Publisher: Shaun Tyas Donington, 2001 1 900289 47 4 £ 19.95 .
After her early experience at sea as a WRNS stoker and early trials and tribulations in her first boat, a converted ship’s lifeboat, Rozelle Raynes bought a Folkboat called Martha McGilda which was her pride and joy for over forty years. It was love at first sight and from that moment she and her small craft were caught up in a magic web of adventures from her first trip across the Thames Estuary to cross-channel racing, venturing further to Holland, France and eventually in 1959, a marathon cruise to Sweden and Finland, a good part of it single-handed. A self-confessed sea-mouse, she was, nevertheless, an intrepid sailor who scorned complicated gadgets in favour of the simplest navigational equipment.
Well-illustrated with photographs and maps, it is an admirably detailed account of her sailing experiences, informative, humorous, often poetic, capturing the excitement, the ecstasy and the agony of sailing, particularly alone.
Here is a book which makes one long to be at sea again and to be a part of “the symphony of sunshine, winds and racing tides”: a siren song hard to resist. - PKC
Page prepared 8 January 2002