Hi, Friends!

Are you, like me, rather frustrated at the inability to do our joy, sailing? Well the stuff below should be of interest to while away the nights.

YouTube (www.youtube.com) is your friend. I can’t imagine anyone not having tried it, but just in case, you can search for almost anything, old TV programmes, movies, whatever takes your fancy. But best of all is there is a lot on sailing, particularly Blogs that people create to let others know what they’re doing and sometimes through a sponsoring service, get some income.

If you do a search for any of

• Adventures of an old Seadog
• Cyprus Sailing TV (with lots of “sailing falls”, crashes that sort of thing)
• Erik Aanderaa Extreme Sailing (very “busy” weather)
• Patrick Laine Sailing
• Ryan & Sophie Sailing (my favourite, fun and instructional)
• Sailing La Vagabonde (if still pining for the BVIs)
• Sailing Ocean Fox
• Sailing Ruby Rose
• Sailing SV Bora Bora
• Sailing SV Delos (if you fancy an armchair voyage around the Pacific)
• Sailing Yacht Ruby Rose
• Sailing Zephyr (with some interesting Atlantic crossing videos)
• Skip Novak's Storm Sailing Techniques (useful on a rainy day)

Some of these are zero to hero, like Ryan & Sophie, and are really enjoyable.

Further, for my other club (also closed, sniff..) Midland Sailing Club, I have run 2 sailing film nights.  These have been a mixture of crashes, capsizes and longer trips, and to make it easy to navigate around, I divided them into categories, with the better ones (either as a filename or as a folder name) preceded by one or more shrieks (!), to find the best ones quickly.  That way I could move from one area to another as the audience desired.

I have put these in a shared area for anyone to download, at

gofile.me/3B4XN/hz2dlCsAt

Just point your browser at this address, and you have the option of navigating the file set (big, 15 GB), downloading individual files/folders, or the lot.

The videos cover big boats and dinghies.  My particular favourites are:

• Come Sailing with Uffa Fox (a really old B&W Southern TV programme)
• The Two Voyages of Donald Crowhurst
• Round Britain by Wayfarer
• Pram Relay, Silly Soccer (in !!Fun folder)
• Buckler’s Hard in 1936 (in !!History folder)
• Amphibious Caravan, Homemade Washing Machine (in !!Inventions folder)
• Dinghy Regattas (from years ago…)

 

And last but not least…

• Wayfarer & Sixties folder – two videos on the Wayfarer, one from Frank Dye (an absolute hero and madman), one about a really nice 4,000 mi trip around the Med in a Wayfarer, and one on the emergence of dinghies as the poor man’s way of accessing boats in the 60s.

Even if you don’t like dinghies, you should find the last folder to really interesting, as a trip down memory lane.  All these files have been harvested from YouTube, and like Wiki, you an do it all yourself, but if you like say crashes a lot, it will save you the effort of mooching around.

And one last thing, there are something like 250,000 old British Movietone and British Pathé movies on YouTube (like the amphibious caravan), all for free, and with a lot on sailing.  So you may be frustrated being stuck at home, but at least you can enjoy many trips down memory lane.

Best wishes all – keep safe.

Stuart