Book description
The hilarious true story of an amateur boating adventure.
Yacht racing. A world of privilege and money. Beautiful women,
bronzed men, and Simon le Bon explaining that he used to be in a band.
It's not like that for everyone. Somewhere much, much further down
the ladder it all looks very different. As a teenager, Michael
Hutchinson raced tiny plywood dinghies on Belfast Lough, amid shoals
of sewage-eating jellyfish. For him, sailing became the kind of
obsession that often as not ends with a psychiatric intervention.
Turning pro was his only dream.
Then, at the age of eighteen, driven to despair by his own
unremitting mediocrity, he gave up. But he never stopped dreaming
about it - what was he missing out on? How good or bad had he really
been? Had it really been a wasted youth? At last, fifteen years later,
he went back.
Missing the Boat is the story of his comeback season, on the
South Coast of England, in Ireland, and in the glamorous resorts of
the Mediterranean. It's about the yachts, the people, the regattas,
and just what it was like to dive back into a world that had become
entirely alien.
Michael Hutchinson won the Best First Book at the British Sports
Book Awards.
Michael Hutchinson became a full-time cyclist in 2000 after becoming
disillusioned with an academic career. Over the following six years he
has won more than twenty national titles, and the gold medal in the
Masters' Pursuit World Championships. He is now a writer and journalist
(and cyclist) and lives in south London. His book on the hour cycling
record,
The Hour
, was published by Yellow Jersey in paperback in 2007. He is now a
writer and journalist and lives in Cambridge.
