My name is Rod Usher and I am 83 years old. I was born in Beverly in Yorkshire. And was a family of three boys, I was the youngest. After school in Beverly, all of us three boys won scholarships. I was well down the timeline because my elder brother was eight years older than me and the middle one was four years older than me. But it was a very happy family. 

When I was in Hull, people wouldn’t know it these days because it has all changed, but they had wonderful trawlers that went out to catch mainly cod but other things as well but it was mainly cod. And I used to play squash with some of the owners’ children and I let it be known to one person that I wouldn’t mind a trip. So one summer I went for three weeks up into the Arctic and we weren’t fishing for it but occasionally you got other fish in there, and we got really quite a big halibut they gave me it at the end of the trip. [Diana, Rod’s wife: what did you do with it?] Well I took it home and [Diana: your mother fainted] Well no, my dad was a gardener as I say and he was telling this to somebody he worked for who was a doctor and he said ‘I’ll cut it up for you Roy and then you can freeze it in our freezer’. And so we had it for Christmas. 

That was wonderful and it made me even more love the idea of the sea. You remember when I said I think we ought to go and have a look at some boats? And we drove from London to the coast just down there, Tollesbury, and I think we said we would buy one then and there. Well I’d been saving money ever since I started work, I tool out an insurance policy and I’d been saving up, and I said to Julia, well we put these sort of things away for a rainy day, well as far as I’m concerned it’s been pouring!

So we bought a new 23 foot yacht which is quite small if you go out to sea. I hadn’t a clue, I did a correspondence course. The boys said they would help and they were wonderful. Well we had the most wonderful time in that little boat, didn’t we love?  And we actually got it to Dunkirk, didn’t we?

After 4 years we sold it and we bought a much bigger one and we had that for about 15 years and we sailed, because I kept a log very accurately, I’ve got them all upstairs I don’t know if anyone will ever read them all but it was very interesting for me to do it that way, and we sailed 16,000 miles in 15 years.

We used to sail to Holland, Julia and I, and then Julia decide she’d get the ferry and I would get somebody else to come with me to Holland. We loved sailing in Holland. We sailed in Calais, Dunkirk and then into Holland where we went right up to Amsterdam on the canals and things. Absolutely wonderful.

And then I think I said there’s one more yacht in me. I thought well this next one… and I went to the boat show and I saw one which was absolutely fabulous and I decided we would have one. So Julia and I were flown put to Finland where it was going to be built. It was dead of winter, it was -9 centigrade when we landed in Helsinki and then we on a coach, do you remember going fast on those ice roads with chains on the wheels? We discussed exactly what we wanted. It was a sort of paradise. We just loved.