Just as a close-hauled sailor likes to feel the wind on his face or the balance of the helm - whether it's a stout wooden tiller or a smart stainless steel wheel with a hand-sewn leather cover - so magazine editors relish feedback from readers.

At Yachting Monthly, we've been poring over the results of the latest reader research from our questionnaire in the July issue that many of you took the trouble to complete.

Apparently, you are spending an average of three hours 13 minutes reading the magazine - 43 minutes longer than four years ago. We salute your commitment to cruising with so many other distractions in this Internet age.

We also learned the average reader's boat is 33ft LOA and almost 40% of your boats are longer than 35ft . You spend an average of £2,130 on chandlery, sails and antifouling each year. Your feedback will help us trim our sails so we can produce a magazine that best reflects all our readers' diverse interests.

We get all kinds of feedback and tips from readers - via email, phone and the rare handwritten letter. There was the skipper/farmer who treated his sailing crew's itchy skin rash
- a condition known as 'gunwale bum' - with udder cream. By coincidence, a new product, 'Yottie Bottie', was sent to the YM office this month to treat the same ailment. See page 89!

Speaking of bottoms, there was the YM reader who confessed to pumping his Lavac toilet while still seated on the 'throne' - he vacuumed himself to the seat. Finally, there was the chap who radioed a Mayday - but, crucially, forgot to add his latitude and longitude. 'What's your position, please?' the Coastguard officer asked. 'Actually', he replied, in a somewhat pompous voice, 'I'm manager of a rather important High Street bank... but I don't see what that's got to do with it!' In these days of sinking assets, toxic debt and 'blame-it-on-the-bankers', he might have considered following the entreaty of sailing pioneeer Col 'Blondie' Hasler - and drowned like a gentleman!

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Joining the YM crew this month is Perry Cleveland-Peck, our new deputy editor. Perry's previous adventures as a journalist include paragliding, ballooning, Arctic dog-sledding and bungee jumping.

He's also very much at home on the water, having sailed 10,000 miles on the Clipper Round-the-World Yacht Race - and shredded a mainsail off the remote Scottish island of St Kilda... thus following the time-honoured Yachting Monthly tradition of creating a ripping yarn out of a cock-up!
Yachting Monthly, 13 November 2008