This new feature length film by Amy Flannery is a rollicking docu-comedy about a couple's year-long sailing adventure. Amy and Ken set out on a cruise from Chesapeake Bay to Nova Scotia and then back down the coast to the Bahamas. Along the way they encounter assorted equipment failures, make new friends, visit many interesting places, improve their navigational skills, and film this movie. Now available as a YouTube Rental for just $2.99. Rent more videos at TheSailingChannel YouTube Documentary Playlist. HIGH QUALITY VIDEO DOWNLOAD JUST $12.99 Available in both Windows Media (WMV) and QuickTime (MOV) versions suitable for full screen viewing. Also available in two parts: Chesapeake Bay to Nova Scotia and Norfolk, VA to the Bahamas. Just $7.95 each. Pay with Paypal or your Credit Card, download and watch on your PC or MAC. FULL SHOW 85-minutes . PART 1: Chesapeake Bay to Nova Scotia 49-minutes PART 2: Norfolk, VA to the Bahamas 45-minutes DVD-US: $24.95 (includes s&h) Sailing Videos from $2.99. Brought to you by TheSailingChannel.TV

VIDEO DOWNLOAD TheSailingChannel.TV has just released Lin and Larry Pardey's Storm Tactics: Cape Horn Tested as a HIGH QUALITY VIDEO DOWNLOAD available in both Windows Media (WMV) and QuickTime (MOV) versions suitable for full screen viewing. PRICE: JUST $12.99. Just pay with Paypal or your Credit Card, download and watch full screen on your PC or MAC. This 84 minute video delivers the skills you need to weather storms with confidence. If you like the preview, buy the DVD. It's the next best thing to having Lin and Larry Pardey onboard, coaching you on storm tactics as the seas build and the rigging howls. Closing in on 200,000 miles of blue water voyaging, Lin and Larry Pardey are recognized as the sailing world's most experienced and knowledgeable cruising couple. In Storm Tactics, they provide a detailed look at the techniques and gear that have kept them safe at sea. "... I wanted to show how the sailor's safety valve--heaving-to-works, and the slick it creates. It's hard for people to imagine the almost magic effect of a slick as it saps the power of breaking waves...." - Larry Pardey. "One of the reasons I wanted to sail east-to-west around Cape Horn was to take video shots proving that small vessels can safely weather storms if they are well outfitted and efficiently handled," Larry Pardey stated after his record-breaking voyage. Lin and Larry completed their against-the-wind rounding of the Great Southern Capes on board their engineless 29-foot Taleisin, weathering nine days of storm-force winds to reach Puerto Montt in Chile. There they interviewed several high-latitude voyagers, prepared the narrative, and shot further detailed footage to complete the Storm Tactics video, a project Lin and Larry conceived almost ten years ago. Read more about Storm tactics at http://www.thesailingchannel.tv/pardey/storm_tactics/about_storm_tactics.htm HANDBOOK Add the Storm Tactics Handbook, recently revised 3rd Ed. to the Video and you've got the ultimate reference set. Price: $20.65. Modern methods of heaving-to for survival in extreme conditions. As in the first two editions of this book, Lin and Larry describe their concerns about the tendency of modern sailors to discard the classic methods used to bring sailing vessels of all sizes—from vast clipper ships to tiny yachts—through amazingly strong winds and heavy seas. “There is only one storm tactic that has the ability to sap the power of breaking seas,” they explain. With clear and concise diagrams, they proceed to show how heaving-to works and how even the most modern of yachts can be made to heave-to, whether with only sail power or with the assistance of a sea anchor. http://www.thesailingchannel.tv/pardey/pardey_books/books/storm_tactics_handbook.htm Mario Vittone, a U.S. Coast Guard rescue swimmer for 14 years, in an unsolicited testimony, wrote: “I have been on several rescues (and heard of many more) that would have been completely unnecessary if the sailboat captains aboard would have . . . practiced the skills taught by Lin and Larry Pardey. Not knowing how to heave-to in bad weather is as inexcusable as not knowing ‘red, right, return’.” HandBook 3rd Ed.: DVD / HANDBOOK COMBO Purchase the Storm Tactics video and the newly revised companion 256 page Handbook 3rd Ed. at http://www.thesailingchannel.tv/pardey/storm_tactics. DVD or VHS: $26.95; HandBook: $20.65; YOUR BEST BUY -- DVD/Handbook Combo: $39.95. Buy them now: DVD: VHS: DVD/Handbook Combo: Be sure to subscribe via iTunes to receive free video podcast for cruising sailors from TheSailingChannel.tv. And watch more sailing coverage from our partner, SailTV on TheSailingChannel. Visit TheSailingChannel.TV Ship's Store Brought to you by TheSailingChannel.TV

When do you heave to when sailing to windward? Lin and Larry Pardey give you the answer and show you how. From Storm Tactics: Cape Horn Tested (84-Minutes). VIDEO DOWNLOAD TheSailingChannel.TV offers Storm Tactics as a HIGH QUALITY VIDEO DOWNLOAD available in both Windows Media (WMV) and QuickTime (MOV) versions suitable for full screen viewing. PRICE: JUST $12.99. DVD also available. Just pay with Paypal or your Credit Card, download and watch full screen on your PC or MAC. This 84 minute video delivers the skills you need to weather storms with confidence. If you like the preview, buy the DVD. It's the next best thing to having Lin and Larry Pardey onboard, coaching you on storm tactics as the seas build and the rigging howls. Closing in on 200,000 miles of blue water voyaging, Lin and Larry Pardey are recognized as the sailing world's most experienced and knowledgeable cruising couple. In Storm Tactics, they provide a detailed look at the techniques and gear that have kept them safe at sea. "... I wanted to show how the sailor's safety valve--heaving-to-works, and the slick it creates. It's hard for people to imagine the almost magic effect of a slick as it saps the power of breaking waves...." - Larry Pardey. "One of the reasons I wanted to sail east-to-west around Cape Horn was to take video shots proving that small vessels can safely weather storms if they are well outfitted and efficiently handled," Larry Pardey stated after his record-breaking voyage. Lin and Larry completed their against-the-wind rounding of the Great Southern Capes on board their engineless 29-foot Taleisin, weathering nine days of storm-force winds to reach Puerto Montt in Chile. There they interviewed several high-latitude voyagers, prepared the narrative, and shot further detailed footage to complete the Storm Tactics video, a project Lin and Larry conceived almost ten years ago. Read more about Storm tactics at http://www.thesailingchannel.tv/pardey/storm_tactics/ Sailing Documentaries from $2.99. Brought to you by TheSailingChannel.TV

Ten years in the making, The BIG Sailboat Project tracks the gritty effort of two gals as they pursue their dream of building and cruising a 43 foot steel sailboat. Located a 1000 miles from the coast in rural Alberta, Canada, the duo decide on steel as their building material, which they shape into a Bruce Roberts designed 43 MKII Long Keel Cutter. Volume I contains five episodes covering steel construction from keel to fully enclosed vessel. Each episode is approximately 23 minutes long, and includes documentary footage of hull construction artfully edited and interspersed with 3-D animation illustrating steel construction techniques. You can watch previews of each episode at www.thesailingchannel.tv/thebigsailboatproject The Big Sailboat Project, Volume I is available for purchase as a High Quality QuickTime Download or High Quality Windows Media Download for just $12.99. Click, pay with Paypal or your Credit Card, download and watch. Volume II is currently in production, and will cover finishing and rigging the vessel through launch and sea trials. Sailing Documentaries from $2.99. Brought to you by TheSailingChannel.TV

