passages from his many books build up a picture of a consistently experimental, and utterly untypical, middle aged man. Every word in the Antarctic logbook of Ice Bird - scrawled with freezing hands - is closely compared with literary sources, National Geographic articles and his commercially successful book-length account. A new critical appreciation shows the white heat at the core of his being. He has abandoned his children again, and been drugged by ocean solitude. But in the act of writing he is earning his place among humanity. To hell with the frozen hands.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 288

Dimensions: 156 x 216 mm

Publication Date: 30-10-2020

The third of George Millar’s masterful sailing and travel narratives to be republished many decades after their original appearance. On the face of it, this voyage from Lymington to the Riviera should not be noteworthy, but this is a world recovering from war, and the author a man ‘incapable of writing a dull sentence’. As Peter Bruce states in his Introduction, “One soon becomes captivated, as one always is, by George’s unusually acute powers of observation and his ability to ascertain and record exactly what was going on at every stop… George Millar’s accounts of his adventures are always like a box of jewels each giving dazzling pleasure and glorious entertainment, and never better than in this deservedly revived book.” George Millar DSO, MC (1910-2005) read architecture at Cambridge.He became a journalist, first on the Daily Telegraph, then as Paris correspondent for the Daily Express. During the war he joined the Rifle Brigade, was captured in North Africa, escaped from a German POW camp and returned to England via occupied France and the Pyrenees, later recording these events in Horned Pigeon (1946). He returned to France as an SOE agent to work alongside the Resistance, an experience he described in Maquis (1945), and for which he was awarded both the Legion d’Honneur and the Croix de Guerre. After the war Millar and his wife Isabel farmed in Dorset, and made a number of voyages under sail in Baltic and European waters, and the Mediterranean. Three of these were recorded in books: Isabel and the Sea, Oyster River (both reissued in recent years by Dovecote Press) and A White Boat from England.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 288

Dimensions: 156 x 216 mm

Publication Date: 03-07-2015

In the late 1920s Norwegian Erling Tambs and his wife Julie set out from Oslo with their Colin Archer pilot boat Teddy, little in the way of navigational equipment, and not much else. The Cruise of the Teddy is Erling's charming and modest account of how, with great fortitude, resourcefulness and good humour they reached New Zealand via the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, with many delightful human encounters along the way, to arrive with one more in the family than they started with.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 176

Dimensions: 156 x 216 mm

Publication Date: 04-12-2020

“Form follows function,” as it has been said; when that form enters the realm of Art, we have something timelessly memorable.—Iain Oughtred Albert Strange (1855-1917) was an accomplished artist, teacher, yacht designer, sailor, and writer, and he left his indelible mark on all these fields of activity, with levels of accomplishment, modesty and humour which have endeared him to so many, from his own lifetime to the present day. In this book, first published in 1990 by The Albert Strange Association and long out of print, John Leather provides a biography of Strange and a commentary on many of his designs. The book also includes: Drawings of 27 yacht designs; an appreciation of Strange the artist; a selection of his cruising yarns reproduced in facsimile from The Yachting Monthly of a century and more ago; an updated selection of recently located images of his paintings; and photographs of Strange yachts afloat today. This is the first of two volumes originated by the Albert Strange Association and to be updated and re-issued by Lodestar Books, and it deserves a place on the bookshelves of anyone who appreciates the design and enjoyment of the classic British cruising yacht, and the 'complete' example of humanity represented by Albert Strange.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 224

Dimensions: 210 x 275 mm

Publication Date: 06-03-2015

Deep in southern latitudes, in a desolate corner of Cumberland Bay on the east coast of the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia, hard by the rotting quays of the abandoned whaling station of Grytviken and almost within a stone’s throw of the grave of Sir Ernest Shackleton, lie three forsaken steam ships: rusting remnants of our industrial past, unique survivals from a vanished age of steam at sea. One of these ships is Viola, the sole surviving Hull steam trawler from the huge fleet which put 'fish & chips' on Britain's plates more than a hundred years ago. In this absorbing account, maritime historians Robb Robinson and Ian Hart describe her ancestry and origins in the Victorian and Edwardian North Sea fishery—vividly depicting life for her crew in the most dangerous industry of its time; they record her Great War service as a U-boat hunter—one of the many merchant vessels largely unsung for their contribution, and often sacrifice, in wartime; and they recount her subsequent career hunting whales off West Africa, then later sealing and exploration work in the South Atlantic, before her final abandonment in South Georgia. Here she became quarry for the infamous Argentine scrap metal expedition of 1982, in the initiating action of the Falklands War. This improbable yet true story of a humble working vessel and those involved with her is a highly readable work of social, as well as maritime, history.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 224

