East Coast Branch Notices

75th Anniversary - Service of Thanksgiving

Sat 30 October 2010 5pm at St Mary's Parish Church 7pm at Swallowtail Resturant, Burnham Yacht Haven

All welcome.

Details very soon from Hon Sec

Service will be followed by a semi formal dinner at the Swallowtail, Burnham Yacht Harbour where our guest speaker will be Dick Durham YM News Editor

Dick was taught how to hand, reef and steer by his father, the late Richard Stephens Durham, himself the son of a master mariner who started as a boy on a Cape Horn windjammer. As a lad Dick explored the creeks and rivers of Essex, Kent and Suffolk in a collection of dinghies and dayboats.

When he left school he signed on as mate of the Thames sailing barge Cambria and delivered the last cargo under sail alone with Bob Roberts whose biography he went on to write (The Last Sailorman). Later he wrote about passages made up to the Dutch Frisian Islands in his engineless cutter Almita for YM. He described his East Coast cruises in On & Offshore, Cruising the Thames and the East Coast. He now sails a Contessa 32, Minstrel Boy, down Channel and across to France, Belgium and Holland. On pal's boats he has cruised Brittany, the Channel Islands, across the Bay of Biscay as far as Belle Isle and up to Norway, Sweden and the Shetland Islands.

He wrote the biography of former YM editor Maurice Griffiths (The Magician of the Swatchways) and was commissioned to write the centenary history of the Sussex Yacht Club (Where the River Meets the Sea). Dick worked as a journalist in Fleet Street for 20 years before joining YM in March 2001. Married with two daughters and a son, he lives in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex

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