Edward Allcard was born 31st October, 1914. He was taught to sail on the Thames, aged six, by his grandfather’s boatman. When he was 12, his grandfather died leaving him a 15ft dinghy, Dora, the first of Edward’s 18 boats.

Before WWII, Edward qualified as a naval architect doing much of his apprenticeship on the Clyde. His free time was spent sailing the Scottish west coast or driving a series of motorbikes and sports cars.

He completed his first single-handed voyage in 1939, going to Norway and back. During the war he designed and worked in air-sea rescue craft. In 1944 he was blown up by a bomb in London and for a while thought he’d lose an arm. In 1950/51 he sailed both ways across the Atlantic single-handedly in Temptress (a 34ft gaff yawl, built in 1910 at Celenick on the Fal) . He wrote two books: ‘Single-handed Passage’ and ‘Temptress Returns’ about the voyages.

Whilst in New York he spotted Sea Wanderer lying derelict in the mud of the Hudson River. A 36ft wooden ketch, she had been built in Lubeck, Germany in 1911 by another CA member, Albert Bone. Edward bought her for $250 and used Temptress to tow her to a boat yard where he laid her up. Edward then sailed Temptress to UK and took a delivery job back to New York to fit Sea Wanderer out to fulfil his dream of sailing single-handed round the world. He was to do so at a leisurely pace: 12 years to cross his outward passage, 16 from start to finish, earning his living as he went. He circumnavigated without sponsorship, ship-to-shore radio, sat. nav. or life-raft. He wrote Voyage Alone about the first part of this trip.

In 1967 he met his wife, Clare, 31 years his junior. In ’68 they drove a Land Rover from England to Singapore and from there flew to rejoin Sea Wanderer in New Zealand. In ’69 their daughter Kate (a future Dingle Cup winner) was born and the same year Edward continued his solo circumnavigation with the family joining him in Portuguese Timor, Singapore, the Seychelles and finally the West Indies where he completed his voyage in 1973.

In 1974 Edward sold Sea Wanderer and bought Johanne Regina, a 69ft gaff-rigged ex-Baltic trader for the same money. Built in 1929, she had sunk in St John’s Harbour, Antigua six months before he spotted her. They spent the next 30 odd years restoring her, first sailing back to their palm-thatched hut in the Seychelles and then on to the Far East. They finally returned to Europe in 1985 and built a small house in Andorra though Edward continued to spend half the year aboard and Clare joined him for the summer. Finally in 2006, 85 years after his first sail, Edward decided, aged 91, to hang up the anchor. He sold Johanne to the City of Badalona in Spain as a sail-training ship.

Edward took up scuba diving at 65, windsurfing at 70, skiing at 75 and computers at 78. Now aged 92, he still skis in the winter and is working on his fourth book, this time about the South American leg of the voyage when he rounded Cape Horn from east to west.

CA