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

This is the story of a solo voyage in a 31ft- wooden sailing boat called Tsambika.
Philip Marsden pilots his sloop along the west coast of Ireland, then the west coast of Scotland. The Summer Isles lie at his journey’s end, but in fact he is unable to land, owing to unfriendly headwinds — hence those islands ‘must remain in the imagination of the book’s subtitle’.

An award-winning writer whose previous books include Rising Ground: A Search for the Spirit of Place, Marsden was a competent sailor before the off (his grandfather taught him), but ‘had never skippered a boat to anywhere I couldn’t reach by lunchtime’. His achievement is all the more impressive as he claims to be ‘not naturally practical’.

The ballast of the book, keeping the poetic musings afloat, concerns cleats and winches, fenders and bowlines, the tyranny of the depth-sounder and the banshee scream of wind in the stays. When things go wrong, as they do in chapter four, the book reads like a thriller. Emotions clump around frightening moments. But nothing really bad occurs, despite the challenges of a vessel like Tsambika. Marsden cites the yacht club adage: ‘If you don’t like someone, leave them a boat in your will. If you really don’t like them, leave them a wooden boat.’ A third of the way through he breaks the journey and returns to hearth and home in Cornwall.

Throughout he zips ashore frequently in his Zodiac, attending a Blessing of the Boats and a midnight beacon-lighting. On terra firma he purchases supplies, calms cabin fever and above all engages with people, using direct speech to leaven the narrative. To tell his stories he cites books of myth, history and memoir, and tells of archaeological finds, such as a factory for making purple dye on the Inishkeas, Co. Mayo.