Eric Forsyth // Sailing Legend

On the Wind Sailing

Andy Schell

Sports, Wilderness, Places & Travel, Society & Culture

4.8 • 593 Ratings

🗓️ 20 January 2015

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

#85. Eric Forsyth, legendary ocean voyager with over 300,000 sea miles and whose visited both Antarctica & Spitsbergen on his Westsail 42, joins the podcast! Andy and Eric chat about his days in the 1950s flying the first fighter jets with the Royal Air Force, how Eric got into sailing, navigating on Celestial only in the Newport-Bermuda Race in the 1970s and what it's like to endure a 75-knot gale in the Southern Ocean.

Eric is a very humble man with extraordinary achievements beneath his keel, and bumps along the road in his life. "I have no regrets," he says about it all. Eric's now going on 83, and is planning on going back to Fiona this spring to sail, well, who knows where. Thanks to Eric for this inspiring conversation! Read all about Eric and his travels on yachtfiona.com.

Want to go ocean sailing with Andy? Book a berth on Sojourner, Serenity or a soon-to-be-announced Swan at 59-north.com/events.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, this is Anna Viner's live from Sweden.
0:02.8	Welcome back to the 59 North Sailing podcast with your host, Andy Shell.
0:07.0	Enjoy the show.
0:08.7	Greetings, greetings, and welcome back to 59 degrees north.
0:11.5	I'm your host, Andy Shell, and this is episode number 85.
0:15.7	Big thanks to a returning sponsor of ours, Weems and Plath.
0:19.7	Weems and Plath was integral to the success of my latest celestial navigation workshop this past weekend in Annapolis. We used all Weems and Plath plotting tools. We had a couple Weems Sextens, C-Path Sextens there as well. And Peter Trogden of Weems and Plath actually came by and said hello to the class, which is a very nice greeting
0:37.8	from him. He also loaned us our coffee maker for the weekend. So thanks again for Williams and Plath
0:42.6	support this weekend at the Celestial Nav course. Weems and Plath started in 1919, and they're still
0:51.1	located at Chesapeake Bay in Annapolis where it all began.
1:05.2	They're still committed to supplying the world with the finest nautical products and navigational instruments available while maintaining the high standards of service that have distinguished weems and plath from its inception.
1:08.4	So check them out, weems dash plath.com. I'm also going to be having a bunch of weems and plath products that I've
1:12.7	curated off their website on 59-north.com on the shop page. So look for that shortly. And thanks again
1:20.1	to Weems and Plath for sponsoring this episode of the podcast. Also, thanks to all my new friends
1:25.7	that I made at the Celestial course this past weekend in Annapolis.
1:29.0	I know some of you listen to this, so that's you guys, Carl, Jake, Mike C, Mike B, Ed, Greg, Jorge, Mitch, Riege, and Jimmy.
1:39.1	So thanks so much for you guys supporting what I'm doing with Celestial, and I hope you enjoyed the weekend as much as I did.
1:45.4	Actually, you might be interested, anybody interested in Celestial.
1:48.3	The chat today with Eric Forsyth looked a lot at Celestial Navigation.
1:52.4	He was a navigator on a lot of the Newport Bermuda races in the 70s and talked about what that was actually like doing it entirely on Celestial.
2:00.0	If you missed the course this weekend and want to take one, I'm going to plan one for late September 2015, so next fall.
2:06.6	So keep your eye on 59-north.com slash workshops to see when the next Celestial Workshop is available.
	...

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