Skimming before caressing trade winds, savoring tropical landfalls, evading stormy seas—such is the image of the cruising life under sail. It is all this, but Lin and Larry's latest documentary: Cruising Has No Limits shows you how it can be so much more. Join Lin and Larry at their New Zealand home base as they recount some of their most memorable adventures during more than 30 years of cruising. YOUTUBE RENTALS Cruising Has No Limits is now available as a YouTube Rental for just $2.99 (US Only). Rent our sailing documentaries at TheSailingChannel YouTube Documentary Playlist. Sail with them across the Indian Ocean on board 29-foot, 9-inch Taleisin. Learn how they planned and executed a seven month "Champagne Safari on a Beer Budget," outfitting a 4X4 to reach remote corners of southern Africa. Share their memories of campfire evenings with Kalahari Bushmen, life in a sculptors' commune in Zimbabwe's northern reaches, and days of animal-watching at waterholes far from game reserves. Then voyage onward with them to Brazil, and see how two 14-year-old passengers led them into a unique, eight-month-long island encounter with nine Brazilian families who dreamed of their own off shore adventures. Finally, sail north through the Atlantic to Ireland's music-filled shores and a summer of history, classic sailing, and friendship. Along the way, you'll learn some of the truisms that could help you get out adventuring sooner and more enjoyably—whether on the water or on land. You'll also come to know more about this longtime cruising couple who have been dubbed "the enablers" because of their enthusiasm and willingness to share their secrets for exploring the far corners of the world on a limited budget. "After voyaging tens of thousands of engineless miles under sail, penning more useful marine books than Hiscock and Moitessier combined, and receiving more awards for their pursuits than Tom Hanks has for his, Lin and Larry Pardey are entitled to their well-earned nautical opinions." —HERB McCORMACK, EDITOR-AT-LARGE, CRUISING WORLD VIDEO DOWNLOAD TheSailingChannel.TV offers Cruising Has No Limits as a HIGH QUALITY VIDEO DOWNLOAD available in both Windows Media (WMV) and QuickTime (MOV) versions suitable for full screen viewing. JUST $12.99. DVD also available. Just pay with Paypal or your Credit Card, download and watch full screen on your PC or MAC. Sailing Documentaries from $2.99. Brought to you by TheSailingChannel.TV

CLICK TO PLAY Ice Blink is a film by Gregory Roscoe, Seaworthy Productions, Falmouth Maine. Life as a Canvas is a chapter from Ice Blink, a remarkable PBS documentary about a conventional family of five living a very unconventional life afloat. In this clip, Jaja and Dave Martin discuss why they chose a cruising lifestyle for their family over a conventional one ashore. Follow Dave, Jaja and their crew of three children from their beginnings aboard a 25-foot day sailor circumnavigating the globe to their most recent voyage on a 33 foot steel sloop to the Arctic, then on to their current homeport in Maine. Available on Vimeo on Demand https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/559621792/0/thesailingchannel Download-to-Own $9.99 | Streaming Rental $4.99 Sailing Documentaries and How-To Videos. Brought to you by TheSailingChannel.TV

CLICK TO PLAY The Privateer Lynx heads off shore for a romp on the pacific and a sea trial with Mother Nature. TheSailingChannel.TV is proud to be named the exclusive distributor of video downloads and VOD rentals for the 51-minute HD documentary,"Tall Ships: The Privateer Lynx". This is the extraordinary story of a tall ship and the exciting lives of the young men and women who sail her. Filmed in spectacular high definition, The Privateer Lynx transports you into the exciting seafaring world of days gone by while connecting directly with today’s youth, expanding their knowledge about the maritime history of our nation and the environmental perils facing our planet. See www.thesailingchannel.tv/tallships/ TheSailingChannel.TV offers Tall Ships: The Privateer Lynx HD Download-to-Own $12.99 | Streaming Rental $5.99. Sailing Documentaries and How-To Videos. Brought to you by TheSailingChannel.TV

CLICK TO PLAY TheSailingChannel.TV presents Cast Off for Catalina, the indispensable Video Cruising Guide to Catalina Island for boaters (and landlubbers too!) This video is a must-see before you sail and while you're there. It includes everything you need to know about cruising to tranquil Catalina island, just 20 miles from busy Los Angeles across the Santa Barbara Channel. The video covers mooring technique, anchoring, and a complete circumnavigation of the island describing the most popular harbors and anchorages. During the video, you'll visit Avalon Harbor, the Isthmus, Cherry and Fourth of July Coves, Howland's Landing, Emerald Bay, Catalina Harbor, Little Harbor, and many others. The video also takes you onshore to visit the quaint town of Avalon, the isthmus outpost of Two Harbors, and the picturesque interior where buffalo roam--decedents of a herd imported for a 1930's Western Movie. Cast Off for Catalina is produced by Mark Ritts and Ted Field, longtime creators, writers and producers of award-winning national television series and documentaries. Check out our Cast Off Cruising Guide for Southern California on Vimeo on Demand. Includes both Cast Off for Catalina and Cast Off for Mexico. All Sailing Videos Just $2.99 or Less. Brought to you by TheSailingChannel.TV

CLICK TO PLAY Sail with skipper/filmmaker/explorer, Dave Perdew, on Irish Rose as novice and experienced sailors join him on different legs as they cruise from Seattle, Washington to Juneau, Alaska along the famed Inside Passage. Irish Rose is a 40 foot Bob Perry Design 1979 cutter completely refurbished for adventure sailing in the high latitudes. She tows a 15 foot RIB with 50hp outboard for exploring narrow channels where a larger boat can't go. The MP4 Video Download is "Chapterized" so you can easily explore different legs of the voyage. Purchase at https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/557582068/0/thesailingchannel HD Video Download $12.99 | Streaming Rental $5.99. Bears, eagles, whales, seals, salmon, and icebergs. There is still a place in America where nature rules. Where glaciers gleam like jewels set into majestic mountains. Where ice-fed waterfalls plummet from tidewater glaciers. Where the spirits of ancient ancestors linger in the mist. Where their signs can be seen on rock cliffs near the bones of their great wooden lodges, their weather-worn totems still standing guard in virgin forests. The inside passage, from Seattle, Washington up the coast of Canada, to Juneau, Alaska is a waterway window into the past with majestic scenery and hidden anchorages where time stands still. Sailing Documentaries from $2.99. Brought to you by TheSailingChannel.TV

CLICK TO PLAY The Sail Vicarious series brings you over eight hours of how-to and cruising information in 7 Video Download volumes or 6 DVDs. Join Spencer and Kathleen as they locate the right cruising sailboat, undertake a major multi-year refit, outfit their craft for long-range cruising, gain experience during a cruise up and down the U.S. east coast, then head offshore from Miami to the Bahamas, and continue south, cruising the BVIs and the islands of the eastern Caribbean. You'll be there as they learn the hard way, correct mistakes, gain experience and confidence by doing, then reap the rewards of cruising to paradise. Each MP4 Video Download is "Chapterized" so you can easily reference different sections, just like a DVD. Purchase the entire series or individual episodes as Downloads or Streaming RentalsVimeo On Demand Buy the series as Downloads: $29.99 | Streaming Rental: $15,99 $7.99 per Episode Download |$2.99 per Episode Streaming Rental DVDs and Downloads from TheSailingChannel.TV - Big cost-savings on full sets, how-to sets, and cruising sets. Watch the 10-minute series overview. Sailing Documentaries from $2.99. Brought to you by TheSailingChannel.TV

CLICK TO PLAY Preview for 52-minute how-to sailing video. U.S. Coast Guard certified skipper, Capt. Jack Klang, combines innovative classroom models with real world sailing situations to explain the skills and techniques required for singlehanders to dock with confidence in any wind or current, trim cruising sails for power and speed, and retrieve a mooring alone. In a bonus segment, Capt. Jack demonstrates how a crew of two can fly, trim, and retrieve an asymmetrical spinnaker, making light air cruising faster and more fun. The QuickTime Video Download is "Chapterized" so you can easily reference different sections, just like a DVD. Purchase at Vimeo on Demand Download $9.99 | Streaming Rental $4.99 Purchase the 2-video set: Sailing Instruction with Capt. Jack that includes Cruising tips and Singlehanded Docking. Download for just $15.99. Purchase 2 DVD-US set: Singlehanded Docking and Sailing Instruction: $29.95 plus S&H. Sailing Documentaries from $2.99. Brought to you by TheSailingChannel.TV

