The Howells maritime wanderings date from an apprenticeship served with Alfred Holt & Company, sailing out of the port of Liverpool, and after three foreign-going voyages (West Africa, New York, South America) aboard the steam ship Troilus, being lucky enough to be transferred to Ascanius, a merchant vessel that was called into service as an armed depot ship during the World War 2 invasion of Normandy.

She didn't last long, being blown up while anchored off the beach head; fortunately didn't sink, but was towed to Southampton where the dead were buried, the injured hospitalised, and the necessary extensive repairs carried out. The next posting involved a move to the Far East, ferrying ammunition and other military equipment needed for the Burma campaign, and after the war was over, spending several years aboard what were known at the time as tramps, picking up cargoes wherever they could be found, mostly in European waters, but including North American ports.

A determined attempt was then made to swallow the anchor; an exercise that proved difficult to accomplish, with the failure leading to a succession of sailing dinghies and the acquisition of a Scandinavian Folkboat. This vessel, launched in 1958 as Eira, after the owner's wife, was sailed in the 1960 single-handed trans-Atlantic race (invited to take part by Lt Colonel H. G.Hasler) and thus played a small part in helping to establish what has become a major event in the international yachting calendar.

The second trans-Atlantic race took place in 1964 with Howells sailing Akka, and although coming third, behind Tabarly and Chichester, this position could have been improved if the boat hadn't been rammed at the start, and badly damaged by a harbour launch down to the gunnels with happy-go-lucky sightseers, coxed by a smiling individual who was apparently completely indifferent to the International Rules for the Prevention of Collisions at Sea.

The next significant sailing experience involved a stint in the Caribbean, as the skipper of the Yankee Clipper, a staysail schooner that offered vacations to 70 passengers, mostly enthusiastic Americans who had been seduced by salacious tales of barefoot adventure which provided sand, sea, sun, sauce, and sex (not necessarily in that order) because, on that once elegant but now defiantly aging old hooker, there was a whole barrel of help-yourself rum, perched precariously on the poop.

Returned to Wales, the still smiling but now greying old dog earned a living as a stringer for both the BBC and national papers, while at the same time helping his wife run a riding stable. Naturally enough, because involvement with farming, horses, inshore fishing, and a succession of restaurants had provided the other absorbing interest in what was turning out to be a far from boring life.

This image was enhanced by participation in the 1976 single-handed trans-Atlantic race, involving the construction of identical vessels (Unibrass Brython and Fromstock Filius) in order that he and his surviving son could become the first family entry in the history of the event, in boats they had built themselves; which proved a step too far at the time, because ill-health brought about a near-fatal accident to the old man, with a subsequent tail-between-legs return to the U.K. while the other competitors, and Philip, continued the race to the 'States.

This type of failure, after an enormous personal effort, is difficult to face if it's judged to be demeaning, with the outcome being that boats and the sea became anathema (defined in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary as … an accursed thing), and while fits of clinical depression are perhaps not all that difficult to recognise, they are rarely easily dealt with and it took Dr Penn, the much loved, mildly eccentric and occasionally outrageous West Wales practitioner to advise his patient, with a smile, that it was … 'time he got off his arse, and did a bit of sailing'. In other, equally well-meaning words, that he should stop mooning about and take the bull by the balls, which is rough old bosun-speak for just about the same thing ...

What transpired is set out in ...

Up That Particular Creek

ISBN 0 9542732 0 6

... a book that certainly lives up to its title.