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...
May 29/2023: I originally had high hopes as I plotted to liberate Lunacy from Palmetto Bay Marina on Hilton Head Island to sail her north toward home waters. Long-range forecasts per both the ECMWF and GFS weather models showed strong rivers of southerly wind blasting up the East Coast, and I speculated I might even...
April 28/2023: It has finally happened! A woman has won a solo round-the-world sailing race. Non-stop no less. South African Kirsten Neuschäfer, age 39, drifted across the Golden Globe finish line yesterday evening in Les Sables D’Olonne, France, after spending 253 days alone at sea, and so has planted an important flag in the annals...
April 24/2023: The strange true story of Thomas Tangvald, a boy who was born at sea and was raised on a cruising sailboat, but then was orphaned in a terrible wreck in the Caribbean, has captured the imaginations of both sailors and non-sailors alike. I’ll be at the Spaulding Marine Center in Sausalito at 7pm...
“Lyrical, engaging, and true,” writes prize-winning historian W. Jeffrey Bolster of my biography of Thomas Tangvald, The Boy Who Fell to Shore, recently published by Latah Books. “Doane reconstructs the searing tragedy, apparent resilience, and ultimate vulnerability of a brilliant young man better suited to navigating the sea than life itself. It’s gripping—a thriller to...