CLICK TO PLAY Preview for 53-minute HD voyaging video. In 1978, photographer and writer Gene Anthony achieved a personal quest. His sea story takes us on an inspirational odyssey to Cape Horn Island at the southern tip of the Americas. We voyage by way of Gene's lifelong fascination with all things nautical and his highly successful career as a maritime photojournalist. Narrated by actor and Emmy Award-winning narrator, Peter Coyote. Purchase Download or Streaming Rental at Vimeo on Demand HD Video Download $9.99 | Streaming Rental $4.99. Sailing Documentaries from $2.99. Brought to you by TheSailingChannel.TV

CLICK TO PLAY Preview for 76-minute HD voyaging video. From the southern tip of Africa, northwestward across the Atlantic to the Caribbean island of Grenada, sail aboard the 50 foot catamaran, Suliere, on her maiden voyage. Find out what it's like to sail on one of the world's longest ocean passages. Your port of departure is St. Francis in South Africa then onto Cape Town for final commissioning. Once underway, stop in the middle of the Atlantic on the famous island of St. Helena where Napoleon was imprisoned before making your final passage to Grenada, gateway to the exotic Leeward Islands of the Caribbean. Learn and feel what it's like to live the dream of long range cruising under sail. Purchase at https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/557527510/0/thesailingchannel HD Video Download (Windows Media & QuickTime) $12.99. SD DVD (includes world-wide delivery) $24.95 Sailing Documentaries from $2.99. Brought to you by TheSailingChannel.TV

CLICK TO PLAY Preview of 2-hour documentary. Transatlantic with Street - A film by Gavin Shaw. A classic Atlantic ocean 5,000 mile trade wind passage shot in 1986 aboard noted sailor/author Don Street's 1905 engineless 44 foot yawl, Iolaire. Documents Iolair's ninth Atlantic crossing from Ireland with eleven ocean islands along the way. First landfall is Vigo in dense fog. Next, a short-handed 800 mile passage to Madeira. Then enroute to the Canaries, the desolate and dangerous Salvage Islands. The trade winds fill in at 20 N and it's an easy reach to the Verdes. From there, a fast 14-day run of 2100 miles with whales, water rationing, a leaky bilge bring Iolaire safely into Antigua just in time for Christmas. Available at https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/557582054/0/thesailingchannel Streaming Rental $2.99 Video Download (mp4 & wmv) $12.99 DVD $24.95 Sailing Documentaries from $2.99. Brought to you by TheSailingChannel.TV

CLICK TO PLAY Preview of Part 2 Originally shot in 16 mm color, the film has been restored and converted to HD video. Completed in 1976, this is a two part sailing documentary by skipper and noted Hollywood cinematographer, Gene Evens (Roots, Jeremiah Johnson, Lady Sings the Blues, Batman and many more movie and television productions) and his wife Josie aboard their 32 foot sloop, "Discubridor" ("Discoverer"). Their two-year sailing adventure takes them over 10,000 miles from southern California south to Costa Rica, offshore to Cocos Island and the Galapagos Islands, then home to San Diego. Along the way they explore remote locales, fish, struggle against storms, and on a few occasions fight for survival. In Part 1, Gene and his wife Josie, sail "Discubridor" ("Discoverer") south from San Diego down the coast of Baja California, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica where they are joined by their son Ron and a couple of friends for a 300 mile off shore sail to the mysterious Cocos Island. In Part 2, the crew explore Cocos Island, sail onto the legendary Galapagos Islands for more exploration, then Gene and Josie sail back across the Pacific alone and home to San Diego. Available at https://vimeo.com/ondemand/600days HD 1280 x 720 (Original format: 16mm color) Pt. 1: To Cocos & the Galapagos Islands Running Time: 90 Minutes Pt. 2: Cocos & the Galapagos Islands Running time: 65 Minutes Sailing Documentaries from $2.99. Brought to you by TheSailingChannel.TV

CLICK TO PLAY Heaving To From Don Street's Streetwise Tips Vol.1 by Sailing Quarterly. In this clip, Legendary skipper and sailing author, Don Street shows you how to quickly "park your boat" at sea so you can rest and regroup in rough weather. In his full 56-minute how-to sailing video, Don covers: Heavy Weather Preparation and Sailing Tactics; Foredeck Work; Mainsail Flaking Systems; Sail Repairs; Navigation; and Jibe Prevention. For more Don Street sailing tips, check out Don Street's Streetwise Tips Vol. 2. Available at https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/557582046/0/thesailingchannel Streaming Rental $2.99 | Episodes $0.99 Download-to-Own (mp4) $12.99 | Episodes $2.99 DVD US $27.99 | DVD INTL $34.99 (includes S&H) Get The Complete Street - all 5 Don Street Videos for just $49.95 Available at https://vimeo.com/ondemand/thecompletestreet Sailing Documentaries from $2.99. Brought to you by TheSailingChannel.TV

CLICK TO PLAY Don Street Antigua Race Week 1985 Preview From Don Street Antigua Race Week 1985. A one hour award-winning documentary by Charles Croft which lets you share the intense sailing action aboard Don Street's 80 year old, 44 foot, engineless yawl, "Iolaire" during Antigua Sailing Week, 1985, Iolarie's final appearance in one of the world's top sailing events. Built in 1905, Don had sailed and raced "Iolaire" throughout the Caribbean for forty years while he developed his famous Imray-Iolair charts and the first comprehensive cruising guides that opened up the Caribbean to modern sailors. Antigua Sailing Week races became an annual event for Street and Iolaire since the first regatta in 1957. In 1985, Street decided to retire Iolaire from racing and they both went out in style, finishing only 5 points out of first place at race week's end. This award-winning documentary shows you what Caribbean racing was like in its golden years when the skippers all new each other and racing was more fun than business. Available at https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/557582042/0/thesailingchannel Streaming Rental $4.99 | Download-to-Own (mp4) $9.99 Get The Complete Street - all 5 Don Street Videos for just $49.95 Sailing Documentaries from $2.99. Brought to you by TheSailingChannel.TV

CLICK TO PLAY Voyage of Entr`acte: The Partnership Trailer for 103-minute cruising video. The Partnership is a story of love and friendship, discovery and improbability. Ellen and Ed Zacko met while playing in the orchestra of a Broadway musical and hatched a scheme to take a temporary brake from the hectic New York scene and explore the world together. Their adventure aboard a Nor Sea 27 foot sloop led them to discover a different side of life that would change their lives forever. Entr'acte - The musical interlude performed between two acts of a play. Join Ellen and Ed on a seven year saga: three years to build Entr'acte and four years to sail her - from a stormy Atlantic crossing to the tranquil French canals. Sail with them as they explore the Mediterranean then follow the trade winds on their return to the Caribbean and sail up the U.S. east coast to home. The Zackos draw upon their musical and show business background to combine over 800 slides with original music and snappy narrative, creating a highly entertaining multimedia experience. Available at https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/557582036/0/thesailingchannel Streaming Rental $1.99 | Download-to-Own (mp4) $9.99 Sailing Documentaries from $2.99. Brought to you by TheSailingChannel.TV

CLICK TO PLAY Voyage of Entr`acte: The San Blas Islands and The Panama Canal - Trailer Trailer for 71-minute cruising video. A Film by Ellen & Ed Zacko. Join the crew of Entr'acte for a journey between two oceans. "The San Blas and Panama Canal" begins in Grenada and crosses the Caribbean Sea to the enchanting San Blas Islands. There Ellen and Ed Zacko re-unite with old friends Paula and John on Mr. John VI to explore the jungle of Panama and transit the Panama Canal together. Travel with them to this un-spoiled, primordial area inhabited by the Kuna Indians. Experience the magnificence of the Panama Canal from the deck of a small sailing vessel. Available at https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/557582034/0/thesailingchannel Streaming Rental $1.99 | Download-to-Own (mp4) $9.99 Sailing Documentaries and How-To Videos. Brought to you by TheSailingChannel.TV

