Anni Hill

Annie Hill spent a good while here in Cape Town while she and her then husband peter were builing the catamaran Paper Moon,Annie became the editor of the TBA (traditional boat ascociation) and the magazine was really looking proffesional then!She tells me they are now down in Queensland,Austraila,since I saw her last she has been to Trinidad where she joined up with Trevour and Iorn Bark,then traveled far north and wintered over locked into the ice,her book,one I have yet to read,may just be the volume you need if your heading off cruising yourself?
Annie Hill: Most of my sailing has been aboard the 34-foot, plywood, junk-rigged Badger that I built with my former husband, Pete. We chose her for a variety of reasons, low-cost being paramount among them. She proved to be a marvelous boat, far better than such a simple vessel should have been! She gave us so much in comfort and confidence that we ended up sailing her both to the Arctic and the Antarctic. She left my life when Pete wanted to build another boat. Because I parted so reluctantly with Badger, I suspect it's impossible for me to be dispassionate about her. Her best features were undoubtedly the rig and deck layout that made it possible to do everything from the protection of a small circular hatch, sheltered by a revolving 'pram hood'. I don't like deck work and I loved being able to sail the boat singlehanded when I was on watch. The accommodation was all that one could have hoped for and the ease and cheapness of maintenance meant that we could live on a very low income and do a lot of sailing. Badger's drawbacks were that she tended to hunt around at anchor, due to the big foremast and sail, and the lack of forefoot. Her windward performance was nothing to boast about and at times I wished for better, but it was a very small price to pay for the virtues of the rig. In all honesty, I think those are the only criticisms I could make!

My present boat is a 35-foot gaff cutter--a Wylo II designed by Nick Skeates. She was built in Australia by Trevor Robertson, who invited me to join his ship a couple of years ago. Iron Bark is handsome and husky and her steel hull is very reassuring. The rig is powerful and in the right conditions she will make over 7 knots for hour after hour, comfortably and without fuss, but I find the rig daunting and don't have what it takes to sail her singlehanded. However, Trevor is happy to do the deck work and as she's a forgiving vessel, we often carry the same sails for long periods.



Annie Hill
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Annie Hill (born 1955 in Liverpool) is an English sailor, author of books and articles about sailboat voyaging, living on a small amount of money and sailing junk rig.

Annie Hill has been voyaging and living aboard various sailing yachts since 1975. Her book Voyaging on a Small Income is a study in the economics of continual travel and self sufficiency. Hill writes using distinct British vernacular and colloquialisms.

Her first two books concerned voyaging aboard Badger, a 34 foot double-ended dory with a two-masted junk rig of the schooner style, which was built by Annie and her former husband, Pete Hill. Badger was designed by Jay Benford for plywood construction. Annie's analysis and comparison of the modern junk rig is at least partly responsible for the recent re-popularization of the junk rig.

Annie Hill now sails aboard Iron Bark, a steel gaff cutter. She is divorced from her former husband, Pete, and travels and lives with Trevor Robertson. She has recently spent the winter on 'Iron Bark' frozen in a remote bay in Greenland.

More history :

Annie Hill: I first set foot on a sailing boat in 1973, when my boyfriend showed me the catamaran that he was building, and my first sail was just after she was launched. Stormalong had no engine, and we sailed out of a narrow river in England's Morecambe Bay, with 35-foot tides and 5-knot tidal streams. The destination was another river where we'd laid a mooring, and because of the time of the tides, part of the passage was at night. My second trip was a 110-mile passage, again overnight. The next year we sailed across the Atlantic to the West Indies. Apart from a couple years, I've lived on boats ever since.