The Idiot Farm: Sailing Painfully Slowly Round Britain's 'Big Island' in a Small Boat, with a Side Order of Low Countries

by Martin Edge

Overview

“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 particularly triumphant victory.

So most of this volume is just about extended holidays sailing around the bulk of Britain. It’s not a gripping, terrifying adventure yarn about braving the savage elements or being dismasted in unforecast hurricanes. In fact it’s all quite sedate, easy and achievable by a congenital wimp in a small boat. Hopefully this volume is mostly a fairly light and – with luck – amusing tale about a fairly ordinary journey. It’s by no stretch of the imagination a pilot book. In fact much of the information in it that isn’t fairly ancient is entirely subjective and only there because it annoyed or amused me. But it might give you a few clues about where’s worth stopping off around the coast and where isn’t.

As well as the coast of the UK and a tiny bit of eastern Ireland, I bang on quite a bit about cruising the fantastic, sheltered inland waters of the Netherlands and bits of the Frisian Islands as far as the Elbe

During the ridiculously long period spanned by my trip, the UK was changing a hell of a lot faster than I was sailing. It was impossible to ignore that fact that the world of 2018 felt like a completely different place to the world of 2006. So I’m afraid I haven’t ignored it. In fact I’ve rather tended to rant on about the difference and the dreadful, parlous state that the UK finds itself in as this book is published in early 2020. I know that a book about sailing isn’t supposed to have politics in it, so this is just a warning. Not an apology, because I think they need to be there, but a warning to the sensitive and the idiotic.

If you do choose to buy this book I sincerely hope you enjoy it and that, should we meet at some point in the future as we sail aimlessly about, you’ll at least not offer me any violence.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940163449514
Publisher:	Martin Edge
Publication date:	01/21/2020
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
File size:	10 MB

About the Author

"Travels with my Rant" Most of my writing is about my travels. Mostly very slow travels. For some years now I've been plodding round the seas of northern Europe aboard a small sailing boat. To date I've published three accounts of these trips. For years I poked around in some of the more obscure parts of some developing countries, hitch-hiking and travelling by boat, train and bus. Some of the buses were slower than my boat. The record was 12 hours to go 11 miles in the Shan State in northern Burma. I'll soon be publishing two volumes entitled "Travels with my Rant" and "The Front of Beyond". These will include tales about hopping across dodgy borders in places like East Timor and Nicaragua. Whilst travel may broaden some minds and narrow others, travelling slowly and alone changes your perspective on the world around you. I like to think it hones the senses and heightens the critical faculties. Others have agreed that yes, it does make me rant on and on about everything. My travel writings are not gripping tales of derring-do and one man's survival in a savage wilderness against all the odds. I am, in fact, something of a wimp. Neither do they consciously seek to maintain the mythology and exoticism of travel to far flung parts. The fact is that more or less everywhere on earth people wear jeans and ride scooters. The documentary makers must have a hell of a job editing the world so that it's full of tribal head-dresses and loin cloths. Culture shock isn't all it's cracked up to be and nowhere on the planet is as alien as it appears to be from a distance. Except Manchester of course. I've tried to give a flavour of the places I've visited and to discuss those aspects of their landscape, environment, people, culture, economy and politics which make them interesting. In 2014 I published a sort of pilot book entitled "105 Rocks and Other Stuff to Tie your Boat to in Eastern Sweden and Finland". It's full of photos, maps, descriptions and waypoints for, as the name suggests, 105 Scandinavian rocks and other harbours. It's available FREE of charge at my website (www.edge.me.uk) as a web file and as a pdf. There's yet more stuff on my web page at http://www.edge.me.uk/index.htm. This includes a pile of more academic papers written while I was Head of Research of the Architecture School in Aberdeen.