CLICK TO PLAY Practicing Heaving to from the Pardey Offshore Sailing Series Larry Pardey talks about the importance of practicing heaving to before you set off across an ocean. Heaving to allows you to park your boat at sea in any weather so you and your crew can rest, eat, and make repairs. Practicing heaving to includes becoming familiar with setting up your para-anchor and other gear at the dock so you know how it all works and you can check that all lines are running clear. Then you should practice heaving to underway, preferably in at least 30 knots of wind. Larry's comments are followed by some historic footage of the Pardey's sailing with a very nice classical 12 string guitar background. The Pardey Offshore Sailing Series consists of all 5 Pardey videos as downloads or DVDs at a package discount price. The videos include Get Ready to Cruise, Get Ready to Cross Oceans, Storm Tactics, Cost Control While You Cruise, and Cruising Has No Limits — over 6 and a half hours of blue-water sailing instruction and adventure from two of the world's most experienced cruising sailors. Sailing Documentaries and How-To Videos. Brought to you by TheSailingChannel.TV

CLICK TO PLAY Sailvation: Charter Boat Hand-Over This 39 minute how-to video provides background on all technical aspects of a typical charter boat hand-over. The video is not designed to replace your live hand-over, but with the information it provides, you'll be better equipped to understand the hand-over process and ask more detailed questions about your charter yacht when you arrive. Sailvation was formed by a team of dedicated sailors with years of experience, not only in cruising but also in chartering and managing boats from popular base stations. They know what sailing is about, what life aboard entails, and what you will experience while chartering. They are the people that you meet on the first day at your charter briefing. About the Founder Sailvation was founded in 2008 by Incila Oezmert. Following a circumnavigation in 1999, Incila has been involved in the charter business as operation manger and base manager with several charter companies in Turkey. She consults in setting up the operations department of charter companies, and has extensive experience with technical problem solving for charter sailors. Incila has been a professional charter skipper since 2002. Introductory special for the first 100 buyers through our Vimeo On Demand store. https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/74988843/0/thesailingchannel One week only: Sept. 20 − 27, 2014. Download-to-Own (mp4) 20% off (normally $18.99 USD). Click BUY. Sign into Vimeo.com or join if you don't have an account. It's free. In the BUY window, click Have a discount code? and enter: SAILVATION-SPECIAL Sailvation downloads also available as mp4 and wmv at www.thesailingchannel.tv/sailvation Download free technical tips and other useful information about chartering. Sailing Documentaries and How-To Videos. Brought to you by TheSailingChannel.TV

CLICK TO PLAY Boat Maintenance DIY with Gary Jobson A video by Rob Dubin with Gary Jobson. From the Sailing Quarterly Video Magazine library. Hosted by America's Cup Champion, this 76 minute how-to sailing video contains a wealth of expert information about boat maintenance for the do-it-yourselfer. Topics include: DIESEL ENGINE MAINTENANCE & TROUBLE-SHOOTING including periodic checks and how to troubleshoot common problems. Taught by engine experts from Mastery Engine Center, Florida, using floor model engines and graphics for hard to see details. HOW TO CLEAN A WINCH What products to gather before you start, how to disassemble, clean and reassemble to keep your boat's winches working smoothly. RIGGING CHECKS FROM MASTHEAD TO DECK Find trouble spots before fittings and shrouds break. FIBERGLASS REPAIRS Step-by-step instructions from filling the holes to polishing the gelcoat. HOW TO FIX A MARINE HEAD Step-by-step instructions on assembly, on repairs and maintenance so fixing the head is no longer such a dreaded task. VARNISHING Step-by-step instructions on varnishing to keep your boat's brightwork shining. All practical and well explained procedures that you and your crew can use to keep your boat in tip top shape. Download to your computer, tablet, and phone for onboard use. See how to do it yourself. Learn about your boat and save money. (M1Z) Boat Maintenance DIY with Gary Jobson is also available as a download and DVD at http://www.thesailingchannel.tv/boat-maintenance-diy/ Sailing Documentaries and How-To Videos. Brought to you by TheSailingChannel.TV

CLICK TO PLAY Suliere: Cuba and the Ragged Islands https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/106054766/0/thesailingchannel A film by Paul Burgess In this 2.5 hour cruising guide series, Sail with Paul and Leslie Burgess aboard Suliere, their 50 foot ocean-going catamaran as they voyage to Cuba's Hemingway Marina, tour old Havana and the Cuban countryside, then sail on to the remote Ragged Islands of the Bahamas. Part 1 provides comprehensive information about entering Cuban waters, navigating the tricky entrance to Havana's Hemingway Marina, and yacht provisioning and maintenance facilities within the marina complex. From the marina, travel with Paul and Leslie as they tour old Havana. Learn about shopping in local markets, finding good restaurants, and living cheaply on the CUC, Cuba'a local currency. In Part 2, go inside Cuba with Paul and Leslie as they drive a rental car deep into the interior, staying with local Cuban families in particulares, the Cuban version of a bed & breakfast. Tour the countryside by horseback, visiting farms and a local cigar factory. Then it's on to Trinidad, the Salsa music capital of Cuba. Traveling back along the coast, learn that most harbors are closed to foreign sailors. Finally, explore the charming town of Sancti Spiritus before returning to Hemingway Marina. In Part 3, sail with Paul and Leslie aboard Suliere from Havana, south along the Cuban coast, then offshore to the Bahama's sparsely populated Ragged Islands in search of paradise. FAMILY EDITION Included is a 2-hour, two-part version of Paul and Leslie's visit to Cuba and the Ragged Islands of the Bahamas for non-sailors, which excludes some 40 minutes of detailed sailing and navigation information. FREE EXTRA - watch the extended 7-minute preview. https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/106054766/0/thesailingchannel/135744915?autoplay=1 Sailing Documentaries and How-To Videos. Brought to you by TheSailingChannel.TV

CLICK TO PLAY A film by Rob & Dee Dubin U.S. - Canada lakes cruising with Gary Jobson as your host. Cruise from the Great Lakes to Utah including Canada's Georgian Bay, Lake Superior's Apostle Islands, Lake Michigan's Traverse Bay, and Utah's Lake Powell. From the Sailing Quarterly Video Magazine series. Your cruise starts in the North Channel of Canada's Georgian Bay. Located on the north coast of Lake Huron, this rugged cruising ground features forested shorelines and scattered islands. Onboard an ODay 35 sloop, we take brisk daysails to picturesque anchorages. Next we're off to Lake Superior and the Apostle Islands National Lake Shore, a collection of 22 pine-covered islands, mostly undeveloped. We provision in Bayfield, a quaint town that is the gateway to cruising the Apostles. Using mostly line of sight navigation, we island hop through this remote archipelago featuring dramatic north woods scenery. Our next stop is Traverse Bay in northern Lake Michigan. In Traverse City, we meet expert sailing instructor and charter skipper, Captain Jack Klang, who acts as our guide on a chartered Morgan 38. The area features two bays with numerous islands, inlets, harbors and small towns to explore. Clear waters, and a northern landscape of alternating rolling fields and forests greet the cruising sailor. Our final segment is a family cruise on southwest Utah's Lake Powell. This man-made lake offers a desert landscape with 1900 miles of meandering shoreline for trailer boaters. Lake Powell features warm waters, sandy beaches and dozens of canyons for both water and onshore exploration. (D6Z) Check out more Sailing Quarterly destination and how-to videos ABOUT SAILING QUARTERLY Produced in the late 1980's, Sailing Quarterly Video Magazine's 24 one-hour programs set the standard for sailing television. It's content represents over 200 years of sailing knowledge from its hosts and presenters such as Gary Jobson, Don Street, Tristan Jones and John Rousmaniere. We've taken individual stories, and grouped them under instructional categories and cruising destinations. The complete series includes nine instructional volumes, eight destination volumes, and the 24 original SQ one-hour programs. This is timeless content that will benefit every sailor, racer or cruiser. Presented by TheSailingChannel.TV. Browse our VOD collection Join our eNewsletter for news and discount offers. Sailing Documentaries and How-To Videos. Brought to you by TheSailingChannel.TV

