This, my friends, is a small boat with a very large reputation. The reason I'm blogging about her right now is that she happens to be for sale. Unfortunately, I'm getting a bit long in the tooth, but for a certain sort of sailor--you must be young, footloose, and maybe just a little bit...
Gather round boys and girls and have a gander at what Santa did not bring me for Christmas this year. One big reason for this is that this boat does not yet exist. Indeed, it may never exist. The yacht Ankida, near as I can tell, is merely a concept, a fanciful g leam...
NASA's Cassini probe, currently in orbit around the planet Saturn, has in recent years confirmed that there are large liquid lakes of methane, ethane, and propane on the s urface of Saturn's moon Titan. (The radar image seen here was gathered by Cassini in July 2006.) Titan also has a dense atmosphere, which, believe...
Lots of cruising sailors maintain blogs about their voyages and adventures. One of the best I'm aware of is written by Antonia Murphy, who sails aboard Sereia, a 36-foot Mariner ketch, with her husband Peter and toddler son Silas. They've been in New Zealand for some time, and here you see them recovering from a...
Theory has it that publicizing teen suicides just encourages more kids to off themselves. So I've been a good little blogger and have kept my laptop shut about this neverending kids-who-want-to-sail-around-the-world-alone-and-break-a-record story. But this past weekend the whole phenomenon went beyond weird when the youngest and most enigmatic of the current trio of contenders,...
I've just finished re-reading this gem of a book, and this has only reaffirmed my belief that it is one the very best cruising tales ever published. The author, Desmond Holdridge, is utterly obscure and long forgotten, but he was a great wordsmith and adventurer in his day. This account is of a cruise...
There have been a few developments since my last tongue-in-cheek post about the America's Cup, so I thought I'd bloviate a bit more on the topic. Don't worry. I'll try hard to be serious this time. You've probably heard yesterday's news that a New York appellate court shot down Ernie Bertarelli's appeal of a...
Three years ago next month, Jim Gray sailed out of San Francisco Bay aboard his C&C 40 >Tenacious, bound for the Farallon Islands to scatter the ashes of his dead mother at sea. Conditions were utterly benign. Gray made cellphone calls to his wife and daughter, described the dolphins playing in the water around him,...
As of Saturday December 12 this past weekend my friend Reid Stowe has broken the record for the longest non-stop solo ocean voyage ever made. The previous record (658 days) was set by Australian Jon Sanders when he completed his non-stop triple circumnavigation over 20 years ago in 1988. Reid's "Mission Control" shore team,...
Wanna-be Viking voyagers daunted at the prospect of having to plunder and pillage in open boats can now heave a huge sigh of relief. At last someone has had the vision to both design and build a modern-day Norse longship with comfortable i nterior accommodations and contemporary amenities. The visionary in question is Sigurjon...
