Professional Skipper Magazine from VIP Publications

BOOKS YACHTIES TELL THEIR YARNS The New Zealand yachtie Ross Bodle has spent his life around boats, not only sailing but designing and building them. He is probably best known for designing the New Zealand training ship Spirit of New Zealand and the superyacht Mari Cha III. His ebook, Sea Gypsies Down Under – a guide to life at sea (Mackay Ebooks, US$6.99, see smashwords.com) is a collection of interviews with cruising folk who share their own personal experiences. Some of them told frightful events while others had wonderfully relaxed voyages. There is also valuable information about storms, pirates, shootings, shipwrecks, man-overboard, diving experiences and shark attacks, plus helpful advice for those who want to go cruising offshore and are keen to avoid at least some of the pitfalls. A forward by Grant Dalton and interviews with the crew who accompanied the late Sir Peter Blake on the Seamaster add valuable insights. As an ebook, Sea Gypsies Down Under can be viewed on a Kindle, the Nook, the iPad and the Sony Reader, among others, or downloaded using an application or "app" from the web. GAIN THE MOST FROM THE GULF The chart-based guide New Zealand's Hauraki Gulf includes full-colour reproductions of portions of the official LINZ hydrographic charts and the Royal New Zealand Navy's leisure craft series. The accompanying text provides useful descriptions of anchorages as well as information about shore-side facilities, weather forecasts and local knowledge. As a cruising boatie the author, David Thatcher, is well qualified and gives the reader confident information that will be useful to both the leisure boatie and professional mariners. Published in a robust hardcover format with large colour plates throughout, this third updated edition (Captain Teach Press, $82) will find favour on board any cruising vessel. See www.boatbooks.co.nz AN INSIGHT INTO A FAMOUS LIFE On December 5, 2001, New Zealand's sporting and adventure hero Sir Peter Blake was killed by bandits at the mouth of the Amazon River. In this intimate account, Pippa Blake Journey, a private view on the 10th anniversary of Sir Peter Blake's Death (Penguin Group (NZ) $50) his wife Pippa offers an intensely personal account of their life together. Unpublished photographs from her personal albums, behind- the-scenes stories of Sir Peter's sailing adventures and Pippa's own journal entries and art provides a moving insight into a life shared with one of this country's greatest sporting legends. Those who followed his life and adventures will recognise Pippa, who says meeting Peter was like a bolt from the blue. "He walked into the Emsworth Sailing Club on a Friday night, a tall, shaggy-haired, blond and blue-eyed guy. I clapped eyes on him – I had never seen anyone like him – and was literally smitten. "His tales of dolphins, whales and albatross, icebergs and the Aurora Australia – I had never heard talk of such things, and was enchanted. I had never met anyone from the southern hemisphere. "I called him cobber when I first met him. The Aussie term did not go down very well at all, of course. That Peter was an adventurer and had been to all these wildly exotic places, I found simply wondrous." MAKE YOUR GARDEN GREEN As a seafarer come landlubber I found the second edition of The Tui New Zealand Vegetable Garden written by Sally Cameron to be a complete guide to growing vegetable and herbs in New Zealand. The book (Penguin Group, $50) contains all the essential gardening information you need, no matter what size garden you have. For beginners, it explains how to condition the soil, how and where to plant and harvesting tips. There is also a section on how to combat pests and diseases in order to build a healthy and thriving garden. It's got everything covered to ensure even the most bumbling of green fingers can enjoy the fruits of their labors with a high level of success. TIME TO TAKE STOCK OF FISHING We've been sold the idea that New Zealand has the best fisheries management in the world. Hook, Line and Blinkers by Gareth Morgan and Geoff Simmons, (Public Interest Publishing, $35) sorts the myths from the realities and finds such an accolade belongs only to part of our fishery. Morgan and Simmons launched an in-depth investigation into the state of New Zealand's fisheries resource and our supposedly world-leading management régime. Hook, Line and Blinkers is the result. Fishing is but one of the pressures our oceans face, but it's one that people – you and me – can readily influence. For it's not only the fishing industry that must confront the impacts of their fishing on the environment: recreational fishers must face up to our share of issues, too. And then, who cares. If the global fishery scene is so dire it poses a threat to the ocean's biodiversity and hence the ability of that ecosystem, then having a part of New Zealand's fishery managed according to best practice seems a little irrelevant. Like climate change, the state of the global fishery is a global issue. The book begins by giving some context of how oceans work and all the different factors that combine to produce a good fishing spot. It then looks at all of the impacts humankind has on the ocean in addition to fishing, which together threaten the ocean's delicate balance. With that in mind, we move on to fishing and find that, left unchecked, fishing is a classic Tragedy of the Commons which ultimately leads to too many fishers, mortgaged to the eyeballs with too much gear, chasing too few fish. It's an economic and ecological disaster that has been repeated all around the world, even here in New Zealand. Meanwhile, if we mean to ensure there are still fish in the sea tomorrow, we must begin to make ethical choices about what we buy and eat. Hook, Line and Blinkers will change how Kiwis think about fishing, whether you are sitting in Parliament, your dinghy or at your dinner table. January/February 2012 Professional Skipper 73

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