Anne Hammick

Very few members have contributed as much for as long and as diligently as Past Commodore Anne Hammick. For a lifetime of fostering and encouraging ocean cruising in small craft, Anne is the recipient of the 2025 OCC Lifetime Award.

Anne’s cruising experience and support of other cruisers through her writing is exemplary. Her ocean sailing began with her qualifying passage from the Canaries to Antigua in 1975 onboard lolaire and was followed by many years of passage making together with her sister Liz. Since her first Atlantic crossing she has completed a further seven Atlantic passages, six of them as skipper/navigator, including the 1981 Two-Handed Transatlantic Race aboard Miss Alfred Marks, a sponsored Freedom 35, and four in their own Wrestler of Leigh, the Rustler 31 aboard which Anne still lives.

Anne has given much to the cruising community through her pilotage books and her articles and is well known to all in the DCC and beyond. She has made a major contribution to the safety and enjoyment of cruisers through editorship of RCC Pilotage Foundation cruising guides, writing the first edition of Atlantic Islands (Azores, Madeira, Canaries and Cape Verdes) in 1988 and taking it through six subsequent editions. Other cruising guides which she has updated at different times include Atlantic Spain & Portugal, The Baltic Sea and Islas Baleares. She updated several editions of The Atlantic Crossing Guide and wrote Ocean Cruising On A Budget based on her own first-hand experience. Anne took over as editor of the prestigious biannual OCC Journal Flying Fish in 1990, remaining in post for 35 years and, in doing so, inspired readers to sail their dreams and share their adventures in writing. In 2016, after a long period of service on the General Committee and Board, Anne was elected OCC Commodore, serving until 2019. Despite doubts in some quarters, she handled this successfully alongside her editorial role with no assistance other than from a small team of proof re