CLICK TO PLAY A Video Series with John Rousmaniere Based on his famous book and hosted by the author, this award-winning instructional DVD series is now available as a Digital Download. As the old salt says, "rocks don't move." Though made nearly 15 years ago, Rousmaniere's milestone series teaches basic sailing techniques handed down by generations of sailors. A must for newbies and a solid reference for those who want to freshen up their sailing skills. "Will help Sailors be more confident and even enjoy sailing in heavy weather." - Gary Jobson. New sailors may want to begin with Volume V, Sailing Daysailors. This video provides a great introduction to the principles and mechanics of sailing, which is much easier to grasp and understand sailing a small boat. You can then apply these basic skills to larger craft and having a solid foundation for the sailing skills presented in the other four volumes. View trailers for each volume. New sailors may want to begin with Volume V, Sailing Daysailors. This video provides a great introduction to the principles and mechanics of sailing, which is much easier to grasp and understand sailing a small boat. You can then apply these basic skills to larger craft and have a solid foundation for the sailing skills presented in the other four volumes. The five program series includes: Vol I: Cruising Under Sail Vol. II: Heavy Weather Sailing Vol. III: Safety At Sea Vol. IV: Sailboat Navigation Vol. V: Sailing Daysailors About John Rousmaniere As one of the sport's most acknowledged authorities, John Rousmaniere has covered more than 30,000 miles of blue water and written fifteen books about the sea and sailing. Yacht Racing and Cruising World Magazine awarded Rousmaniere its Medal of Achievement for his Contribution to Yachting. Presented by TheSailingChannel.TV Browse our VOD collection Join our eNewsletter for news and discount offers. Sailing Documentaries and How-To Videos. Brought to you by TheSailingChannel.TV

CLICK TO PLAY TRAILER Lin Pardey resides on a picturesque island along New Zealand's coast. Recently, New Zealand TV filmed Lin as she reminisced about her sailing career with husband, Larry. Lin and Larry Pardey are among America's (and the world's) most knowledgeable and recognized cruising sailors. During their 40 plus year career, they sailed over 200,000 miles, including two circumnavigations east to west and west to east aboard two self-built, wooden, engine-free cutters under 30 feet. Authors of a dozen books, countless magazine articles, and co-creators of five cruising documentaries, Lin and Larry have shared their sailing experiences with tens of thousands around the globe prompting many to take up sailing and live the dream of the cruising lifestyle. The Pardey's motto is "Go simple, go modest, go small--just go". Check out the Pardey Offshore Sailing 5 Video Series. Presented by TheSailingChannel.TV rowse our VOD collection of destination and how-to sail videos. Join our eNewsletter for news and discount offers. Sailing Documentaries and How-To Videos. Brought to you by TheSailingChannel.TV

CLICK TO WATCH FREE TRAILER This video takes on the challenge of simplifying celestial navigation. Buckley gives the viewer just enough concept but sticks primarily to the procedure, like a chef explaining the steps in a recipe. Buckley demonstrates the following steps: 1. Take a Sight of the sun with your sextant. 2. Get your Geographical Position from the Air Almanac. 3. Select an Apparent Position along a line of latitude. 4. Refer to the Sight Reduction Tables to draw a Line of Position. 5. Plot your Exact Position. Purchase the Download and Streaming Rental at Vimeo on Demand. ABOUT WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR. William F. Buckley, Jr. was an American conservative author and commentator, founder of National Review magazine, host of the long-running political TV show, Firing Line, and author of more than fifty books. He was also a passionate and experienced sailor. For more, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_F._Buckley_Jr. Check out the Celestial Navigation Simplified on TheSailingChannel.TV Presented by TheSailingChannel.TV Browse our VOD collection Join our eNewsletter for news and discount offers. Sailing Documentaries and How-To Videos. Brought to you by TheSailingChannel.TV

CLICK TO PLAY A Video Series with Michael Briant A 6-part video series by Michael Briant Join British bluewater sailor and TV Director, Michael Briant as he sails to exotic destinations from the Caribbean to Asia aboard his 1980 Moody 36 center cockpit sloop, Bambola. ******************************************** Available with a SailFlix.com subscription. Buy or Rent with Vimeo On Demand ******************************************* Begin your journey sailing from Trinidad to Panama, stopping at seldom visited locales in the southern Caribbean. Next, transit the Panama Canal into the Pacific and sail on to the remote Galapagos islands. Continue across the south Pacific to the Marquesas and Tuamotus. Then explore Tahiti, Bora Bora, and the Cook Islands of French Polynesia. Complete your south Pacific crossing by visiting Sydney, Australia then sailing north along the east coast through the Great Barrier Reef and around the top of Australia to Darwin. Finally, make a tropical 500 miles passage to West Timor, gateway to Indonesia and the Indian Ocean. Contemporary and Classic Sailing Documentaries and How-To Videos. Brought to you by TheSailingChannel.TV

On Friday Paramount dropped the trailer for the second most anticipated EON Production of 2020, The Rhythm Section! The Rhythm Section has been delayed several times (first when star Blake Lively suffered an on-set injury), but here's proof that it's finally really coming... and it looks great! While an adaptation of Mark Burnell's 1999 spy novel would be something for spy fans to be seriously excited about anyway, it's even more exciting because it hails from Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson's EON Productions, the producers behind the James Bond movies. While EON has been venturing outside the realm of 007 lately, this marks their first new foray into the genre that defined them—and that they defined, under the auspices of first-generation Bond producers Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman. And it's not only a new EON spy movie; it's potentially the start of a new, female-fronted EON spy series! (Burnell wrote four Stephanie Patrick thrillers.) Will Lively end up being the Sean Connery of a long lasting Stephanie Patrick film series?

The books are quite good, and remind me of a female Callan. Like Callan, Stephanie ends up working as an assassin for a particularly unpleasant boss in an ultra-secret branch of British Intelligence. And like Callan, she doesn't do this work by choice. Instead she's forced into it by that unpleasant boss. But she's also got very personal motivations (motivations he ruthlessly manipulates) for her initial mission: an opportunity to get revenge on the terrorists responsible for the death of her parents and siblings. Burnell's book is very dark and very serious, and judging from this trailer the movie will be true to that tone. In fact, the movie (directed by Reed Morano and scripted by Burnell himself) looks quite faithful to the book overall, though it's obvious that the ending has been changed, which was pretty much a given. (The villains' plot in the '99 book had eerie similarities to 9/11, which simply wouldn't play in today's world.) And it looks great!

The first of two major EON spy movies coming out next year, The Rhythm Section opens on January 31, 2020. It stars Blake Lively (The Age of Adaline), Jude Law (Spy), Raza Jaffrey (Spooks/MI-5), and Sterling K. Brown (Black Panther).

In a great profile in Saturday's New York Times promoting his new novel Agent Running in the Field, author John le Carré  reveals that his sons' production company, The Ink Factory, are plotting an epic new TV series about his most famous character, spymaster George Smiley. "According to le Carré," asserts the article's author, Tobias Grey, "The Ink Factory now plans to do new television adaptations of all the novels featuring Cold War spy George Smiley - this time in chronological order. 'That means that if you actually go back to the first big conspiracies in The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, you've got to consider how Smiley ages and how young he was at that time,' le Carré says. That would mean finding an actor who can play younger than the Smiley incarnated by Gary Oldman in the film version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Le Carré says that his sons are interested in casting the British actor Jared Harris, whose performance they all admired in the recent TV mini-series Chernobyl." Harris (The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Allied), interestingly, was originally cast in Tomas Alfredson's 2011 le Carré  adaptation Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy as Circus (MI6) chief Percy Alleline, but had to drop out due to scheduling conflicts with Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, in which he played Professor Moriarty. Toby Jones took on the Alleline role, and embodied the character perfectly. Besides Oldman, Smiley has been played in the past by Denholm Elliott, James Mason, Rupert Davies, and, most memorably, Alec Guinness in two famous BBC miniseries.

