Quality Time?

Published to celebrate the life of Mike Peyton, 'the world's greatest yachting cartoonist', this second edition features personal tributes from some 12 other successful and well-known sailors (including Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, Sir Ben Ainslie and Tom Cunliffe). They all recognise Mike's observational talent and comment on how sailors see themselves (or their friends) in his cartoons. Along with 80 of his incomparable cartoons, Mike Peyton recounts how he became a yachting cartoonist and his fifty years of sailing. So as well as chuckling at the cartoons themselves there is the opportunity to learn from Peyton's 50 years of experience of sailing different boats, meeting a variety of sailors, and getting into - and out of - some truly hilarious situations.

Mike Peyton lied about his age to join the Army at the start of the Second World War. He spent much of the war in a prisoner of war camp, but escaped to join and fight with the Russian Red Army (told in his memoir An Average War). Mike began sketching as a boy and, after the war, trained at Manchester Art School. He also discovered boating, spending his wedding night camping besides the Thames in London, having got there by canoe! He worked as a freelance cartoonist for New Scientist, Yachting Monthly and Practical Boat Owner, to name but a few. Mike has had over 18 books of yachting cartoons published and in 2016 was dubbed 'the Picasso of sailing' by the Yachting Journalist Association. He passed away in late January 2017, a few days after his 96th birthday.