Posted by Jock on January 24, 2008 at 12:04:32 from 87.105.81.146 user Jock.
In Reply to: Puffin picture books - Sailing posted by Owen Roberts on January 24, 2008 at 00:34:28:
I would think it would further aid the understanding of the seamanship episodes in AR's books.
Over time I've built up quite a library of such books. My first acquisition, which I ordered while
I was still at school, was Small Boat Sailing by E.F. Knight which was an updated and revised
reissue of his original Sailing as used by John and Dick.
It's true to say that Ransome and Knight taught me to sail. There are some rather nice on-line
pages about sailing maintained by Brian Walsh here.
Brian has some nice things to say about Sailing. He also plugs Arthur Ransome.
An online version of "Sailing by E.F Knight" at http://arthur-ransome.org/AR/literary/knight.htm
should probably be a bible for those interested in classic boats. It's still a good book for anyone
who wants to learn about sailing. As a matter of opinion, it would stand up well as the only reference
material for Day/Coastal Skipper. Read the sections on Mercator's Projection or anchoring,
for example, and see if the standard texts do as well after over a hundred years of reflection.
Sailing used to be accessible on-line with all of Knight's explanatory sketches and diagrams
via that wonderful TARS resource The Literary Pages on their WWW site.
Sadly, this amazing resource has been taken off-line. As some TarBoarders may know, dead links
such as the one above can be resurrected by typing or pasting the URL into the Wayback Machine.
This almost works for Sailing although a number of diagrams appear not to have been archived.
Another on-line source for Sailing is here, but sadly this doesn't include any of the diagrams.
Finally, I found this amazing on-line sailing compendium which includes much good stuff (including
MacGregor and Warrington Smyth) and Knight's epilogue to Sailing dedicated to one-armed sailors.