I'm remembering that famous line from The Treasure of Sierra Madre: "Keels? We don't need no stinking keels!" And, apparently, you don't. Not all the time anyway. For proof of this I offer into evidence the eyebrow-raising tale of Polbream, a Jeanneau Sun Odyssey 37 in charter service in Falmouth, England. As documented in recent...
We touched on the subject of solar wind back in May when the Japanese successfully launched IKAROS, the first solar-wind-driven spacecraft. Now it's in the news again, as NASA announced last week that its 33-year-old probe Voyager 1, currently about 10.4 billion miles from Earth, has reached an area where the solar wind is no...
What a difference a year makes. Last December right about this time I posted a story about Laura Dekker getting busted in St. Maarten after she ran away from home so she could sail around the world alone without the Dutch government messing up her plans. The kill-joy government deported her butt back to Holland...
As Martin Luther King once put it: I have a dream. His was most admirable; mine is a bit selfish. Pretty much ever since I acquired Lunacy, I've had visions of a bowsprit of some sort dangling off her bow. Something that would allow me both to fly an asymmetric spinnaker in a sock forward...
In the last installment of our continuing exploration of how fiberglass sailboats get built we looked at the different types of fabric that can be used to create a laminate. As mentioned in our first episode, however, any fiberglass laminate is in fact a composite material (just like papier-mâché), consisting both of glass fabric, which...
American shipwright and boat designer Tom Colvin, who has long championed both metal construction and junk rigs on cruising sailboats, has designed about 300 small ships and boats over the course of a career that has now spanned about 70 years. He designed the original Gazelle for himself and his family to cruise aboard way...
I never met George McKay, but I often saw his bizarre schooner-rigged galleon Raw Faith, first in Rockland, Maine, where she spent several years, and again last winter in Portland, during my own wanderings on the coast. Though I always admired the tenacity with which McKay pursued his dream, his ship always struck me as...
Yikes. Things are getting grim out there. Just last week I blogged about the tragic Emma Goldman disaster, wherein a young 25-year-old woman lost her dad at sea. Now comes word that another young woman, Canadian Myda Egrmajer, 24, got to see her dad, Milan Egrmajer, 58, shot and killed by a gang of thieves who...
Often the best books are those you discover entirely at random, browsing through some forgotten shelf somewhere. It is one important reason why shopping at Amazon will never be like shopping in a bricks-and-mortar store. At Amazon you need to search for something intentionally. Or maybe their fancy consumer algorithm will suggest some new title...
This is old news, I know, but I just found it and feel compelled to share it. Pretty frickin' cool, if you ask me. The series of photos you see up top and below were taken by Frederik Fransson and crew aboard S/V Maiken soon after they departed Tonga bound for Fiji in August 2006....