A new miniseries version of The Spy Who Came In From the Cold was first announced back in 2016 as a follow-up to the hugely successful le Carré miniseries The Night Manager. Le Carré worked with the producers and writer to crack their take on the material, and that work led him to write a whole new sequel to the book, A Legacy of Spies, but did not yield a series. Instead, The Little Drummer Girl (2018) proved to be the next le Carré miniseries, but work continued on The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. Now, apparently, that project has grown in scope and morphed into this one. I've long craved a long-form TV series about le Carré's Circus, devoting a season to each book and dropping in the short stories from The Secret Pilgrim at the appropriate historical moments and, most crucially, finally giving us a television version of the (to date unfilmed) middle book in the Karla trilogy, The Honourable Schoolboy. This sounds like it could turn out to be exactly that! (Though hopefully they'll begin at the real beginning with Call For the Dead, and not The Spy Who Came In From the Cold.) It's a most tantalizing prospect!

Read my George Smiley Primer here.

USA's Bourne spin-off series Treadstone premieres tomorrow night. While I've been surprised by the paucity of advertising in the real world, the network has released many, many clips online over the past month--enough, seemingly, to create a fairly good assembly cut of the pilot episode! But they've saved the best for last. A clip with an extended fight scene and a chase across European rooftops shared today by the International Spy Museum really demonstrates that they appear to have captured the tone and feel of Doug Liman's 2002 movie The Bourne Identity. (The lead actor also seems to have been cast at least partly for bearing a slight resemblance to Matt Damon.) This has me very excited to sample the series tomorrow night! Watch the clip here.

Read my review of the novel that started it all, Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Identity, here.

Treadstone premieres on Tuesday, October 15, at 10/9c on USA.

EW shared the first teaser today for Bravo's upcoming reality competition series Spy Games. According to EW, the show "features 10 contestants living together in a large house and attempting to gather intel on their fellow players while competing in challenges designed by three former spies, alumni of the CIA, Secret Service, and FBI. Players will be eliminated until one remains to claim a $100,000 prize." Apparently the format is in some ways based on a real-life World War II-era scheme known as Station S, "in which civilians were recruited and relocated to a 'remote estate' to be trained as spies." Spy Games, which is hosted by model and martial artist Mia Kang, premieres on Monday, January 20, 2020, at 10/9c. I tried to embed the video, but Bravo's own awful, awful video platform (which is really quite terrible) automatically plays a Real Housewives promo instead. So check out the trailer here.
Thanks to Jeff for the intel alert!

Black Widow will be the first of Marvel's superspies to get her own movie (preceding Shang Chi by a year), and today Marvel released the first trailer. And it looks pretty cool! I'm honestly surprised about how many images come directly from the various Black Widow comics over the years. Clearly, the character's first standalone film will contain some flashbacks to Natasha Romanoff's early days as a child raised to be a KGB assassin in Moscow's infamous Red Room. Scarlett Johansson has played the role in seven Marvel movies (most recently the all-time box office champ Avengers: Endgame), but this will be her first solo feature.


If you want to play catch-up on the comics and see where some of those images in the trailer come from, there are some collections out there that make that possible. (And even more are due next year in the lead up to the movie!) Three beautifully prodcued Marvel Premiere hardcovers collect this secret agent's most essential adventures in matching volumes. Black Widow: The Sting of the Widow presents the character's first appearance (in a silly costume in an issue of Iron Man) and earliest solo adventures from the early Seventies, after she'd gotten an Emma Peel makeover, ending up in the black catsuit with which she's still most closely associated. These early Black Widow comics will surely be of interest to collectors and hardcore fans, but casual fans looking for a great introduction to the character are better off picking up the second volume in the series, Black Widow: Web of Intrigue first.

Black Widow: Web of Intrigue offers an excellent primer on the character containing some of her classic appearances from the early Eighties, including an excellent comic drawn by my second-favorite spy artist (after Steranko), Paul Gulacy.  (Look for a cameo appearance by Michael Caine!) Black Widow: Web of Intrigue contains this and several other seminal tales of the red-haired Russian superspy. A third volume, Black Widow: The Itsy Bitsy Spider collects a pair of Marvel Knights stories from the late Nineties (including one by Queen & Country scribe Greg Rucka).

My two favorite modern-day Widow storylines have yet to receive the hardcover treatment, sadly, but are available in a pair of out-of-print trade paperbacks. (They'll also, happily, be collected in a new single volume next year!) Richard K. Morgan's Black Widow: Homecoming and Black Widow: The Things They Say About Her put the focus on espionage above superheroics and are among the very best Marvel spy stories of this century. Other recent Widow stories include Black Widow: Deadly Origin, Black Widow and the Marvel Girls, Black Widow: The Name of the Rose and Black Widow: Kiss or Kill. Most of the character's adventures with Daredevil from the 1970s are included in Essential Daredevil: Volume 3. as well as the color Daredevil Epic Collection: A Woman Called Widow.

Deadline reports that Marv Films (Matthew Vaughn's UK-based production company) "is plotting 'something like seven more Kingsman films' as part of the company’s expansion plans." That's... ambitious! But other spy franchises have certainly sustained that many or more. At least one of those seven films is expected to be a spinoff centered on the American spies (including Channing Tatum and Jeff Bridges) introduced in the second movie, Statesman. If previous plans mooted by Vaughn are still in effect, another is likely to be a third and supposedly final movie about the characters from the first two films, Eggsy (Taron Edgerton) and Harry Hart (Colin Firth), said to close out that trilogy. 

The next Kingsman movie we see will definitely be the WWI-set prequel The King's Man, long in the can and delayed by the global pandemic. That's currently slated for February, but likely to change again. It stars Harris Dickinson, Ralph Fiennes, Gemma Arterton, Rhys Ifans, Tom Hollander, and Daniel Brühl. With a cast like that an an exciting new time period less well mined by other spy franchises (and even a more serious tone judging from the trailers), I'm hopeful some more of these upcoming Kingsman films are sequels to The King's Man. Perhaps Dickinson and Fiennes will get as many movies as Edgerton and Firth.

According to Marv Group CEO Zygi Kamasa (per the trade), the company also has a Kingsman TV series in the works. 

Theodore J. Flicker's 1967 James Coburn satire The President's Analyst is one of my very favorite spy movies. (It's also Coburn's best spy movie... Sorry, Derek Flint.) When describing it to people, I always say that the comedy holds up surprisingly well today... sadly. America is still facing many of the same social  issues Flicker sent up over fifty years ago (from institutional racism to monolithic Big Tech), and it's easy to imagine a remake. Now, Paramount is imagining one... with The Daily Show host Trevor Noah on board to produce and potentially star. According to The Hollywood Reporter, former Obama White House staffer Pat Cunnane will write the script. The premise, about a psychotherapist burdened with all of the President's top secret stresses, will obviously be familiar ground for him! According to his publisher, Cunnane served as "President Barack Obama’s senior writer and deputy director of messaging at the White House, where he worked for six years in many roles."

On the eve of Killing Eve's series finale (airing this weekend), Deadline reports that "producer Sid Gentle Films is in early stage development on [a] spin-off, though it hasn’t got a greenlight yet." The spin-off (for BBC America and AMC Networks) would focus on Fiona Shaw's character, Carolyn Martens... but not as the cool, commanding spymaster we met in the show's first season. Instead, the potential spin-off would focus on her early days with MI6. From what we know of her history on the show, that could be incredibly compelling! Presumably such a series would focus on her time on Russia Desk and in Moscow during the waning days of the Cold War, when she recruited a crucial asset. I'm not so interested in this potential series because of its Killing Eve connection (though I do love that show's wit and tone and performances, and it would be nice to see them continue), but because of its setting. We don't see many Cold War era series, and when they do come along, I'll always be watching! It would be particularly cool to see one set in the late 80s with that focus. The Americans of course reveled in its 80s setting, but that was focused on Soviet agents undercover in America. A show about a British agent operating in Moscow at that time would be very different! 

