Captain James Naismith is master of the Active, a small ship employed in the routine business of servicing aids to navigation in the English Channel.

One night in 1984, the Wallenstein and the Calliope collide just off the Casquets and Active is commissioned to wreck-mark the site to ensure the safety of other passing vessels.

What should have been a routine task turns into one which deeply affects the lives of Captain Naismith, his idealistic female second officer Susan Paulin, and a new seaman named Frank Davis.

As fate draws him into an increasingly complex web of international intrigue, Naismith finds he must make the almost impossible moral choice between his duty as a loyal public servant and his beliefs as a human being.

Though the action takes place aboard Active in ‘The Accident’, the themes of pollution, international arms trafficking, female liberation and a popular revolution in Central America are skilfully woven into a highly plausible and disturbing parable for our times.

‘The Accident’ is a tense naval thriller of epic proportions.

Born in London in 1944, Richard Woodman crewed in a Tall Ships race before becoming an indentured midshipman in cargo-liners at the age of sixteen. He has sailed in a variety of ships, including weather ships, lighthouse tenders and trawlers, serving from apprentice to captain. He is the creator of Nathaniel Drinkwater and in 1978 he won The Maritime Society's Barbara Harmer Award for a work of original maritime history and is the author of seventeen novels. A member of the Society for Nautical Research and the Navy Records Society, in his spare time Richard sails an elderly gaff cutter with his wife and two children. 

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