Three good solid chunks of armchair sailing.

Two on a big ocean and Two against Cape Horn may sound like Enid Blyton titles, but they're actually first-hand accounts of long cruises Hal Roth and his wife made on their 35-foot sloop Whisper — around the South and North Pacific in 1967-68; through the islands of southern Chile and around Cape Horn a few years later. Roth provides a very well-balanced mixture of sailing stuff and more general travel writing about the people they meet and the places they visit. Neither aspect displays sensationally good writing, but equally there's nothing really disagreeable or dull. It will keep you entertained, and might inspire you with a desire to see the places for yourself. However, what he tells us about the islands and straits around Cape Horn won't do anything to change the idea you already had that these are bad places to be in a big, powerful motor ship, and absolutely crazy places to take a small sailing boat.

The third book in this collection is The longest race, an account of the notorious 1968-69 non-stop singlehanded round-the-world race sponsored by the Sunday Times. The race had plenty of drama, but, perhaps inevitably as nothing like this had ever been run before, was an organisational disaster. Nine solo yachtsmen started: six of them had to withdraw at various stages due to ill-health, storm damage or mechanical failure; another, who should never have been allowed to start, went mad and killed himself; the amazingly hairy and delightfully eccentric Bernard Moitessier enjoyed himself so much finding inner harmony on the Southern Ocean that he didn't want to return to Europe (and his wife and kids...), so he left the race shortly before the finish, did an additional half-circuit of the globe and ended up in Tahiti; the reassuringly English (but still pretty hairy) Robin Knox-Johnston was thus the only one who actually got back to Plymouth and took the prize. This race was big news when I was a child, and I remember reading Knox-Johnston's book at the time, although the details now escape me. Roth's book was written more than thirty years after the event (probably more-or-less at the same time as the excellent Channel 4 film Deep Water was being made). It draws very heavily on the first-hand accounts of the participants, which he quotes and paraphrases extensively. As an experienced yachtsman who took part in later, better-organised solo races, and knew quite a few of the sailors involved (including Knox-Johnston and Moitessier) he is able to add a bit of perspective and explanation here and there, and the story he has to tell is a gripping one, but really the book is a bit of a journalistic pot-boiler. ( )