May 20/2025: Early assessments of the apparently botched departure of the Mexican Navy tall-ship Cuauhtémoc from a Manhattan pier, leading to a fateful collision with the Brooklyn Bridge this past Saturday evening, had it as just a dope-slap nav problem. As in: those dopes should have waited until the tide and current were in their...
May 17/2025: NO! The near simultaneous accidental deaths of accused fraudsters and tech moguls Mike Lynch and Stephen Chamberlain—in disparate locations, of disparate causes—was NOT the product of an evil corporate revenge plot. It was purely coincidence. We established as much in my previous post on the sudden sinking of Lynch’s superyacht Bayesian while at...
May 8/2025: Some of you may be surprised to learn this, but I do have fans. One at least, anyway. Scott Davis, an active sailor based in Manchester, MA, contacted me via this blog site some time ago and worked hard to establish a rapport. We had a long chat on the phone, during which...
April 3/2025: Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks? Through all of my career as a sailor and journalist, I have believed, wrongly it turns out, that Naomi James was the first woman to sail around the world singlehanded. I have a feeling I am not the only one. It is true...
March 27/2025: I wanted to take a more “cruiserly” approach to bringing Lunacy back to North America from the Caribbean this year, and I also decided it was well past time to get my shoal-draft centerboard boat into Bahamian waters for a change. Thus the hatching of an obvious plan: to island-hop from the south...
Feb. 2/2025: It is, as Steve Callahan himself once remarked to me, a story that will not die. That being the story of his 76-day solo survival drift across the North Atlantic in a liferaft, back in 1982, after his 21-foot sloop Napoleon Solo was sunk in a collision (presumably with a whale) some distance...
Jan. 16/2025: ‘Tis a bit discouraging, I have to admit. The last time we cruised the Spanish Virgin Islands as a family was 12 years ago, and when I asked the kids (now ages 25 and 19) what they remember about it (they were then ages 13 and 7), they said they recalled very little....
Dec. 16/2024: If there’s one thing I’ve learned about Jimmy Cornell over the years, it is that he keeps moving forward. So I wasn’t too surprised when I received an e-mail from him last week, announcing that he is organizing yet another high-profile worldwide cruising rally. Here’s the full text of the press release he...
Dec. 12/2024: I’ve been remiss here. I got a copy of this book some time ago, handed me direct and personal from its author, Tim Murphy, autograph included. I read big chunks of it most immediately and learned: it’s a great book! But I was on my boat at the time, and the book got...
Nov. 20/2024: This is getting tedious. First it was my fractured left wrist, nursed through a Caribbean cruise and a solo passage back home earlier this year. Then bursitis of the left elbow, endured through some coastal summer cruising in Maine. Now it is a badly sprained left ankle. Not a boat-related injury (unlike the...
