The Long Lost Log

Mick, a 22-year-old virgin sailor, escapes unemployment, family, and a 3-day-week London to become a deckhand on a small yacht, Gay Gander, sailing the Atlantic from England's West Country to Antigua in the Caribbean. He learns sailing, table manners, and bridging the generation gap, and gets marooned, almost drowns, and jumps ship to escape mortal danger. The author lost his log book, but it surfaces fifty years later during an old girlfriend's attic clearout. The book is a voyage of discovery into the price of being free, with danger, the unexpected, the erotic, and the comic.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 176 pages
Publication date: 28 April 2022
Publisher: The Lilliput Press Ltd

In 1974, 22-year-old virgin sailor Mick escapes unemployment, family, and a three-day-week London to become a deckhand on a small yacht, 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 ships cat. Set in a time when the oceans were plastic-free, and a compass, clock, and sextant the only tools of navigation, then 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 log book – until fifty years later, the diary surfaces out 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. This resonantly related rite of passage leaps from the page like the curious whale that once disturbed the narrator's watch.

Weight: 368g
Dimension: 137 x 216 x 26 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781843518273