Rescue and Recovery

Publisher: SeafarerBooks, 1997 £ 8.95 .

Long-distance sailors have many tales to tell beyond the simple facts of their voyaging. You're keen to hear what motivated the writer in the first place to join this most courageous élite, then how they kept going, practically and spiritually. Yet from Knox-Johnston to Goss, the achievements are massive but all too often sailing writing is depressingly two-dimensional. By contrast Rescue and Recovery, although the story of a cruise, could hardly be further from a padded-out logbook.

Frank Mulville, who died in autumn 1997, vividly articulates passages under sail, his philosophy mingling with almost tangible evocations: "Iskra was inspired by speed - wind on the quarter, sheets free, sails pregnant with wind… every part of her giving its all towards her onward progress… With the wind free, we can drive her as hard as her gear will stand - we are the masters of her."

The cover pictures Iskra amid surf, bowsprit run in, pitching violently to a bar-taut anchor cable. A windswept and lifejacketed couple stand disconsolately in the cockpit. If you look closely the bulkier figure has his arm reassuringly around his companion's waist. The story itself is dramatic enough: constant adverse weather forced Wendy and Frank (by any standards an adventurous spirit) into a decision to sail from Spain to Scotland for the winter, rather than home to Essex up-channel. In Ardminish Bay a mooring rope chafed through and Iskra drove onto a rocky lee shore in a gale. Mortally damaged, she was only salvaged at all by dint of superhuman effort by the Mulvilles and a selfless group of local people.

The narrative is always interesting, often gripping, and complimented by many photos whose rather grey-on-grey presentation was my only criticism of the book. But beyond the retelling of remarkable events, by the end of this absorbing book Recovery comes to mean healing and renewal. You have shared in a cruise which became a spiritual journey for Frank and his intuitive and steadfast wife Wendy. This book is further evidence that Mulville was that rare thing, a cruising novelist, now lost forever. - RC.