The long lost log - Michael Chapman Pincher

In 1974, 22-year-old virgin sailor Mick escapes unemployment, family and 3-day-week London to become a deckhand on a small yacht,GayGander, setting out to sail the Atlantic from England's West Country, viathe Canaries, to Antigua in the Caribbean.

Under the eye of an unfathomable skipper, John Francis Kearney, and hisformidable sailing companion Carola (both escaping from a rain-soddenIreland and broken marriages), Mick has to learn sailing, table manners,bridging the generation gap and getting along with Stryder, the RussianBlue ship's 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 Logshould 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 Logis 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.