"A Gigantic Whinge on the Celtic Fringe" is the story of a circumnavigation of Ireland aboard my 27ft yacht in 2011.From the Firth of Forth I went through the Caledonian Canal and round Ireland anti-clockwise, which many people consider to be the 'wrong way round'. Most, but by no means all of the journey, was sailed solo.On the way I skirted a lot of the bits of what is sometimes called the 'Celtic Fringe'. If you are used to travelling in Britain by road and rail it's eas...

"The Idiot Farm" is the story of my sailing trip round what most people would probably call Mainland Britain in my wee 27ft long keeled yacht. I never really set out to go round the whole thing, so the journey was incredibly slow, sporadic, and and not in any particular order. I started out in 2006 and didn't really finish until 2018. Had a garden snail started out on the same 3000 mile journey at the same time as me, he'd have finished only a few days after I did, which I don't count as a...

"Floating Low to Lofoten" is the story of a trip to the Norwegian Arctic aboard my 27ft yacht.In 2008 we crossed the North Sea from the Firth of Forth, then I cruised northwards, above the Arctic Circle to north of the Lofoten Islands. Most, but by no means all of this journey, was sailed solo.Having decided to explore the west coast of Norway a friend asked me how far up I intended to go. Without having bothered to look at a map I replied casually that I'd probably just ni...

"Skagerrak and Back" is the story of my North Sea circuit aboard my 27ft yacht.In 2007 I bit the bullet and decided to head for foreign climes. We crossed the North Sea from the Firth of Forth to Norway. We skirted the coast southwards to Sweden, through the Skagerrak past Denmark and into Germany. We travelled through the German and Dutch canals and back home through the uninviting waters of the English east coast. Most, but by no means all of the journey was sailed solo.W...

"Bobbing to the Baltic" is the story of my cruise from Edinburgh to the Russian border aboard my 27ft yacht 'Zophiel'.In May 2012 we left the Forth to cross the North Sea. Though we originally intended to go to Denmark, a combination of wimpiness and extraordinarily poor navigation took us to Holland instead.From there I sailed to the Baltic, via Germany, then to the eastern Baltic, via Denmark and Sweden's Gøta Canal. We cruised the million islands of the Swedish and Finni...

“Travels with my Rant” describes my wanderings around some of the more obscure bits of East Timor, the Indonesian islands of Nusa Tenggara, Sulawesi and Borneo, Central America and parts of India. It is a series of travellers tales about uncomfortable and sometimes slightly worrying journeys, sometimes in places which few other western touros reach.In the 1990s, whilst working as an academic, I took full advantage of every minute of the only perk of the job – ten weeks holiday a ye...

'The Front of Beyond' is a collection of travellers' tales from East Asia, Africa and the Middle East.In the late 1980s and the 1990s I was working as a lecturer. The only perk of this eighty hour a week job was ten weeks holiday a year. So two or three times a year I would leave the office and take a bus to the airport. Usually travelling with hand luggage only I would hop on a plane to somewhere interesting, cheap and a long, long way from the nearest student of quantity surveyin...

'Sail's Pace' describes my trip, on a number of different boats, over quite a few years, from Arctic Norway of to the Guna Yala islands of Panama. It's the first volume in a series, entitled 'Å to Oz', which documents my very slow, sporadic attempts to sail from north of Tromsø to Australia.It, and its companion volume, 'Nautical Tortoise', are about the sort of sailing that anyone can do, given enough time and an appropriate boat. They are definitely not about superhuman feats of ...

'Nautical Tortoise' is about my passage, aboard someone else's deeply flawed 38ft boat, from Caribbean Panama to the Marquesas Islands of French Polynesia. It's the second volume in a three-part series describing my snail's-pace efforts to sail from northern Norway to Australia. The series is entitled, optimistically, 'Å to Oz'.It's the sequel to 'Sail's Pace', in which I progressed, infinitesimally slowly, from Norway to Panama. Neither volume could be described as a gripping, nai...

In this long-awaited fifth edition of the best-selling book, Martin Edge continues to provide the definitive guide to underwater photography. The book covers everything from the basic principles, the equipment and approaches to composition and lighting through to creating an individual style.The book features over 400 updated colour images - taken on numerous dives around the world - with an accompanying narrative that provides detailed information on how the shots were taken, thei...

A single-handed voyage on a small sailboat from Key West Florida to Isla Mujeres, Mexico.

In 1986, seventy-one-year-old Edgar Whitcomb faced a crossroads in his life; he needed a new direction. Th at venture became an epic journey, as this retired Indiana governor embarked on what would be a solo, 30,000-mile, six-year sailing trip. With virtually no previous sailing experience, he and his thirty-foot sailboat, the CILIN II, traveled around the world.In this travel memoir, a chronicle fi lled with danger and adventure, Whitcomb narrates the details of his explo...