May 13/2022: I used to live in Thomaston, Maine, literally just down the street from the Lyman Morse yard, but that was 20 years ago, so I was happy to have a chance to revisit the yard this past week. It was then, and is even more so now, the kind of place where you...
May 9/2022: One of the very cool things about my recent solo jaunt aboard Lunacy northward from Hilton Head up to New Jersey was getting to see four bright planets lined up diagonally near the moon on each clear night. This photo shows only three of them—Jupiter, Venus, and Mars (from left to right)—as the...
April 27/2022: No, my friends, this is not one of those “concept” yachts, where a bored designer comes up with some really fanciful, crazy idea for a boat that will never ever get built. This is a real fanciful, crazy boat that exists in the real world, and if you really want you can buy...
Apr. 7/2022: It’s been a long strange trip, my friends—researching, writing, and finding a publisher for this story—but at last it is happening. My third book will be published this coming October by Latah Books. Faithful WaveTrain riders will recall that I first “rediscovered” Thomas nine years ago, in the spring of 2013, while noodling...
March 25/2022: I returned to Beach Marine in Jacksonville Beach early this month to bring Lunacy along on the first step of her seasonal pilgrimage back north to New England. I arrived at the marina late on a Friday evening and on rising from my berth the next morning, I immediately noticed: 1) the boat...
March 23/2022: As soon as I finished reading Chris Bowman’s excellent memoir about building boats in Bequia and sailing with Bob Dylan, I was inspired to revisit this book. It is a curious volume, part cruising memoir and part scholarly treatise. Its author, Douglas C. Pyle, arrived in the islands in 1968 aboard an old...
Feb 25/2022: It’s hard to believe, but this coming November we’ll be hitting the 10th anniversary of Paul Larsen’s record-breaking 65.45-knot speed sailing run in Vestas Sailrocket 2. That record, almost 10 knots better than its predecessor, still stands. These days two different teams are hard at work designing and building vessels they hope to...
Feb. 9/2022: You’ll recall we left the good ship Lunacy at Beach Marine in Jacksonville Beach. I returned there middle of last month with no clear idea of what I would do with the boat, beyond that my old Portsmouth sailing buddies, Jeff and Molly Bolster and Phil Cavanaugh, would join me, and we would...
Jan. 20/2022: Bob Dylan is of course a famously opaque character, and one of the more opaque episodes of his life concerns a certain boat he once owned. It is almost mythical, the stuff of legend among sailors in the Caribbean today. But it is in fact true: the last large traditional schooner built on...
Jan. 8/2022: Here’s a blast from the past. Behold the long outer face dock at Fish Island Marina in St. Augustine, round about sunset earlier this week. The last time I was here was in late April 1992, when I was crewing on the late great schooner Constellation. We had sailed down from Charleston, South...
