About Us
Peter Duck—that’s a strange name for a brokerage business, how on earth did you arrive at that?
Well my family has grown up in boats, played in boats, worked in boats and we even live on a boat. When my daughter was very young I used to read her stories from Arthur Ransoms Swallows and Amazons at bedtime. The idyllic descriptions of children free to idle away their summer holidays in there own little sailing boats greatly influenced me as a young boy and in time these wonderful stories became my daughters own favourite tales. Now 70 odd years after they were written, you would find yourself today as a parent dragged before a court for neglect for letting kids row and sail on a lake unaccompanied by an adult or without life-jackets, never mind letting them camp on a island overnight.
The happiness and simple pleasure one person or a whole family can have from the smallest canoe to a squillion pounds worth of luxury craft is the same. All boats exude the same sort of magic and foster an independence of spirit and well being that cannot be found anywhere but afloat. It is ‘Peter Ducks’ mission to help everybody find this pleasure and on this site can be found a craft that will help you steer a course towards this nirvana. You will also find all sorts of bits of information if you look around, just as if you had known ‘Peter Duck’. So you cry who is or was Peter Duck.
In Arthur Ransome’s book Racundra’s First Cruise, not a novel but a true tale of his cruising adventures in the Baltic. Ransome introduced Peter Duck based on a real person, Captain Schmel, the ‘ancient mariner’ described in the book. His past at sea was never fully explained but he had raced against the Cutty Sark in the great tea clipper races from China and was an experienced and perhaps a notorious old sea dog. Ransome used him as a template for his adventurous old sailor. Peter Duck is an ideal adventure to read to children at bedtime just before you tuck them up in their bunk although the evil pirate ‘Black Jake’ maybe rather frightening for timid adults.
You can get more information at http://www.arthur-ransome.org/ar/literary/.
So when we were casting around for the right name for our brokerage business it did not take long for Peter Duck to be suggested, he was the most experienced and saltiest old sea dog ever !
We all need a metaphorical ‘Peter Duck’ to help and guide us through the complicated things in our boating life, a friend we can trust, with the experience to sort through the red tape and to make sure we do not meet up with a ‘Black Jake’, well that’s what we are aiming to make sure does not happen to you with our services.
Wishing you fair winds and good sailing.