Sailing

Four months adrift in the Pacific: a couple’s extraordinary feat of endurance

2 March 2024 9:00 am

When a freak occurrence wrecked the Baileys’ sloop 300 miles from the Galapagos, their chances of rescue were minimal – and one of them couldn’t even swim

An elegy on yachting

7 August 2021 9:00 am

Patmos A very long time ago I wrote in these here pages that spending a summer on the Riviera or…

Sailing’s coming home: the stunning Ben Ainslie comeback

23 January 2021 9:00 am

Alan Bond was a rogue and a rich man, in every way your typical Aussie larrikin. In 1983 he bankrolled…

How the NHS has coped with the second wave

28 November 2020 9:00 am

Across Europe, hospitals have been filling up again with the second wave of coronavirus. France, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and the…

Gales and Gaels — sailing solo from Cornwall to the Summer Isles

28 September 2019 9:00 am

This is the story of a solo voyage in a 31ft- wooden sailing boat called Tsambika. Philip Marsden pilots his…

Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, master of the seas and model Englishman

20 April 2019 9:00 am

Something very odd happened on the Today programme the other morning. Amid the mountains of bombast that usually fill the…

High Life

29 July 2017 9:00 am

Greece   I am surfing along the Cycladic islands on Puritan, a 125ft classic that was launched in 1929 by…

Introducing the silent narrator

5 September 2015 9:00 am

Andrew Miller’s seventh novel, and the first since Pure, which won the Costa Book of the Year award, is an…

The difficult art of finding the right yacht

8 November 2014 9:00 am

To Newport, Rhode Island, the smallest state in the Union but one of the most beautiful. Driving north-east from the…

The Olympic spirit may be dead in Ibiza, but at least the hookers are world-class

13 September 2014 9:00 am

Ibiza This island is the Spanish equivalent of  the Greek sex rock of Mykonos, except its waters are murkier, its…

Alexander McCall Smith’s diary: Meeting Babar’s creator

8 February 2014 9:00 am

As any author will tell you, literary festivals differ widely. If you are invited to Willy Dalrymple’s Jaipur Festival, with…