Coarse Cruising

The Art of Coarse Cruising by Michael Green
First published 1976 by Hutchinson & Co.
Illustrated is the First Edition

Another of my favourites, a gift for helping a friend move his boat from the Thames to Devon, a real Coarse adventure! The sailing in this book is more adventurous than the “boating about in muck” of Coarse Sailing, and in an ideal world the titles should be swapped round.

Whatever the disaster, as a last resort one can always say “We were seized by a Giant Hand”.
The history of the Giant Hand is interesting. In the days when I sailed the Norfolk Broads regularly, there used to be a particularly vicious current just beyond the remains of the old swing bridge at the entrance to Breydon Water (now removed). Often we had to go into the stays to negotiate the bridge, and inevitably the boat would then be swirled to one side and piled up on the mud at the side of the channel. The first time it happened it was so sudden that we described it as “being seized by a Giant Hand”. The phrase stuck and is now accepted amongst my friends as a standard explanation of anything that goes wrong. Nobody believes it, of course, but it sounds nice.