New Reads: Under Wide and Starry Skies

Jenny and Nick Coghlan

May 14, 2026

If you own a boat, chances are that you’ve wondered what it would be like to throw in your job, cast off and sail over the horizon. BC – based sailor Nick Coghlan did just that in 1985. On and off, he and wife Jenny have been cruising ever since in two successive 27-footers and now have 70,000 miles behind them.

In Under Wide and Starry Skies – Fifty Sailing Destinations in Seas Less Travelled, Nick tells vivid stories of some of his favourite places. They include fabled Robinson Crusoe Island; Napoleon’s prison of Saint Helena; and Palmerston atoll, where all fifty inhabitants have the same surname. The least travelled of all are Venezuela’s Cayo Herradura, now patrolled by Predator drones, and Crocodile Island, on the Blue Nile near the battered capital of war-torn Sudan.

Closer at hand are five Canadian destinations. In BC Nick takes us to snug Hollywood Passage on the west coast of Vancouver Island; through Nakwakto Rapids (which run at 16 knots) to Summers Bay; and to the eerie abandoned village at S’G̱ang Gwaay (Haida Gwaii). Off the St. Lawrence, we visit Anse aux Petites Iles in the Saguenay fjord and – in Lake Superior – Michipicoten Island.

Each chapter is introduced with a story, followed by a beautifully hand-drawn sketch of the anchorage and an information box.

Here Nick describes arrival at Quebec Harbour, on Michipicoten Island:

The island’s name is an Ojibwe word meaning Big Bluffs. Here at last we came across a few more people: a handful of sports fishermen in their runabouts, camping in grassy meadows above the beach.

One morning a damp, fog blanketed the bay; it was a reminder that summer was half-gone. Bob, the skipper of Boomalong – an old tug he’d converted into a pleasure boat – invited us to warm our hands over coffee in his snug little wheelhouse. He’d been coming here to fish for twenty years or so and in real life was a university lecturer.

‘The people we call Ojibwe,’ he told us, ‘actually call themselves Anishinaabe. It means The True People, I’m told, or Beings Made From Nothing. To them this was always a mysterious place, that kept disappearing in the mist when they approached by canoe. They said it was the work of Gitchi Manitou, the Great Creator…Plenty of the old folks still believe.”

On Haida Gwaii, an archipelago of over 150 islands off the northern British Columbia coast, a native guide shows Nick and Jenny around the old village by the water:

Here on a pole, with his large ears and prominent cheeks, is Bear; here is Sea-Wolf (half bear, half orca); here is Orca with his great fin; and Beaver, who even has a stick to gnaw on. On one pole are the remains of a small copper shield. This means that here was buried a chief, whose status was measured not by the extent of his wealth, but by how many shields or other trading goods he gave away at ceremonial occasions (‘potlatches’). The mortuary poles will, by decree from the elders, not be raised again when they fall; neither will they be in any way restored.

          David tells the old myths with passion and enthusiasm, as if they were undisputed fact.  For a few moments, you suspend disbelief: after all, why not?

*****

Under Wide and Starry Skies – Fifty Sailing Destinations in Seas Less Travelled is published by Bloomsbury (UK) and is available at all the usual outlets.