Tom Cunliffe

We had to leave Rio de Janeiro, and we had to leave quickly, but we had no chronometer and no charts because they had all been stolen. All we had was a chart of the Atlantic Ocean and the coordinates for Barbados. My proposition was to sail north until we passed 13 degrees North and then to turn left and run down the line of latitude until we got to Barbados. At the last minute, a friend gave me his Bulova Accutron watch, which would have given us longitude, but that went overboard at Cabo Frio, so we had no longitude again. So, there we were in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, and we didn’t know where we were to within 200 miles. And it didn’t matter. It was not important because we knew that we were safe and we knew that we were going the right way.”

I’m sitting in Tom Cunliffe’s “den” next to his home in a quaint village outside Salisbury in South West England. The pretty cottage where he and his wife, Ros, live and the converted outbuilding are all quintessentially English, as is the 1949 Bentley in which he picked me up from the station. But the stories he tells me conjure up another world, one of stormy seas, leaky boats, exotic locations, and curious characters. His stories are told with the characteristic mix of high drama, acute technical know-how, and great humor that has turned him into something of a celebrity in the British sailing world.

Since Tom took up writing in the mid-1980s to fund his addiction to old wooden boats, he’s written about 30 books on subjects ranging from histories to sailing manuals and cruising pilots, as well as hundreds of articles for British and American sailing magazines. He’s featured in three BBC series about the sea and has become a regular fixture on the boat-show and yacht-club speaking circuits, where he’s guaranteed to raise a laugh. In recent years, he’s taken to the Internet, with more than 40,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel and 1,000 subscribers to his online private members club, The Sea Chest. Most recently, he’s written his first novel, a tale of corruption, murder, and love in the Caribbean, based on his experiences of sailing among the islands over several decades.

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