Author(s): Nick Thorpe

Travel

With his characteristically humorous and self-deprecating style, celebrated travel writer Nick Thorpe charts his journey around both known and unknown parts of Scotland's waterways. In late May 2003 thousands converged on Edinburgh for the International Festival of the Sea. With this as the inspirational starting gun he embarks the following week on his own voyage, a 1000-mile round trip through the canals, lochs and coastal waters of Scotland. Starting only yards from his front door, he uses any and every vessel available - from a canoe to a fishing trawler, from a square-rigged sailing ship to a nuclear submarine. Along the way he stops to explore and meet the folk who lie at the heart of this odyssey: sailors and visionaries, boaties and eccentrics, nautical nomads with sea legs who prefer a stretched horizon to a warm hearth. Nick's rules are simple: relying on those he meets to help him on each successive voyage, he travels only where he is in range of water, and use only transport which floats. First published 2006.