A teacher who spent 171 days sailing a wooden Mirror dinghy from Romania to Italy has advised would-be adventurers following in his wake: “Don’t do it.”
Former Ellesmere College deputy housemaster Sandy Mackinnon, 60, who now teaches at Timbertop in Victoria, Australia, “nearly came to grief” a dozen times while coastal hopping from Sulina, in the Black Sea, to Venice via the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits, Aegean, Ionian and Adriatic seas.
Sailing into the historic waterside city on 22 September was every bit as fantastic as he had imagined, yet the amateur sailor said: “Once I started I was determined to finish but there were 11 or 12 times where I thought I’m
