The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow
A. J. Mackinnon
Language: English
Pages: 298
ISBN: B00VAZ5T2S
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Truly hilarious books are rare. Even rarer are those based on real events. Join AJ Mackinnon, your charming and eccentric guide, on an amazing voyage in a boat called Jack de Crow. Equipped with his cheerful optimism and a pith helmet, this Australian Odysseus in a dinghy travels from the borders of North Wales to the Black Sea - 4,900 kilometres over salt and fresh water, under sail, at the oars, or at the end of a tow-rope - through twelve countries, 282 locks and numerous trials and adventures, including an encounter with Balkan pirates.Along the way he experiences the kindness of strangers, gets very lost, and perfects the art of slow travel.
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Standing by itself with bare fields on either side. Along with the warm light that poured from its windows into the night there came the homely buzz of voices and the clink of glasses that betokened a pub. In fact, as I peered at the building’s frontage, there did seem to be a sign of sorts, and a name in German. This was clearly the German equivalent of the Red Lion or the Fox and Hounds, though here it would be the Two-Headed Eagle or the King of Prussia. At any rate it would have a phone and I.
Such as ‘No, that’s a screw you’re holding. It needs to be inserted with a screwdriver, not a hammer,’ or ‘Please never use my best chisel as a screwdriver again or I’ll drown you.’ In the next-door workshop was a blacksmith, and he made me a crutch, a thin pole of iron with a horseshoe-shaped piece of steel on the top. This slotted neatly into the pintel holes where the rudder fit-ted and would support the end of the boom; the boom then could act like a tent’s ridgepole for the awning. The.
Sky. With dusk, the wind died to nothing and a consultation of the map showed that I had two choices. I could either row back upstream the mile or so to Pangbourne or row the six miles down to Reading. Heaven knows why, but I chose the latter option. In fact, I found on my whole trip a deep, irrational reluctance ever to retrace my route, even by so much as half a mile and even when the benefits of doing so were clear. It stemmed, I think, from the feeling that this trip was in some sense a.
By the melancholy jester Jack Point. And so too, my own Jack was singing his own lap-lapping melody as we crept down the last dull-eyed miles between the warehouses of Wapping and Bermondsey to Greenland Pier and the lock entrance to Surrey Docks. There a young lock-keeper took me up the lock, opened a swing bridge between one compound and another, and I rowed through into the placid waters of the Surrey Docks marina. There was Ilanga Umfula, Tim and Babette’s smartly painted narrowboat in royal.
Long bar of tan shingle and a seawall. What is more, the afternoon breeze was dropping and I had to take to the oars again. Now I’m not stupid. I know about tides. I’ve read the cautionary tales about rips and treacherous currents, small vessels being swept out to sea and the deceptive nature of coastal tides. But of all the writers who have dealt with the subject of tides and small boats, no one has seen fit to point out a crucial aspect of the phenomenon: its undetectable nature. You see,.