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This week I am delighted to welcome to The Joy of Cruising Podcast Dave Monk, the embodiment of the blog Shipmonk.Dave Monk is an award-winning cruise blogger and journalist who has written for the UK’s major publications. Dave created Shipmonk, the blog that cruise line executives, travel media, and passionate cruisers visit for up-to-date cruise industry news, ship reviews, and features. I wrote about Dave in the just-released The Joy of Cruising Again amzn.to/3lAfyON in a section called “The Cruise Communicators.”

Dave is a long-tenured UK professional journalist, and more recently the most prolific and keenly read cruise reporter on UK social media. Dave has been a journalist for over 40 years. In 2013, while still working at the newspaper Metro, Dave decided to establish a cruise blog, Shipmonk. In 2016 he was granted early retirement, which enabled him to pursue cruise writing in earnest. Now he was able to go on more cruises and to write about them at Shipmonk. He also began writing regularly for World of Cruising magazine, and travel writing for the Daily Mirror and Express, and then for the Daily Telegraph.

 
With 100 sailings, Dave has experienced an incredible diversity of cruises—from four-passenger motor yachts to the biggest cruise ships in the world. His favorite destination is Alaska, although Dave also loves the Norwegian fjords and the Caribbean islands. He cruises so much he has to turn down what would be bucket list sailing for the rest of us—like the Galapagos twice!

‘Any day at sea is better than a day in the office’—that’s the signature adage of the late John Honeywell, aka Captain Greybeard, iconic United Kingdom journalist, and cruise writer. It was the epigraph, the opening quote, to my first cruise book The Joy of Cruising. I thought it perfectly captured the essence of the book—the joy of cruising. I repeated it at the beginning of Dave’s feature in The Joy of Cruising Again because John Honeywell was a great friend and former colleague of Dave. Dave is an iconic UK journalist and cruise writer in his own right. And Captain Greybeard’s quote perfectly captures the essence of Dave’s story. He loves what he does—cruising and writing about it.

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