April 12/2026: It’s a good thing I decided to attend this year’s PAYS Yachting Festival in Dominica (March 21-27), otherwise no one might have noticed it was the festival’s 10th anniversary. As it was, I almost didn’t notice myself. Originally labeled as Yachtie Appreciation Week, the week-long event was conceived by Hank Schmitt, an old...
April 4/2026: A part of me thought this would never happen. When I first met Francis “Nim” Marsh III in Puerto de Santa Maria, Spain, during Jimmy Cornell’s America 500 rally in 1992, I was amazed when I found out he was 20 years older than me. For if anything, he seemed younger. And as...
March 4/2026: In July of 1880 or ’82, a young African-American boy named William Golden (he would later often give his surname as Golding) was loitering about the waterfront in Savannah, Georgia, with a young cousin. The two boys were admiring a three-masted barkentine named Wandering Jew, when the captain and his wife called out...
Feb. 7/2026: I found Kiana Weltzien (see photo up top) online a couple of years back and was immediately intrigued. It’s not every day you see a young woman sailing around solo on a super-primitive Wharram catamaran, and I certainly wasn’t the only one who noticed. Kiana’s YouTube sailing channel has over 50K subscibers, and...
Jan. 26/2026: EDITOR’S NOTE—This is, I believe, the first time we’ve had a guest post on WaveTrain written by someone other than me. The author of this post, Dylan Flack, got in touch with me shortly after he and four others abandoned the catamaran Magic Bus via Coast Guard helicopter almost 300 miles off the...
Nov. 21/2025: It’s true! It’s true! I’m selling Lunacy after a hard long debate with myself. She’s afloat and available for viewing at Jabin’s in Annapolis, courtesy of my old friend Forbes Horton, who is listing her for me. Unlike last time, when I sold old Lunacy in order to buy new Lunacy, and so...
Nov. 19/2025: Speaking of Tom Cunliffe, here’s a bit of serendipitous coincidence. Both he and Clare Allcard, who met for the first time back in 2016 in Andorra, when I met Clare for the first time, have published new books just about simultaneously. Except Tom’s book is a novel, his very first. And just as...
Nov. 7/2025: This isn’t really a sailing book, but in one sense it is sort of an ultimate sailing book—a story of sailing and the sea as a saving grace. I first met its author, Clare Allcard, in the spring of 2016, when I set out researching The Boy Who Fell to Shore, my biography...
Aug 8/2025: There was a time when survival drift stories involving bluewater sailors were not unusual. From the early 1970s to the late 1980s, as bluewater cruising became increasingly popular, but the technology involved remained relatively primitive, we saw a steady trickle of them. These days, what with modern sat comms and global 406 EPIRB...
June 11/2025: I first met Zdenka and her husband Jack in an entirely conventional shorebound way, through my cousin Charlotte, who is an old childhood friend of Jack’s. This at a lunch Charlotte hosted in her home in Portland, Maine, soon after Jack and Zdenka finished sailing around the world on Kite, their Valiant 42....
