Paul Gelder Editor
After more than 20 years in weekly newspapers, as reporter, film critic and finally editor, Paul gave up his deskbound job looking for new adventures with Yachting Monthly.

Four months after joining in 1990, he volunteered for his first blue water passage, sailing from the Azores to Plymouth. Two years later he crewed on the first 5,000-mile leg of the British Steel Challenge, to Rio de Janeiro, and subsequently wrote a book, InterSpray's race around the World. His other book, The Loneliest Race, was about the 1994-95 BOC Challenge Solo Round the World Yacht Race.

Paul came to sailing late, in 1982, aboard a Cape Cod catboat, followed by a 20ft Robert Tucker Princess. He currently sails a Telstar trimaran.

Paul is a committee member of the Ocean Cruising Club.

Miles Kendall Deputy Editor
Miles was lucky enough to grow up by the Helford River in Cornwall and set sail in his own Optimist aged six. He also enjoyed West Country family cruises and trips across to Brittany, first on board the family Ecume du Mer then on a Spinner 28.

His career as a journalist started at The Lymington Times where he also enjoyed the evening racing. Miles joined Yachting Monthly as a feature writer in 1998 and was literally thrown in at the deep end – demonstrating lifejackets in the Solent in April.

He cut his offshore teeth sailing from Durban to Cape Town, around the Cape of Good Hope, as part of the Clipper round the world race. He has chartered boats in Greece, Turkey, Spain, Italy and Thailand. At home he sailed a Dart 18 catamaran from Gosport as well as the family Dufour 31. Further afield he has sailed in the waters of Finland, Portugal and Morocco.

After three years at YM, Miles headed east to Hong Kong where he was deputy editor of Action Asia, an adventure travel magazine. Three days after arriving in the former colony he hooked up with The Times Clipper fleet again for the 400nm leg to the Philippines.

Miles, a new and proud father, rejoined YM as Assistant Editor in July 2003 and became Deputy Editor in 2004.

Dick Durham News & Features Editor
Dick was taught how to hand, reef and steer by his father, the late Richard Stephens Durham, himself the son of a master mariner who started as a boy on a Cape Horn windjammer. As a lad Dick explored the creeks and rivers of Essex, Kent and Suffolk in a collection of dinghies and dayboats.

When he left school he signed on as mate of the Thames sailing barge Cambria and delivered the last cargo under sail alone with Bob Roberts whose biography he went on to write (The Last Sailorman). Later he wrote about passages made up to the Dutch Frisian Islands in his engineless cutter Almita for YM. He described his East Coast cruises in On & Offshore, Cruising the Thames and the East Coast. He now sails a Contessa 32, Minstrel Boy, down Channel and across to France, Belgium and Holland. On pal's boats he has cruised Brittany, the Channel Islands, across the Bay of Biscay as far as Belle Isle and up to Norway, Sweden and the Shetland Islands.

He wrote the biography of former YM editor Maurice Griffiths (The Magician of the Swatchways) and was commissioned to write the centenary history of the Sussex Yacht Club (Where the River Meets the Sea). Dick worked as a journalist in Fleet Street for 20 years before joining YM in March 2001. Married with two daughters and a son, he lives in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex. Contact Dick.

Chris Beeson Technical Editor
'YM's Technical Editor Chris Beeson, 38, is a sailor with over 40,000 miles experience in the Caribbean, Mediterranean, Pacific and South China Sea. He has completed two transatlantic passages and competed in several Fastnet Races and world championship sailing events. His ocean experience led him to write The Handbook of Survival At Sea, published in 2003.

Chris also scooped a top prize at this year's London Boat Show. In the Lewmar Challenge he hoisted a mainsail in just 26.5 seconds, beating Ellen MacArthur, Dee Caffari and Shirley Robertson.

Kieran Flatt Production Editor
As a child, Kieran grew up in Southern Africa and the Cayman Islands, where he learned to sail on an elderly windsurfer. At the age of 12 he learned about ‘proper’ boats (those you could  sit in, rather than stand on) when he fell into the freezing-cold waters of the English Channel. He's capsized, broached and pitch-poled various dinghies – from a Laser, Merlin-Rocket, 505 and a home-made Sydney Harbour-style Skiff. Kieran began training as a naval architect but, dropped out to work a sailing instructor and bosun at Dinard Yacht Club in Brittany. Back in Britain, he talked his way onto a succession of keelboats and racing yachts, from Darings to Sigma 38s and completed a brace of Fastnet races and a score of other offshore races. Nowadays he cruises a his long-keeled Twister sloop out of Portsmouth, sometimes as far afield as Biscay but mainly in sea areas Wight, Portland and Plymouth. He joined YM in 2007 after working as a food critic and editing a business journal for the best part of a decade.

Graham Snook Photographer
Yachting Monthly's photographer was given an Optimist dinghy at the age of four and by the age of eight had 'stolen' his mother's camera.

Sailing and photography didn't come together until Graham saw an article in a sailing magazine about the celebrated marine photographer Kos. Inspired, he went on to study photography at college in Falmouth. After a chance meeting with a sports photographer, Graham got six weeks work experience with Allsport, one of the biggest sports picture agencies in the world and moved to London three days after graduating to work as a darkroom technician and photographic assistant. He joined YM in March 1999.

His father runs a yacht charter business in Falmouth. Click here to contact Graham.

Maxine Heath Editorial Artist
Maxine has been sailing since 1970 and has worked at Yachting Monthly since 1979.

Early years were spent racing GP 14s, Cadets and Snipes. A period of cruising the South Coast, Channel Islands and France followed. Until recently Maxine was the co-owner of a Hunter Sonata, racing in a fleet of 24 on the River Medway. Racing successes included winning the Medway Sonata Spring Series and coming second in the Sonata Eastern Area Championships.

Maxine draws the sail and general accommodation plans for our monthly boat tests, Second Look, and One Man and His Boat, as well as for our Second Hand group focus series.

Jane Fenton Editorial Assistant
Jane started sailing in dinghies with her father at Christchurch, near
Bournemouth. She raced Enterprises and Albacores - a two-handed 15ft dinghy.

She has cruised homewaters, the Med and the Caribbean and crossed the
Atlantic with the Atlantic Rally for Cruisers (ARC).

She enjoys sailing the family-owned Westerly Centaur that is kept at Christchurch.

Ben Meakins Geoff Pack Scholar
Ben Meakins joined YM in January 2008 as the latest Geoff Pack scholar. Ben first went sailing at the age of four weeks, and crossed the Channel aged six months, during which time he fell out of a bunk and hit his head as the boat fell off a wave.

In spite of, or perhaps because of this, he has since spent every spare minute on the water - racing and cruising a variety of sailing dinghies, rowing skiffs and keelboats.  He learned to sail and row in a Nutshell pram dinghy which still gets an occasional outing, but is more often to be found sailing on the family Sigma 38, Festina Lente.