Longer articles by me that treat sailing and the sea in a more literary manner, short reviews of nautical books I think readers might enjoy reading, plus occasional excerpts from nautical books that I’d like to share with readers.
May 19/2021: Editor’s Note… I was planning here to reprise a fine adventure I had back in May 2003, when I sailed from Cartagena, Colombia, to the western Caribbean islands of San Andrés and Providencia in a local race/rally called La Ruta de Morgan. My host and skipper was a very special man, Eric Thiriez,...
Dec. 18/2020: James Wharram, who first came to notice back in the 1950s after sailing a crude homemade catamaran across the Atlantic from England to Trinidad with two occasionally (and famously) unclad women, has cut a unique trail through the firmament of modern yacht design. He has always planted his flag far outside the boundaries...
July 24/2020: I’ve said this before, and now I’ll say it again: the book Northern Lights, by one Desmond Holdridge, first published by Viking in 1939, is one of the best, perhaps the best cruising account I have ever read. It recounts the author’s first serious venture under sail, as an 18-year-old skipper managing a...
Apr. 21/2020: By far the most successful post ever to appear here on WaveTrain, in terms of simple traffic, was this one here, from December 2015, on the replica Viking longship Draken Harald Hårfagre (see image up top). My echoing of a call for volunteer crew to help sail the 115-foot ship transatlantic ended up...
What a charming book this is! A slim volume, but with a surprising variety of material in it. There’s a good deal of standard-issue practical advice you might find in other marine how-to tomes, but here you find it steeped and strongly marinated in a special sauce unique to Doug Logan. I’ve known the lad...
Decent films about ocean sailing are, alas, few and far between, so it’s worth noting there are at least three recent offerings I’ve screened that are truly worth watching. The first, unbelievably, is an A-list flick starring Colin Firth and Rachel Weisz, The Mercy, which recounts the well-worn tale of Donald Crowhurst’s tragic voyage during...
One thing that never ceases to amaze me is that the literature of the sea is nearly as vast as the sea itself. It seems there are always new landfalls to make. Here for example we have yet another fascinating character I never dreamed existed. Henri de Monfried, son of a minor French artist who...
Many of you have asked about this, and I am happy to report my latest book has just been released in electronic format at both Amazon and at the iBooks store. Now you have no excuse for not reading it! (Also, it’s my birthday today, so you should feel obliged to propitiate me.) Remember: John...
This was a rumor that may have started on a Dick Carter fanboy thread on Sailing Anarchy a few years back: that Carter, one of the leading designers during the IOR era back in the 1970s, had sadly passed away. Even people active in the thread who’d once been close to Carter--like Bob Perry and...
How could I have lived so long without discovering this man? He is such an improbably entertaining writer, and all he wrote about, pretty much, is boats, the water surrounding them, and the life that is in it. Hats off to crew member (and erstwhile Boréal shopper) Nat Smith, who handed me a copy of...
