Ignorance Is Bliss - Sailing With Dad »

Ignorance is Bliss – Sailing with Dadis for everyone who has ever dreamed of traveling under canvas, driven solely by a gentle breeze and with the cheerful chuckle of water under the bow. These are not harrowing tales of blizzards on far-away oceans but rather the experiences of an ordinary family as it steers an erratic course from an English Midlands lake to the Caribbean Sea and from naiveté to a state of near-competence.

We are carried from the nostalgia of the post-WW2 scene and the gleam of varnished mahogany to the utilitarian glass-fiber boats of the present; through three generations of sailors, each of whom learns a little from his forebears.

Though at times improbable, these tales are all completely true. It will be a flinty reader indeed who does not let loose the occasional “Gordon Bennett” or “stone the crows” on learning of some of the predicaments awaiting innocents-afloat. This book does not belong in the “how to do it” section of the bookstore; indeed it probably belongs in a “how not to do it” section still to be devised. Yet there is wisdom here, if you will dig for it.

Richard Hansford is the author of The Doctor Factory, a book about the life of professors at a fictional offshore medical school named the Freedom University of the Caribbean (FUC), which has been well-received.