Riding the waves of change
Mike Hopkins, 64, began sailing in 2009. He plans to sail solo around Britain next summer
Beached, stranded and desolate in Abergele. With a stick in hand, I shouted and screamed her name as I carved ‘Mum’ into the sand, which was moist with tears and sea salt.
It was 0400, a grey morning in April. It was my 50th birthday. At midnight mum had left the ‘party’, as I held her hand in the gloom of a hospice room.
Without knowing it then, that’s where my affair with sailing and the sea would begin, on that beach on the North Wales coast, 13
