Alex Stone looks at tempting onboard reading options for this summer.

NEW BOOKS

NEW ZEALAND’S NORTHLAND COAST FOURTH EDITION
BY DAVID THATCHER

YACHTIES AND LAUNCH-OWNERS of Te Ika a Maui! If, like my shipmate Gordon, the yacht chandlery store is your church, then you might call this your indispensable bible. And it’s back on the shelves of Boat Books in a fourth edition. New Zealand’s Northland Coast is a valuable asset to safety and practicality along the coast and in amongst the many delightful bays and inlets of our special cruising destination. The combination of large-format actual charts, overlaid with additional author’s tips (pivotal waypoints, worthy anchorages, shipwrecks worth exploring etc) work really well, in combination with photos of approaches and channels and the surrounding landscape. It’s also a valuable modern companion to the classic Pickmere’s Atlas.

BOATS OF THE LAKE
BY LAKE ROTOITI CLASSIC AND WOODEN BOAT ASSOCIATION
SELF-PUBLISHED, NZ, 2021

IT’S A COLOURFUL (in every sense of the word) annual festival that has been regularly reported on by this magazine – the Classic and Wooden Boat Annual Parade on Lake Rotoiti. This book, conceived and produced during the Covid lockdowns (at least someone did something useful!) is a celebration of 25 years of the event, which has grown from strength to strength – and never lost its sense of humour along the way either. Excerpts from the Skippers’ Instructions, 2003:

1. The parade this year will proceed rather slower than before and will at times actually stop to let slower entrants keep up. Please keep behind the lead boat at all times
2. Any attempt to land on the beach before the lead boat will be met by three of the biggest beach marshals props from the Chiefs front-row armed with 12g shotguns and electric cattle prods, so don’t try it!

Boats large and small, classic and quirky are featured on the pages in fine colour pictures – portraits, actually. Each has an informative short bio rich with boating’s history. The names of the boats alone read as a delightful litany of our cultural heritage too. Some examples: Aroha, Alberta, Geese Fly in Pairs, Shady Lady, M V Snark, Maimai, Rere Moana, Maggie May, Jaffa, Rambler, Norma Jeane, Happy Days, Ruru, Romany, Harp ‘n’ Atom etc.

This wee gem of a book also serves as a visual record contribution to the pivotal part of our cultural heritage that is old boats – and our inordinate love of them.

MAINTENANCE IN EXOTIC LOCATIONS
BY ALLEN HOGAN
SELF-PUBLISHED, NZ, 2023

RICHLY-ILLUSTRATED with colour pictures of people (and donkeys!), plus many Google Earth maps showing sea and coastal passages. Maintenance in Exotic Locations is more an absorbing travelogue than a maintenance manual – though some of that does naturally creep in too. The book is a record of a Kiwi family’s circumnavigation aboard Sojourner, a well-founded Peterson 44 monohull sloop-rigged yacht. Allen and his family would be extraordinarily interesting onboard guests: he holds private and commercial flying pilots licences, and a private helicopter pilot’s licence; has been an aerobatics championship flyer and flying instructor; is an organiser of the War Birds over Wanaka airshow; had established the first boutique winery in Marlborough; and he’s a skier and musician, playing the flute in an orchestra, jazz quartet and chamber music groups. Allen and his wife Joyce could keep you in yarns in your saloon for ever. Failing that, their book could do it in place of them too!

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE PACIFIC
BY JEREMY BLACK
ROBINSON PUBLISHERS, UK, 2023

HARD TO IMAGINE such a huge subject being fitted into such a modest-sized book. But given his experience with other titles in the series, Brief Histories of the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, Medieval Warfare etc, author Jeremy Black does admirably. Beyond its headlong chronological sequencing, the book is enlivened by super-interesting snippets in boxes. Like, for instance, ‘Hoaxing Formosa’ about a 1703 con-man in London named George Psalanaazar who claimed to be indigenous to Formosa (Taiwan) and to have ‘invented’ a Formosan language. It’s a book that’s both brief (light on board) and big (in subject matter). And has piqued my curiosity in Black’s other title, The World of James Bond.