#000042
Classic Boat Seamanship
Martin Tregoning
A practical manual for handling traditional boats — the gaff riggers, luggers, and other older craft whose ways the modern sailing manual tends to ignore. Martin Tregoning covers the seamanship specific to classic rigs, where the gear and the vocabulary alike come from an older world (the book cheerfully includes a glossary for terms like baggywrinkle, bumkin, snotter, and truss). It is a hands-on guide rather than a nostalgia piece: how these boats actually want to be sailed, rigged, and cared for. For the traditional-boat sailor, or anyone drawn to the craft and language of working sail, it is a knowledgeable and genuinely useful companion.
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The book
Written by Martin Tregoning and published in 1992 by Adlard Coles Nautical, the venerable British nautical imprint. It is a comprehensive guide to sailing traditional rigs — the handling, rigging, and seamanship that classic craft require and that general sailing texts, oriented to modern Bermudan-rigged yachts, largely skip.
Its charm and use
Part of its appeal is the vocabulary it preserves: a glossary runs through the wonderful, half-forgotten language of working sail — baggywrinkle, bumkin, jigger, snotter, truss — terms that are also practical knowledge, each naming a piece of gear or a technique. The book treats the old ways as living skills rather than museum pieces.
How to read it
As a working handbook for a particular and devoted world, the traditional- and classic-boat revival. Its value is durable precisely because the boats and their handling do not change.
For more context
The wider Adlard Coles nautical library; and Tom Cunliffe's books on traditional rigs and hand-reef-and-steer seamanship.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Martin Tregoning
- Publisher
- Adlard Coles Nautical
- Place of publication
- London
- Year
- 1992
- Edition
- First edition (1992)
- ISBN
- 0-7136-3606-8
- Format
- Hardcover
- Shelf
- Maritime
- Location
- Maine