Chris Stewart did not follow a predictable career path to literary success. He was the original drummer in Genesis (he played on the first album), worked in a circus, learnt to shear sheep and went to China to write a Rough Guide. His three hilarious books about life on his Spanish farm – Driving Over Lemons, A Parrot in the Pepper Tree and The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society – have sold more than a million copies in the UK alone. But before he started to farm – and write about it – he messed about in boats.
His nautical life started on the Wandsworth Road. A friend offered him a summer job skippering a yacht in the Greek islands. Even though he knew nothing about boats, he seized the opportunity. To learn how to sail he pottered about off Littlehampton with a man from the DHSS who fancied his girlfriend. After knocking him overboard (he claims not because of the girl), Stewart enrolled at the Isle of Wight Sailing School where the bug – or sea slug – bit him.
At the age of 29 he flew to Greece to prepare the boat for the season. With the help of two enthusiastic but mercurial carpenters who had "only the shakiest grasp of the workings of time", he launched his employer's pretty little Crabber and set out for Spetses. En route the boat caught fire. He rammed a couple of concrete piers. His first (and only) mate nearly drowned. Yet as he sailed his whole being became "suffused with the sheer joy of wind and water and sunshine, and the beauty of our little craft."
"No wonder people get emotional about their boats. Because boats – or, at any rate, old wooden boats – have their personalities, their foibles, their weaknesses and their beauty. The wind sings in the rigging; the hull creaks and groans and the stays take the strain of the wind in the sails," he wrote. The incomparable beauty "of sailing boats is a thing that settled deep in my heart and it's hard to get rid of it."
A blissful Aegean summer unfolded for Stewart, sailing between Saronic harbours, picnicking on beaches beneath the pines, enjoying leisurely kafeneon meals "with the boat tied, like an obedient dog, to my chair leg". The next year he was invited to join a very different trip, following the route of the Norse explorer Leif Eiriksson across the north Atlantic from the UK to Newfoundland. This journey was violent and dangerous, with wild storms tossing the little Cutter "like a walnut in a millrace", as well as moments of profound beauty: sailing alongside a finback whale, debating with crew mates the ways to live a rewarding life, navigating across the open sea where "all the woes and worries that afflicted you on dry land – all the things you ought to have done but have left undone, all the drab detritus and clutter of your daily existence – slough away like the old dry skin of a snake".
Three Ways to Capsize a Boat is a charming and lyrical read, awash with the joy of discovery, and Stewart is an immensely likeable narrator (I've never read a funnier description of a bodily function than his detailed advice on How to Pee at Midnight during a Force Nine Gale). The key to his popularity is his honest and self-effacing determination - as discussed during a mid-Atlantic storm - to live a rewarding life.
One day, before he finally slips away to the last harbour, Stewart plans to sail around the world. Not with all the ballyhoo of racing and record breaking but rather at a gentle, ambling pace so that he can wonder "at all the terrible, immeasurable beauty of it". His approach to travel and travel writing brings to mind a scene in Antoine de Saint Exupéry's masterful Wind, Sand and Stars. The French author and aviator once told a Bedouin camel driver that a flying machine could cover in two hours the distance that would take a caravan 10 days. The Bedouin looked into Saint Exupéry's eyes and asked, "But why would a person want to do that?"
When Stewart sets out on his last, slow, round-the-world voyage, I hope to be there at the quayside, waving him off, wishing him well on his humble yet remarkable lifelong adventure.
• Rory MacLean's latest book Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to India is published by Penguin in the UK and by IG Publishing in the States. His UK top tens Stalin's Nose and Under the Dragon are available in Tauris Parke Paperbacks.
