Long Lost Log (ePub)

In 1974, 22-year-old virgin sailor Mick escapes unemployment, family and 3-day-week London to become a deckhand on a small sailboat, Gay Gander, setting out to sail the Atlantic from England's West Country, via the Canaries, to Antigua in the Caribbean.

Under the eye of an unfathomable skipper, John Francis Kearney, and his formidable sailing companion Carola (both escaping from a rain-sodden Ireland and broken marriages), Mick has to learn sailing, table manners, bridging the generation gap and getting along with Stryder, the Russian Blue ship's cat.

Set in a time when the oceans were plastic-free, a compass, clock and sextant were the only way of finding out where you were; Mick finds love, gets marooned, almost drowns and jumps ship to escape mortal danger in the Caribbean.

Long Lost Log should be fiction but is the true story of a voyage of discovery that Mick - against all odds - survived to tell this remarkable and hilarious tale. In charting his adventure of a lifetime, the author lost his logbook - until fifty years later the diary surfaces out the of the blue during an old girlfriend's attic clearout. This witty, well-paced rite of passage is full of freshness, sexual impulse and a clash of values. The addition of '70s hippiedom at the many ports-of-call catches the history of the day. Long Lost Log is a voyage of discovery into the price of being free.

His inner and outer journey combines danger with the unexpected, the erotic and the comic, in a resonantly related rite of passage that leaps from the page like the curious whale that once disturbed the narrator's watch.