The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow is a 2002 book written and illustrated by A. J. MacKinnon about the author's 1997 journey from North Shropshire to the Black Sea in a small Mirror dinghy.
The book describes a voyage that starts off as a trip from North Shropshire to the coast in a small (3.3m long) dinghy. When the author gets there, he decides to keep going through canals to London. Along the way he decides to continue the trip across the channel and then across canals to the Black Sea, ending up travelling around 4,900 kilometres.
Reviewers praised the book for its good-natured, humorous, self-deprecating tone.
In 2010, McKinnon published a second work in a similar vein, The Well at the World's End, describing his travels from Australia to Iona, Scotland without flying.
Cruising is a maritime activity that involves staying aboard a watercraft for extended periods of time when the vessel is traveling on water at a steady speed. Cruising generally refers to leisurely trips on yachts and luxury cruiseships, with durations varying from day-trips to months-long round-the-world voyages.
The River Severn, at 220 miles (354 km) long, is the longest river in Great Britain. It is also the river with the most voluminous flow of water by far in all of England and Wales, with an average flow rate of 107 m3/s (3,800 cu ft/s) at Apperley, Gloucestershire. It rises in the Cambrian Mountains in mid Wales, at an altitude of 2,001 feet (610 m), on the Plynlimon massif, which lies close to the Ceredigion/Powys border near Llanidloes. The river then flows through Shropshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire. The county towns of Shrewsbury, Gloucester and Worcester lie on its course.
Bass Strait is a strait separating the island state of Tasmania from the Australian mainland. The strait provides the most direct waterway between the Great Australian Bight and the Tasman Sea, and is also the only maritime route into the economically prominent Port Phillip Bay.
Brendan of Clonfert is one of the early Irish monastic saints and one of the Twelve Apostles of Ireland. He is also referred to as Brendan the Navigator, Brendan the Voyager, Brendan the Anchorite, and Brendan the Bold. The Irish translation of his name is Naomh Bréanainn or Naomh Breandán. He is mainly known for his legendary voyage to find the “Isle of the Blessed” which is sometimes referred to as “Saint Brendan’s Island”. The written narrative of his journey comes from the immram The Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis.
The Swallows and Amazons series is a series of twelve children's adventure novels by English author Arthur Ransome. Set in the interwar period, the novels involve group adventures by children, mainly in the school holidays and mainly in England. They revolve around outdoor activities, especially sailing. Literary critic Peter Hunt believes it "changed British literature, affected a whole generation's view of holidays, helped to create the national image of the English Lake District and added Arthur Ransome's name to the select list of classic British children's authors." The series remains popular and inspires visits to the Lake District and Norfolk Broads, where many of the books are set.
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, written in 1838, is the only complete novel by American writer Edgar Allan Poe. The work relates the tale of the young Arthur Gordon Pym, who stows away aboard a whaling ship called the Grampus. Various adventures and misadventures befall Pym, including shipwreck, mutiny, and cannibalism, before he is saved by the crew of the Jane Guy. Aboard this vessel, Pym and a sailor named Dirk Peters continue their adventures farther south. Docking on land, they encounter hostile, black-skinned natives before escaping back to the ocean. The novel ends abruptly as Pym and Peters continue toward the South Pole.
Richard Halliburton was an American travel writer and adventurer who swam the length of the Panama Canal and paid the lowest toll in its history—36 cents in 1928. He disappeared at sea while attempting to sail the Chinese junk Sea Dragon across the Pacific Ocean from Hong Kong to the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, California.
The Flying Dutchman is a legendary ghost ship, allegedly never able to make port, but doomed to sail the seven seas forever. The myths and ghost stories are likely to have originated from the 17th-century Golden Age of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and of Dutch maritime power. The oldest known extant version of the legend dates from the late 18th century. According to the legend, if hailed by another ship, the crew of the Flying Dutchman might try to send messages to land, or to people long dead. Reported sightings in the 19th and 20th centuries claimed that the ship glowed with a ghostly light. In ocean lore, the sight of this phantom ship functions as a portent of doom. It was commonly believed that the Flying Dutchman was a seventeenth-century cargo vessel known as a fluyt.
Alain Bombard was a French biologist, physician and politician famous for sailing in a small boat across the Atlantic Ocean without provision. He theorized that a human being could very well survive the trip across the ocean without provisions and decided to test his theory himself in order to save thousands of lives of people lost at sea.
Emma Smith was an English novelist, who also wrote for children and published two volumes of autobiography. She gave encouragement to Laurie Lee while he was writing his bestselling memoir of his childhood, Cider with Rosie.
Cape Horn is the southernmost headland of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago of southern Chile, and is located on the small Hornos Island. Although not the most southerly point of South America, Cape Horn marks the northern boundary of the Drake Passage and marks where the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans meet.
Arthur Jones, pen name Tristan Jones was a British mariner and author. He spent most of his life at sea, first in the British Royal Navy, and then sailing in small yachts for various purposes, including self-appointed adventure trips. Starting in 1977, he wrote sixteen books and many articles about sailing and his adventures, including several memoirs. His writing, while highly entertaining, often mixes fact and fiction. In his memoirs, he invented a fictional childhood and youth.
Missee Lee is the tenth book of Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons series of children's books, set in 1930s China. The Swallows and Amazons are on a round-the-world trip with Captain Flint aboard the schooner Wild Cat. After the Wild Cat sinks, they escape in the boats Swallow and Amazon, but are separated in a storm. Both dinghies eventually end up in the lair of the Three Island pirates—Chang, Woo and Lee—where they are held prisoner by the unusual Missee Lee, the leader of the Three Island pirates.
Steven Callahan is an American author, naval architect, inventor, and sailor. In 1981, he survived for 76 days adrift on the Atlantic Ocean in a liferaft. Callahan recounted his ordeal in the best-selling book Adrift: Seventy-six Days Lost at Sea (1986), which was on The New York Times best-seller list for more than 36 weeks.
Dougal Robertson (1924–1991) was a Scottish author and sailor who with his family survived being adrift at sea after their schooner was holed by a pod of orcas in 1972, one of many documented orca attacks.
The Montgomery Dinghy Dawdle was an event held annually between 1985 and 2011 to promote use and awareness of the Montgomery Canal, and to highlight the road bridges which had been lowered. It involved unpowered craft such as dinghies, canoes and coracles travelling along the canal. Early events involved stopping the traffic and carrying boats over a road where a low bridge prevented using the canal. Increasing difficulty with supervising this aspect of the event led to it being held on sections that did not involve crossing roads, and so it became a social event, rather than a campaigning tool. This led the organisers, the Shropshire Union Canal Society, to cancel the event after 2011, but the Friends of the Montgomery Canal took it over, and turned it into a triathlon, with cycling, walking or running, and paddling, covering the whole length of the canal.
Gulag: A History, also published as Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps, is a non-fiction book covering the history of the Soviet Gulag system. It was written by American author Anne Applebaum and published in 2003 by Doubleday. Gulag won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and the 2004 Duff Cooper Prize. It was also nominated for the National Book Critics Circle prize and for the National Book Award.
Miles Clark was a sailor, journalist and writer from Northern Ireland. A few months before he died, Clark circumnavigated Europe through several of Russia's waterways which led him to winning the Cruising World Medal for Outstanding Seamanship.
Henry Wallace Stuart Clark MBE was a sailor, author and businessman from Northern Ireland.
Narrow Boat is a book about life on the English canals written by L. T. C. Rolt. Originally published in 1944 by Eyre & Spottiswoode, it has continuously been in print since.
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