Time out from the day job – pic: Mike Mottl

Bio

One place to start the story is when you get loose from school or college, when you suddenly realise you now have to make all those choices for yourself, rather than have them set by parents, teachers, the exam system, etc, etc... In my case, I chose to travel...

After a summer in a sports equipment factory, loading rugby posts onto lorries, I had a working holiday visa for Australia and the cash to buy a one-way ticket to Sydney. Along with the - less than concrete career plan - that I’d travel and then write a book about the experience.

The stop-overs in the US and Hawaii were planned. The stop-over in New Zealand wasn’t – it came courtesy of an airline strike that re-routed the plane. But I stayed for six months and that began an enduring love affair with the place. I did eventually drag myself onto Australia and more or less back onto schedule – but schedules are pretty nebulous things when all you’ve got is a backpack full of dirty clothes, books, a notebook and a camera. After working up and down the east coast as kitchen-hand, fruit picker, warehouse man and sailing instructor, I hitched across the Nullarbor Desert to Perth. It was a year before the 1987 America’s Cup, and I talked my way into a job cleaning and painting the British team’s shore-base on the waterfront in Fremantle. But I’d already done plenty of dinghy sailing, both team racing with Nottingham University and sailing 420s with the British youth squad, and the degree course gave me a bluffers background in computers. So when illness and injury took its toll during the long winter training, I eased myself onto the sailing team as a navigator on the tune-up boat. I switched to a support role during the Louis Vuitton Cup, running the computer and data analysis systems.

Jamarella after the Fastnet in ‘89

And this is where the oscillations between professional sailboat racing and writing really started. I hadn’t given up on the travel book. Encouraged by the arrival from Auckland of a New Zealand Herald clipping with my first published travel story, I dragged the backpack out from under the bed and headed north as the Cup ended. The journey back to the UK went through Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, China, Tibet and Nepal and left me with some fantastic memories.

But by the time I got home there was an invite to sail with a British team at the 1987 Twelve Metre Worlds in Sardinia (then the America’s Cup class). After that, I couldn’t refuse an offer to go and work for Sailmath, the manufacturers of the tactical racing computers used aboard the Cup boats. That in turn led to sailing the Maxi yacht circuit in 1988 in the Caribbean, Hawaii and San Francisco.

The following year was even better (except for the weather) - winning the Admiral’s Cup with a British team as navigator aboard the top individual boat, Jamarella. But all those carefully kept notes and travel diaries were fast falling into the awkward limbo of not being recent enough to be contemporary, but too recent to be social history. So I started to think about a novel instead, and I had an idea. The Defector grew out of that idea – a game of the Prisoner’s Dilemma played for life and death – but it was 1996 before it was finished and first published in the UK (as The Delivery).

In the meantime I’d published the first three of five technical sailing books and carved out a career as a freelance journalist with material appearing in magazines and newspapers worldwide. But the sailing wasn’t going so smoothly – the ambition of navigating a British boat in the America’s Cup was foundering on the absence of any British participation in the event (or any professional yacht racing). A short Olympic campaign in the 470 in 1992 had left me with debts that I still get into a cold sweat thinking about. So I’d turned to the Admiral’s Cup and the circuit of similar events – Kenwood Cup, Sardinia Cup – and sailed with Italian, Japanese, Greek and American teams.

Then came the internet – which for me started with the 1997-98 Whitbread Race and an offer from the race website’s publisher, Quokka, to write a daily race commentary. Rick Tomlinson also asked me to write the accompanying text for his book about Team EF’s two competing boats. The immediacy of the internet was a revelation, and when Paul Cayard and the boys on EF Language went on to win the race, it didn’t do the book sales any harm either.

Singapore docks on a trip to research
The Wrecking Crew

But all of this was a massive distraction from the second novel, and by the time I finished The Wrecking Crew in late-1998 any momentum gained from the debut was gone. And since it was a sequel, that wasn’t good – the publisher rejected it and I went back to sailing. I was lucky enough to hook up with Vasco Vascotto and his Italian team aboard Merit Cup and we had a great year in 1999, winning the Worlds and coming top boat in our class at the Admiral’s Cup.

In the background, the internet was gathering steam and by the time we’d finished the ’99 sailing season there were at least five sailing websites in various stages of gestation in the UK, and they all needed writers and editors.

Some of these were proper jobs, the kind I’d never had – salary, benefits, share options. It seemed like a good time to give that life a go, pack up the travelling and the uncertainty of freelancing. The boom and bust warning signs were already there, but the experience I’d gain was too good to miss and so I took a job to launch and edit madforsailing.com.

We’d been going for five months and were nudging towards fifty thousand users when an email arrived from the OneWorld America’s Cup Challenge with the kind of offer that you can’t refuse. Two months later I’d pulled the bags back out, packed up and moved to Seattle – once again a navigator with a Cup team. James Boyd took over madforsailing.com, which went on to win the British Marine Industry Federation’s Media Award that year, and which he now publishes as thedailysail.com.

But when OneWorld decamped to Auckland to train for the 2003 America’s Cup, I saw an opportunity to inject some life back into my moribund career as a novelist. I contacted HarperCollins in New Zealand to see if they’d be interested in republishing The Delivery during the America’s Cup - when it might have more chance of gaining that crucial media and public interest that can make or break books from new authors.

They were and it did – renamed The Defector, it was much more commercially successful second time around. And this time I had the follow-up book ready to go. The Wrecking Crew came out eighteen months later and sold more than three times as many as the debut. Unfortunately, I've yet to finish a third that I'm happy with - and happy means getting it published in the UK as well as NZ and Australia...

Meanwhile, I did short stints with both Luna Rossa and Emirates Team New Zealand ahead of the 2007 America's Cup, went to the Falklands and South Georgia with Adele and Rick Tomlinson, wrote a website commentary for the aforementioned Cup - tackbytack.com - and if I knew what was coming next, I'd tell you....

Latest Book

The second edition of Shooting H2O - Rick Tomlinson's photos with my text - is out now.