"We decided to sell the business, buy a yacht and clear off into the wide blue yonder"

Now John, 82, of Kirkbymoorside, is the author of three books about his experiences, to be launched simultaneously in early April.

The autobiographical works each cover a different period in John's life, leading up to that epic voyage. The first deals with his childhood, growing up in Dringhouses in York, playing on - and in - the brick ponds there. He joined the RAF in the early 1950s, aged 17, and serviced propeller-powered aeroplanes in Singapore for two and a half years. He did a bit of sailing round those islands, as far south as Indonesia.

On his return to Yorkshire, he got into architecture and started doing up properties. He and his wife had a tea shop in Hutton-le-Hole, which they sold to buy a gallery in Pickering, in an old chapel at the bottom of the market place. He got into picture framing and pottery. They had three daughters.

It was at this point, in 1980, that the family decided to take a trip from Scarborough to Singapore - by boat.

"We decided to sell the business, buy a yacht and clear off into the wide blue yonder," said John. "Normal business and normal routine can be pretty boring."

After years of working hard and saving, eventually John had enough money for the craft, a standard sailing yacht called a Moody 33.

The one thing he didn't have was much in the way of actual sailing experience. Aside from his days sailing in the RAF decades previously, he had done a five-day skipper and "competent crew" course in Scotland, and he took the new yacht from Scarborough up to the Farne islands and back for a bit of training. "That was the extent of it," he says.

The family's expedition is the subject of John's second book: "A Yorkshire Family Afloat". The crew consisted of John and his wife, their three daughters, and a "son" he borrowed from friends.

"I thought I should have another bloke on board," John says, "and that resulted in Peter joining us."

The trip had an inauspicious start. "We set off from Scarborough just as the lighthouse man hoisted a woven basket in the shape of a cone. That meant that there is a storm expected from the north; Force 8. So we set off in a howling gale. By then I'd had about two weeks' sailing experience. But we survived it."

Their 13-month voyage, detailed in the book, was cut short in the eastern Mediterranean by a ferocious storm that almost sank them. "We spent 12 hours constantly bailing water," says John. Normally you don't have to bail a yacht - the pumps do the work. "It was all good fun in the end," he shrugs. "But we got into Port Said and decided it wasn't a good idea to cross the Indian Ocean in this tub." The family ended their journey, and spent a month sailing and scuba-diving near the Suez canal.

He says his children were changed by the experience. "They all enjoyed it. They look back on it with great pleasure and they love the stories. They wrote a lot during the voyage. Poetry, descriptions of the storm that nearly sank us."

John's youngest daughter, aged 16 at the time, sat her A-levels at Scarborough College on their return to England.

John's third book, "Endeavour", covers his biggest and most ambitious adventure. In 1987, having spent the intervening years as a sailing instructor, taking crews to Holland, the Canary Islands, and the Baltic, he decided to sail around the world - a two-and-a-half year, 40,000 nautical mile "circumnavigation" following the route of Captain James Cook.

"I wanted to do one major voyage, not just pratting about teaching," he says. With the help of others, he designed a yacht that would be up to the epic task. "It resulted in a yacht that was strong, tough, powerful enough to get round Cape Horn.

"It was a crazy idea really because it was obviously going to lose money. This was not to be family. This was just going to be a group of people I would recruit."

He recruited a crew of people who were willing, even if some were lacking in experience. "One was escaping from a job with the electricity company," John says. "Bored to tears, he wanted to do something different. He'd never sailed and couldn't swim. I made him learn to swim 50 metres. He would get sea sick below deck."

On board, they had the radio and nearly 200 books on pilotage and navigation. John paints an evocative picture of life on the ocean waves. "At night there's no other light apart from the stars. The dome of the sky is spectacular, in a manner that we cannot appreciate on land. We used to count the number of shooting stars. The sky was full."

The sea at night can be equally bright, he says, with bioluminescence - glowing organisms. He talks of whales cruising 50 metres below the hull, outlined by the eerie glow. "We saw sharks, turtles, lots of flying fish, many whales. There was life all around. Some of it strange but really wonderful."

He was inspired to record some of the wildlife in his notes by the Kon-Tiki expedition. "I was a great admirer of it. It was so well written about by the crew. It was a wonderful influence. They were better artists than me, though." John's notes contain his own illustrations of animals such as a leaping whale, as well as written descriptions. "I got all poetic about albatrosses," he admits.

They left England in 1987, and arrived in Australia in 1988 - the bicentennial year of the arrival of the James Cook in Botany Bay. It would be another year of adventure before they were back in England.

John is very familiar with James Cook's own famous writings, and includes many of them in his book, but he himself puts it very simply: "We had a marvellous time."

John is launching his books at an exhibition at the Moorside Room in Church Street in his home town of Kirkbymoorside on April 9 and 10, from 10am to 4pm each day. As well as the books on sale, there will be a show of his illustrations, charts and objects from the voyages. Entry will be free.