Princess P Goes to School

Sailing came into Barbara's life when she was a young girl. Aged nine, with her father and brother, she built a flat pack Heron dinghy and spent the next six years sailing and racing her off the beach at Worthing, the town where she was born. The challenge and pleasure of sailing has been a perennial thread running through the six decades of her life since then.Although she started sailing big boats in her twenties, the charm and immediacy of dinghy sailing is as dear to her today as it was back then, and with her husband, Rob, she still sails the dinghy she helped build all those years ago.At eighteen she embarked on her first voyage with the Sail Training Association (STA), and many years later became a watch leader for the renamed Tall Ships Youth Trust (TSYT), a volunteer role she undertook for a decade.While raising her daughter, Emily, by herself, Barbara graduated with an Open University Arts Degree and qualified as a middle school teacher, before transitioning to a self-employed driving instructor, allowing her to take long periods off work to go big ship sailing. Barbara began her sailing blog, blog.mailasail.com/zoonie, in 2014, on which she is still active, and she has written travel pieces for the likes of Yachting Monthly, Yachting World, Sailing Today and Practical Boat Owner. In 2015 Barbara and Rob retired and having spent the two previous years planning their circumnavigation on Zoonie, their 40-foot Oyster 406, they were both ready to set off. The first half of this six-year voyage is documented in A Tale of Two Yachts, her debut book.Now back on solid ground, Barbara and Rob live in Dorset, South West England, though they look forward to many more adventures aboard Zoonie in the years to come.