IT was a "Great Escape", they said, and it should have been perfect. A well stocked yacht, a willing crew, a passage plan from Scotland Antarctica, by Polynesia. Yet there was the mate, retching miserably in "mute despair" - and this was only the Irish coast.

In fact, there are parts of this 2,700 mile seaboard which must be carved into John Ridgway's consciousness. When their daughter, Rebecca, was only seven years old, he and his wife, Marie Christine, with whom he runs an adventure school in northern Scotland, had made a winter sailing trip to the Spanish Sahara. They almost foundered off Ireland on return.

But then, as he notes, the biggest wave in The Guinness Book of Records was recorded off this coast. Previously, this Pangbourne and Sandhurst educated adventurer had rowed the Atlantic with international yachtsman, Chay Blyth. Their first landfall was on the Aran islands, where the Galway Bay lifeboat thought they needed rescue. Seas were certainly heavy, but after 93 days of it they were not in any great difficulty. Still, they were gracious about it, and accepted the lift and the welcome ashore.

John Ridgway has what they call "the right stuff" - the sort of stuff that Rolex likes to use for its ads for Oyster Explorer watches. Apart from the Atlantic crossing by oar, he has sailed single handed from Ireland to Brazil, has skippered a boat in the Whitbread round the world yacht race and has completed a non stop circumnavigation which broke records.

In tandem with the adventure school, he and his wife also ran a fish farm. He has always kept a daily diary, even when reduced to a scrap of paper and Biro refill. With this material, he has written 10 books.

This latest may be his most revealing, given that this was a family effort. It was prompted by a family trauma. "Foolishly" taken in by a television company, in his own words, he agreed to, participate in a film which would mark 25 years of the adventure school. He gave the company free access, and even allowed it to pick the course participants.

They were divided up to create "maximum conflict" for the film's two camera crews, he says. The programme made "great commercial television" but in sending up its school director as some sort of autocrat, it almost finished his business. The Ridgways took to the sea, leaving their cottage door open, believing they had nothing to lose.

Small wonder that the first leg of their 18 month voyage on their ketch, English Rose VI, was fraught, and the weather didn't help. With them were their two daughters, Rebecca and Isso, Rebecca's boyfriend, Will, and one of their staff, Andy, who was a "biology student. The log kept by three of them gives a more accurate picture of a sea journey, which was as much about self discovery as about exploration of places new.

So, Ridgway is matter of fact, while Marie Christine, his wife, records emotions - after 6,000 miles at sea and a land fall on the Galapagos, she announces that she hates sailing and hates being on board a boat with other people. And this from a Whitbread veteran!

Rebecca, who became the first woman to canoe round Cape Horn when she paddled it with her father, waxes lyrical - about dolphins, tuna, poetry, paradise and life in limbo on long passages. How the rest of the crew knitted in with the family is left very much to the imagination.

Isso, who had not seen South America since leaving her native Peru, where she was adopted by the Ridgway couple seven years, before, is very much the child on board.

As a travelogue, the Ridgway log sparkles. As a diary, it is brutally honest. Not too much by way of nautical terms, but there is still lots of useful information. The authors' account of the clash among scientists over the future of the Galapagos even gives it a political edge. The islands are not so remote, they discovered, and are under constant tourist pressure from visitors like them.

An official tour boat recently discovered a French yacht on one of the anchorages the crew was playing soccer on the beach and using a local penguin for a ball...