Australia the Hard Way

David Pyle was born to sailing parents, and started sailing himself as plump three-year-old ballast in his father's eighteen-foot clinker boat. He was given a reclaimed (having sunk) ten-foot dinghy on his eleventh birthday, became an avid reader of Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons tales, and later cruised and camped with school friends in Langstone and Chichester harbours. After a brief spell in the Army he became an instructor in sailing and rock climbing in North Wales, then relocated to teach sailing at the Calshot Activity Centre in Hampshire, from where he and a colleague crossed the English Channel by Wayfarer dinghy. He designed and built Atlantis, a twenty-seven-foot ketch, in which he took part in the 1968 Observer Single-handed Trans-Atlantic Race (OSTAR). He fitted out his Drascombe Lugger Hermes in 1968/9 and on return from Australia built a career in sailing instruction and yacht delivery, before joining Princess Yachts (then called Marine Projects) in 1984, retiring as Sales Director in 2016.