Jonathan Raban was one of my favourite writers. He died a few days ago, aged 80. He turned travel writing into a new form of art. His writing was comic, dark and incisive with prose that could leave a heart bleeding. He also wrote novels, essays and criticism.

We had a love of the sea in common. I felt what he was writing about. His love of boats and yachting was almost tactile. He recounted his anxieties as openly as the triumphs and beauty of being at sea, recognising the value of plain description: ‘The lightless water and the lightless sky formed an evenly laid wash of flannel-grey…”

Boats allowed him an outsider’s view of the places and people he encountered ashore. His magnificent book Coasting is the story of his circumnavigation of the UK in an old ketch, in which he skewered all the lingering pomp and crusty self-importance of 1980s Britain.

One of his best books – and one which got its grappling hooks deep in to me – was Passage to Juneau (1999) when, after a thousand miles of lone sailing, Raban is joined in Alaska by his wife and young daughter. While they watched the girl rock back and forth on a park swing, his wife say: “I’m leaving you.” It is a devastating finale to what is his finest book and one of the best works of nonfiction of the last 50 years.

Not many writers can get to me. Raban did.