Sailing and Music 2013 and 2014

We are now at the planning stage of a series of weekly music workshop/sailing cruises during June/July /August 2014. Negotiations are taking place to secure the right vessel for the job and we hope to know where we stand by the end of June 2013.

We ran a pilot (please forgive the pun!) cruise in august last year on the pilot cutter Pegasus courtesy of the Island Trust which was great fun and very successful. The basic model is to spend five days at a time sailing a traditionally rigged vessel in west country waters with two hours of informal music workshops each day lead by Phil. Into this basic idea, we introduced two extra workshops with outside tutors. In this instance, songwriter Reg Mueross (Songwriting) and Neil Davie from the cornish band Dalla (Mandoline/bazouki and cornish music) These workshops were for all comers. We had in this ships company, two singer/guitarists, a fiddler, a mandoline player, and english concertina player, and three people who did a bit of singing. It worked very well. We will consider specialising after we’ve looked at the volume of enquiries for next year and who they re from.

The cruises will run out of Plymouth on a weekly basis. Embarkation is at teatime on a sunday and, weather permitting, will involve setting sail mid evening to incorpoate a night sail. Cruises return to Plymouth the following friday between lunchtime and teatime.

The cruises start from Sunday 1st of June and run every week until the end of August.

The working crew of the boat are the Skipper, the Mate, and Phil. Participants can fully engage in the sailing of the vessel and will receive expert instruction.

Anyone who likes the sound of this should register their interest now. We may be using two different vessels, one with five berths and one with twelve

Of more immediate interest now, We have just been given two weeks of access to Pegasus. (Phil’s favorite ship and the one he did Tall Ships on three years ago)

There will be two cruises this summer.

  • August 11th-16th (Out of Plymouth)
  • September 1st-6th (Out of Portsmouth/Southampton)

There are up to 8 berths available for each cruise and the cost is £650 per head for the august trip and £700 per head for the September trip.

If you’re interested, please drop us a line – vicky@firebrandmusic.co.uk, if you can include your phone number, email address and the trip you are interested in that would be great.

Thanks. Phil Beer and the Folk-Boat team.