No sooner has Anthony Horowitz completed his trilogy of excellent, period-set James Bond novels than the next iteration of Ian Fleming Publications' literary continuations appears on the horizon via HarperCollins: Double or Nothing, by Kim Sherwood. And this one forsakes 007 (for the moment, anyway) to put the crosshairs on 003, 004, and 009... and the whole Double O Section! It should be unsurprising, given the name of this site, that I find that prospect tantalizing. Since I was a kid, I've been very curious to read about the adventures of the other 00 agents! 

Usually when we meet them in the movies, they're already dead or just about to die. The only other active agents we've ever really gotten to know well were Suzie Kew and Briony Thorne in Jim Lawrence's Daily Express James Bond comic strip, Nomi in No Time to Die... and I suppose we ought to also count Scarlett Papava in Sebastian Faulks's thoroughly disappointing Devil May Care. (Read my review here.)

Now, I know. You might ask, "What's the point of a James Bond continuation novel without 007?" To which I would point out that this has actually worked very successfully in the past! Some of my very favorite Bond continuation novels ever are Kate Westbrook's (aka Samantha Weinberg's) Moneypenny Diaries trilogy. (Read my review of the second one, Secret Servant, here, and read my in-depth interview with Weinberg about writing the series here.) Weinberg put the spotlight on Moneypenny, and created thrilling and original narratives in the familiar setting of Fleming's Secret Service. 

Kim Sherwood has already demonstrated her bona fides in her Twitter feed and on her website, and it sounds like she knows her spy stuff. (Not only is she well versed in Fleming, but she's also a Modesty Blaise fan!) I can't wait to see what she does with Fleming's supporting characters and the new 00 agents she creates in her Double O Section trilogy! The first book, Double or Nothing, is due out September 1 in Britain. A signed edition with stenciled page edges is also available exclusively from Waterstones (pictured below). No U.S. publication date has been announced so far, but Sherwood recently hinted on Twitter that such an announcement might be imminent. 

AIP’s Vincent Price vehicle Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine was one of the first Sixties Bond parodies I ever heard of, long before I actually saw it. In a way, that was a good thing, because it afforded the movie years to percolate in my imagination, growing far beyond a potential it could possibly live up to when I finally saw it. Ultimately I was bound for disappointment, because, let’s face it, Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine is a far better title than it is a movie. But because of all those years that it lived in my mind as pure potential, I went into it for the first time after college (during college I had tried in vain to track down a 35mm print to program on campus) with a pre-built nostalgia, and nostalgia is a wonderful—and possibly essential—cushion for a movie like this. If you remember it from your childhood, you’ll probably enjoy it more than it deserves to be enjoyed. And the same can be said if you’ve somehow approximated such a nostalgia like I did. But even after that lengthy apologia for liking the movie, I have to admit that I only really like certain parts of it. Most of it is pretty bad.

Made at the height of the Sixties (and here I’m grudgingly conceding that that phrase, which I usually use very positively, can also have negative connotations), Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine is a as much a blend of what was popular then as those Seltzer and Friedberg “parody” movies (usually with “movie” in the title) were in the early 2000s. (Though to be fair it’s a lot better than those!) And since it was made by American International Pictures, it’s a blend of its time that particularly reflects that studio’s output. Therefore it’s as much a parody of their two bread-and-butter genres—Frankie and Annette beach movies and Poe-inspired Vincent Price horror movies—as it is of James Bond. While I’m indifferent to beach movies, I do love those Poe movies… so I’m not being an espionage chauvinist when I say that the only bits that really work are those inspired by the spy craze. And even then the hit-to-miss ratio is probably 50/50... at best.

Appropriately, Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine opens with one of the strangest title sequences of any Sixties spy movie. Under a rather great and undeniably infectious theme song performed by the Supremes (available on the stellar Ace Records Sixties spy theme compilation Come Spy With Us), instead of the Bond-style credits most spy spoofs opted for, Bikini Machine treats us to Claymation, courtesy of Gumby creator Art Clokey. And the entire Claymation sequence is built around the stupidest thing in the whole movie: a pair of stupid gold elf shoes with little bells on their pointed toes that Price’s character wears to justify his name, Dr. Goldfoot. I’m aware that I just used the word “stupid” twice in that sentence, but that’s because these shoes are seriously stupid. I don’t know whose idea they were, but I sure am glad that Ken Adam wasn’t struck by a similar necessity to equip Gert Frobe with jingling golden thimbles.

After the titles, we meet an attractive robot woman (Susan Hart) in a trenchcoat and fedora walking through the streets of San Francisco. We learn that she’s a robot woman through a series of stupid gags (there’s that word again… are you detecting a pattern?), like a car crashing into her and getting wrecked (because she’s metal, get it??), or two bank robbers escaping and crashing into her and getting knocked down (because she’s metal!), then shooting her full of holes with no discernable result (because… you’ve figured it out by now, haven’t you?). Then we meet Frankie Avalon being annoying in a restaurant and sporting a really annoying helmet of hair. (Uh-oh. There’s another word that bore repeating twice in one sentence!) The robot woman comes in and drinks a sip of his milk and then spouts out gallons of the white stuff (all from that one sip, apparently) through the “bullet holes” in her body. (John Cleese would recycle the same questionable gag years later in that Schweppes commercial on the original Licence to Kill VHS.) Despite her leakage, the holes (which aren’t visible) don’t seem to have damaged her mechanics one bit, and in minutes she’s successfully picked up Avalon and is heading back to his apartment with him.

Avalon is Craig Gamble, a bumbling agent of Secret Intelligence Command (or SIC, which I think is supposed to pass for a joke) who decorates his walls with a picture of Sherlock Holmes, apparently for inspiration. The robot woman is named Diane, and she talks with an annoying put-on Southern accent and, we and Gamble soon come to learn, wears only a gold lamé bikini underneath her fashionable spy trenchcoat! (The latter makes up for the former.) But what made her pick him?

The answer comes back at Dr. Goldfoot’s lair, where we meet the diabolical mastermind and his sidekick, Igor (occasional Elvis cohort Jack Mullaney). While Vincent Price deserves an iconic entrance in any movie he makes, it’s kind of undercut here by those stupid gold shoes, which really are quite stupid. (Have I mentioned that?) I am not a production designer, nor a fashion maven, but I am confident I could have designed much better gold shoes for the same purpose. And regular readers will know that I am not given to making such claims. Anyway, it transpires at Goldfoot HQ that the idiotic Igor programmed poor Diane to go after the wrong man. While Gamble hasn’t got two pennies to rub together, she was supposed to be seducing Avalon’s beach buddy Dwayne Hickman, as millionaire playboy Todd Armstrong. (As either an inside joke or laziness, Hickman’s character is named after Avalon’s character in Ski Party, and Avalon’s Craig Gamble is named after Hickman’s character from that movie.) To Igor’s credit, the two actors do look a lot alike (in a very generic Sixties heartthrob way), and that fact actually makes the movie a little bit confusing. The fact that Gamble turned out to be a secret agent was just bad luck—or bad scriptwriting. Luckily Dr. Goldfoot can operate Diane by remote control, and he’s able to reprogram her to suddenly walk out on Craig and set off to lay a trap for Todd.

Diane’s trap for Todd involves bending over and pulling her trenchcoat far enough aside to expose a glimpse of that golden behind as she pretends to inspect a flat tire. It also involves Dr. Goldfoot somehow taking remote control of Todd’s car, and driving him backwards until he sees Diane. (Dr. Goldfoot possesses a magical universal remote long before its time, and uses it primarily for making cars drive the wrong direction and various things blow up. He also threatens people with it a lot, though I’m not sure if he’s threatening to blow them up or to reverse them.) One glimpse of Diane, however, is enough to make Todd forget that it might be a little suspicious and just a tad weird to find yourself suddenly pulled backwards by an unseen force while driving. Their meeting also offers the movie’s choicest bit of dialogue—and, yes, it’s every bit as sexist as you would expect/hope for from a movie called Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine.

“Thank heavens you came along, darling, I’m completely flat!” declares Diane as she opens the front of her trenchcoat.

“Well, I wouldn’t say that,” replies Todd, ogling her gold bikini-clad breasts jutting out of the London Fog.

