Nov. 29/2023: And here I am—way late—with a description of how the good ship Lunacy and her faithful Lunatics finally finished their voyage down to the warmth of the W’Indies. The last photo in my previous post, some may recall, was of a massive barge/crane/ship thingy that I found anchored across the way in Jamestown...
Oct. 26/2023: Rather than shoot from Portsmouth to Newport all in one go, as has been my past practice when heading south for the winter, I wanted this year to make a little cruise of it and see some sights along the way. After 10 days at the Wentworth Marina seeing to this and that,...
Oct. 5/2023: I wrote a tongue-in-cheek post about the orcas-messing-with-boats phenomenon back when the first incidents off Spain and Portugal were reported three years ago. It says something about the state of marine journalism, I suppose, that the most intelligent and interesting article I’ve read on the subject since then was recently published in the...
Sept. 26/2023: Having failed to do as much sailing as I would have liked through July and August, I had big plans to get a bunch of cruising in during September and blocked off the middle two weeks as non-stop boat time. One big fly in that ointment was Hurricane Lee; the other was a...
Sept. 7/2023: While vacationing in West Cork, Ireland, last month, one of my goals was to spend some time sailing with Don Street. It says a lot that this is even a possibility. The last time I sailed with Don, when he was a sprightly sure-footed 75-year-old, was way back in 2005, aboard his famous...
Sept. 2/2023: Neither of these guys were on death’s door, at least as far as I knew, so I was a bit surprised when they died within a day of each other this week. They were both sailors, but in very different ways. Bill Pinkney, of course, was the first black man, of any nationality...
Aug. 10/2023: My summer sailing schedule has been chopped up by intermittent book appearances, and it certainly didn’t help that the first several weeks were unremittingly rainy, foggy, and windless. The last few weeks I’ve been more active, but my outings have been limited to only a few days at a time. Another limiting factor—now...
July 5/2023: This was the scene last week off Chandler Cove, on the bar between Great Chebeague and Little Chebeague Islands just north of Portland, after I intentionally grounded Lunacy to give her bottom a scrub and check on her prop zinc. This bar is quite close to my mooring behind Maine Yacht Center, with...
June 16/2023: In the wake of my earlier post, I did receive some advice on the feasibility of escaping to open water from Oriental, North Carolina, via Ocracoke Inlet. The majority opinion was that to transit any of the three inlets between Pamlico Sound and open water (Ocracoke, Hatteras, or Oregon) in a cruising sailboat...
June 5/2023: So… this involves a string of remarkable coincidences. Number one: my mother at age 15 went on a family trip to Ireland and the UK and was in England when Elizabeth was crowned queen in 1953. Number two: Twenty years later, in 1973, Prince Charles sailed into Portsmouth NH on HMS Minerva, on...
