Thanks to a heads-up from WaveTrain rider Gareth Hughes I've been following this story over the past several days on the Cruisers Forum. I didn't write anything, however, as I thought the missing boat would soon show up. Now that seems increasingly unlikely, and it would appear that the fabled 59-foot schooner Nina, winner of...
In the beginning, what we now call "yachting," or sailing for pleasure, was practiced solely by a wealthy elite. Indeed, the first leisure craft were owned by monarchs and were profligate in their construction and appointments. Ptolemy IV of Egypt, we are told, lolled about the Nile aboard an immense 300-foot catamaran whose hull stood...
I've had to replace all the propane bottles on Lunacy over the past two years, as no one would refill the really old aluminum ones that came with the boat. While shopping around, I took a hard look at the new fiberglass bottles that are now available. As intriguing as they seemed--because they are so...
You usually don't think of a hole in your hull as being a good thing, but sometimes a properly organized one can save you a lot of trouble. Back when I owned Crazy Horse, my Alberg 35 yawl, a boat with a full keel and very deep bilges, I wished I had a bilge drain...
FRIDAY THE 14TH (June 2013) is a date that no doubt will live infamously in the memories of the owner of this 80-foot Jongert 2400M that was utterly and completely destroyed by fire at Prickly Bay in Grenada late last week. (Unless, of course, this is an insure-and-burn situation...) According to a bluewater cruiser named...
It's not very often I have a "major motion picture" about ocean sailing to look forward to seeing. Must be the end of days or something, because now there are two. Usually, of course, these movies are pretty terrible--I'm thinking The Dove or Waterworld, for example--but it's seems there a chance both the films I'm...
Lunacy got hauled out at Maine Yacht Center soon after we arrived there from Bermuda last week, and yesterday I went up to have a look at her. As you can see in the photo up top, there's very little bottom paint left on her nether parts. She's been mostly bald like this for most...
Gulfstar Yachts was founded in 1970 by Vince Lazzara, an industry pioneer who in the early 1950s helped make a success of Aeromarine, one of the very first fiberglass boatbuilders. In the early 1960s he did the same at Columbia Yachts, which became the world's biggest sailboat builder in its day. Early on Gulfstar emphasized...
I didn't come up with this idea myself. I learned it crewing for a guy down in Florida who always stored not one, but two rope anchor rodes on his foredeck while cruising. Even on offshore passages he kept them out there, with the coils of rode lashed to stanchion post bases, and never had...
Just arrived yesterday in Portland, Maine, with crew members Billy "Swizzle" Springer and Adam "Twinkletoes" Cort after another reasonably fast passage on Lunacy. This time we covered a distance of 820 miles in 5 days 6 hours, again without using too much fuel for motoring--just 13 gallons. Which means in all, moving the boat 1,670...
