Review
This nautical desk diary and calendar is an ever-growing encyclopedia of marine fact, fiction and folklore. Entertaining and informative, every year the calendar is updated, making it a keeper well after the year is over and done. --Sailing Magazine
Peter Spectre's nautical miscellany is delightfully digestible. Each left-hand page has a selection of marine information and highlighted notes from past nautical adventures famous, infamous, and obscure. The right-hand pages are weekly day planners. Each day provides a brief note of a significant nautical event that occurred on that date along with plenty of white space for noting appointments, birthdays, anniversaries, and so on. --Good Old Boat
There are, of course, only two consolations for getting a year older and Peter Spectre s wonderful week-to-view mariner s diary is one of them. Each spread has the days of the week on the right hand page and for every single day of the year, there s an anniversary of something-or-other: January 1st, for example, notes the first publication of Jane s Fighting Ships in 1897; December 31st, the very last day of WWII, Loran-A nav system in 1980... and so on. Each of the left-hand pages has a crisp old line-art illustration with a miscellany of short quotations and longer pieces: for the week in October in which I write this, an account of the launch Narcissus encountering a sea-serpent in 1903; a listing showing the water resistance of various marine glues; a little bit of Lear Edward not King and this from George Putz: The notion that modern boat construction materials are immortal is baldly stupid. Everything breaks and is eventually thrown away and even morons these days come to understand there is no away. --Watercraft
About the Author
Peter H. Spectre, a renowned writer with a lifelong appreciation of the sea and its traditions, is the former editor of WoodenBoat magazine and the current editor of Maine Boats & Harbors.