So what’s all this about? Well, sadly all of Dr. Goldfoot’s ingenuity is expended on a simple gold digging scheme. Diane is supposed to get millionaire Todd to marry her and then make him sign over power of attorney to her (which is of course the same as signing it to Dr. Goldfoot). Honestly, I find it a little disappointing that Dr. Goldfoot has the ingenuity and the wherewithal to build perfectly human-looking robots and universal remotes that control anything, and yet the best scheme he can come up with is gold digging. Why not aim higher, Dr. G? Why not strive for world domination? (Well... that's what sequels are for!)

Anyway, Igor’s error with the target has accidentally tipped off an agent of SIC to the mad doctor’s big gold digging plot. Fortunately for Dr. Goldfoot, though, he’s not a very good agent.

Gamble’s code number is only Double O and a half. “Why they won’t even let you carry a gun until you get a digit instead of a fraction!” yells his boss and uncle, Uncle Donald (genuine comic genius Fred Clark, of Zotz! and Hammer's Curse of the Mummy's Tomb). Donald’s not really in any position to berate his nephew, though, because he’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer himself. When Igor shows up in his office dressed in what looks like a Sherlock Holmes Halloween costume (deerstalker and Inverness cape) claiming to be SIC director Inspector Abernathy, Donald believes him despite Gamble’s protestations.

The gags in this movie are mostly lame (as opposed to lamé), and recycled for the hundredth time. When an upper file cabinet drawer is closed, a lower one pops out knocking someone on the head. A beautiful girl robot is mis-programmed (Igor!) and starts talking like a Brooklyn gorilla. When Igor tries to spy on his boss using a periscope, Dr. Goldfoot splashes some ink on the top end giving Igor a black ring around his eye from the viewer. (Actually, that one's still kind of funny.) Even the spy-specific jokes tend to fall flat a lot of the time. Igor shows Dr. G a new attaché case (pronounced the American way, not the British “attachee”) with its own From Russia With Love-style gadgetry. What surprises does it have in store?  Would you believe a fist with a boxing glove that pops out and punches someone when they open it? (Neatly and obviously accomplished by situating a stuntman underneath the table the case is set on, easily able to reach through a hole in the table and the case.)

While the jokes often fall flat, highlights come in the form of random outbursts of go-go dancing, whether from Dr. Goldfoot’s bikini girls (whose default mode seems to be set as “go-go,” befitting their gold bikini costumes) or in nightclubs. (There’s a odd number from a band all dressed up as Fred Flintstone credited as Sam and the Apemen and accompanied by—you guessed it—go-go girls. But for some reason the go-go girls aren’t dressed in fur bikinis, just regular bikinis.)

Price himself camps it up to the extreme (surprise, surprise), parodying his own other AIP performances and even donning costumes from a few of them at times. To that end, the movie becomes more and more of an AIP in-joke as it proceeds (complete with an Annette Funicello cameo), and eventually Gamble and Todd end up in Dr. Goldfoot’s torture chamber, getting a tour that includes portraits of all his illustrious forebears (again bearing certain resemblances to famous Price roles past) and lots of familiar torture implements. It’s poor Todd who ends up strapped down beneath the swinging pendulum from The Pit and the Pendulum.

But then, in its final act, something unexpected happens. The movie becomes… really fun! The undisputable high point of the film is the fifteen-minute-long final chase through the streets of San Francisco in which the heroes and villains keep changing vehicles. It’s accomplished mostly through obvious rear projection, but the San Francisco scenery is quite real. The heroes (Gamble and Todd) start out in a gadget-laden Cadillac spy car whose gags include inflatable seats that inflate when you don’t want them to and a steering wheel that switches sides between the driver and the passenger at inopportune moments. The villains start out in a motorcycle and sidecar that become detached in the course of the chase and eventually manage to re-attach themselves. When Dr. Goldfoot uses his magic remote control device to blow up their spy car, the heroes swipe a red convertible (a Sunbeam Alpine, like Bond drove in Dr. No), and when the motorcycle and sidecar end up smashed on the front of a train, the villains (their faces coated in black soot, just like a cartoon character’s after surviving such a collision) appropriate an E-Type Jag. Eventually the heroes are on a bicycle while the baddies commandeer a San Francisco cable car—and manage to drive it right off its tracks and all over town! By the end the good guys are in a boat on a boat trailer careening wildly down San Francisco’s steep hills. It’s all pretty fun, really, in a typically zany way.

The end titles feature those stupid gold shoes again (though not Claymation this time), performing a disembodied dance (accomplished simply—and effectively—enough with a dancer dressed all in black dancing in front of a pitch black background) alongside gold bikini-clad go-go dancers—and similarly disembodied writhing gold bikini tops and bottoms. (That’s actually a really cool effect!) All of which handily beats (and makes up for) the Claymation opening in my book.

Even though Doctor Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine leaves things open for a sequel with Dr. Goldfoot and Igor surviving their cable car crash (and subsequent bombardment by gunboats) and turning up on the plane winging our victorious heroes off to Europe, the end credits instead tout the next beach movie, The Girl in the Glass Bikini. Which kind of brings us back to this movie’s title. Say it out loud to yourself. Think about it. Based on that title more than my (or any) review, I suspect you already know if this movie is for you or not.

Los Angeles' legendary New Beverly Cinema (owned by director Quentin Tarantino) blew my mind today by announcing that they'll be showcasing movies helmed by exploitation auteur Lindsay Shonteff in late February! And the line-up includes two of his spy movies. No. 1 of the Secret Service (1977) is the top of bill at 7:30pm on Monday, February 27 (paired with "brutal British crime film" The Bullet Machine), and The Million Eyes of Sumuru (1967) closes out the double feature on Tuesday, February 28 (along with Curse of the Voodoo) at 9:25pm. 

Shonteff first became associated with the spy genre at the height of Bondmania when he introduced the world to Charles Vine in The Second Best Secret Agent in the Whole Wide World (aka Licensed to Kill) in 1965. (Yes, the movie whose Sammy Davis, Jr. theme song is energetically sung by all the Circus staff in Tomas Alfredson's 2011 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy!) Star Tom Adams reprised the role in two Sixties sequels which Shonteff sat out (Where the Bullets Fly and Somebody's Stolen Our Russian Spy), but Shonteff clearly felt a close attachment to the character, because he revived him under slightly altered names (for legal reasons) throughout the rest of his career with ever diminishing returns. The 1970s saw first Nicky Henson and then The New Avengers' Gareth Hunt essaying the role of "Charles Bind" in spy spoofs No. 1 of the Secret Service (1977) and The Man from S*E*X (1979), respectively, while 1990 found Michael Howe playing a Lamborghini Countach driving No. 1 in the nigh unwatchable Number One Gun. Just prior to No. 1 of the Secret Service (which one-time Bond contender Richard Todd steals as the urbane villain Arthur Loveday), Shonteff tried his hand at a serious spy movie adapting Len Deighton's Spy Story, the unofficial fourth "Harry Palmer" movie. 

But his finest hour in the genre may have come in 1967 when he updated the Sax Rohmer "Yellow Peril" femme fatale Sumuru for the spy craze, with Goldfinger's golden girl Shirley Eaton once more altering her skin color to play the Asian supervillain. Nope, there's nothing remotely PC about any of it, but if you can get past the appalling casting conventions of the time, The Million Eyes of Sumuru is a thoroughly entertaining Eurospy romp! It stars Eurospy stalwart George Nader (Jerry Cotton himself!) and Dr. Goldfoot foil Frankie Avalon as the intrepid agents who go up against Eaton. Amazingly, the New Beverly will be screening a 35mm IB Tech print of this cult classic!

Now let's be greedy and hope that perhaps this Shonteff celebration will continue into March with screenings of The Second Best Secret Agent in the Whole Wide World, Spy Story, and the two Big Zapper movies. (The Big Zapper was Shonteff's female private detective turned spy, an Emma Peel wannabe who could shoot lasers out of her... well, it was the Seventies and it was Shonteff, so you can guess.)

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