Dimensions: 156 x 216 mm

Publication Date: 27-10-2014

No maritime library will be complete without a copy of this volume on its shelves, for the Yorkshire fishing coble and the Yorkshire smack of the past century were among the finest examples of English sea-going craft ever devised, and none more fitted for the rugged coast to which they belonged or for the stormy seas on which they used to sail. —Peter F. Anson, 1933 First published in 1933, this book of a hundred of Ernest Dade’s delightful pen and ink sketches of the North Sea fishing fleet in the latter part of the nineteenth century is not only a significant artistic achievement, but also an invaluable historical record. Observed either from his own boat or from onboard the fishing boats themselves, the drawings have an immediacy rare in work of this kind—epitomized by the sketch on page 37 where it may not be too fanciful to imagine that the yawl in the foreground is Dade sailing out to meet the returning fishing fleet with pen and pad to hand. Not only do the sketches portray the boats and their gear accurately and in great detail, but they also show the fishermen at their work both offshore and inshore from most of the fishing centres of the Yorkshire coast. The facility of Dade’s pen work can only be admired and most certainly enjoyed. These pictures show all this and are true in every way. Mr. Ernest Dade lived the life, knew the men, and sailed in the various craft he draws so well. It is a record of things passed away. —Frank Wheeler, Fisherman, 1932 This new edition has an illustrated Postscript on the restored 40ft Bridlington Sailing Coble Three Brothers.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 224

Dimensions: 156 x 216 mm

Publication Date: 27-11-2013

To those who went to the War straight from school and survived it, the problem of what to do afterwards was peculiarly difficult.' For H.W. 'Bill' Tilman, the solution lay in Africa: in gold prospecting, mountaineering and a 3,000-mile bicycle ride across the continent. Tilman was one of the greatest adventurers of his time, a pioneering climber and sailor who held exploration above all else. He made first ascents throughout the Himalaya, attempted Mount Everest, and sailed into the Arctic Circle. For Tilman, the goal was always to explore, to see new places, to discover rather than conquer. First published in 1937, Snow on the Equator chronicles Tilman's early adventures; his transition from East African coffee planter to famed mountaineer. After World War I, Tilman left for Africa, where he grew coffee, prospected for gold and met Eric Shipton, the two beginning their famed mountaineering partnership, traversing Mount Kenya and climbing Kilimanjaro and Ruwenzori. Tilman eventually left Africa in typically adventurous style via a 3,000-mile solo bicycle ride across the continent - all recounted here in splendidly funny style. Tilman is one of the greatest of all travel writers. His books are well-informed and keenly observed, concerned with places and people as much as summits and achievements. They are full of humour and anecdotes and are frequently hilarious. He is part of the great British tradition of comic writing and there is nobody else quite like him.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 215

Dimensions: 159 x 218 mm

Publication Date: 01-09-2015

'So I began thinking again of those two white blanks on the map, of penguins and humming birds, of the pampas and of gauchos, in short, of Patagonia, a place where, one was told, the natives' heads steam when they eat marmalade.' So responded H.W. 'Bill' Tilman to his own realisation that the Himalaya were too high for a mountaineer now well into his fifties. He would trade extremes of altitude for the romance of the sea with, at his journey's end, mountains and glaciers at a smaller scale; and the less explored they were, the better he would like it. Within a couple of years he had progressed from sailing a 14-foot dinghy to his own 45-foot pilot cutter Mischief, readied for her deep-sea voyaging, and recruited a crew for his most ambitious of private expeditions. Well past her prime, Mischief carried Tilman, along with an ex-dairy farmer, two army officers and a retired civil servant, safely the length of the North and South Atlantic oceans, and through the notoriously difficult Magellan Strait, against strong prevailing winds, to their icy landfall in the far south of Chile. The shore party spent six weeks crossing the Patagonian ice cap, in both directions, returning to find that their vessel had suffered a broken propeller. Edging north under sail only, Mischief put into Valparaiso for repairs, and finally made it home to Lymington via the Panama Canal, for a total of 20,000 nautical miles sailed, in addition to a major exploration 'first' all here related with the Skipper's characteristic modesty and bone-dry humour, and many photographs.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 202

Dimensions: 156 x 216 mm

Publication Date: 01-09-2015