April 28/2023:  It has finally happened! A woman has won a solo round-the-world sailing race. Non-stop no less. South African Kirsten Neuschäfer, age 39, drifted across the Golden Globe finish line yesterday evening in Les Sables D’Olonne, France, after spending 253 days alone at sea, and so has planted an important flag in the annals...

Feb. 24/2023:  Elvis Francois, originally from the island of Dominica, was making repairs to his boat at St. Maarten back in December, when he somehow got swept out to sea. Twenty-four days later, in late January, after drifting across much of the Caribbean basin, he was rescued about 120 miles off the coast of Colombia,...

Feb. 10/2023: Got a hot text this morning from an old shipmate of mine, Geoff Hill, tipping me off that he’s been prominently featured in an official Rolex Sydney-Hobart Race viddy as the living incarnation of “the true Corinithian spirit of the race.” I can attest to this. I first met Geoff in 1992, when...

Feb. 7/2023:  Maybe this counts as progress. The new sailing flick that just dropped on Netflix—True Spirit, a dramatization of Jessica Watson’s 2009-10 solo non-stop circumnavigation—is not actually cringingly inaccurate as to the details and nuances of ocean sailing. They have, for example, done an excellent job of recreating Jessica’s boat, an S&S 34 she...

Feb. 2/2023:  I’ve been waiting since the 1990s, when I developed a crush of sorts on Isabelle Autissier, for a woman to win an around-the-world solo sailing race. A tantalizing prospect! This is the toughest, most extreme sport there is, but it is also that great rarity—a sport where women and men compete against each...

Jan. 11/2023:  Now comes news over the past weekend that Charley Morgan, one of the great pioneers of fiberglass boatbuilding and design, left this world on Saturday, bound for whatever comes next. He was 93, and reportedly passed just a few hours after his wife Maurine died. Sailors of a certain age will remember Morgan...

Sept. 5/2022: I wrote about the advent of unmanned sailing drones back in January 2014, when a robot sailboat completed a passage from San Francisco to Hawaii, and haven’t given the subject too much thought since then. Turns out a lot has been happening! The California-based company Saildrone has been successfully putting drones into action...

You’ve seen the ugly images. A so-called derecho, with winds peaking at 140 mph swept across Corsica on the morning of August 18, killing at least eight people, injuring several others. Wasting countless boats. An ugly sky indeed   Now here’s the video… the most graphic one I’ve found so far. Click on the “Watch...

June 22/2022:  We need some closure on this, I think. I twice transited the wreck site where the 656-foot car carrier Golden Ray lay on its side in St. Simons Sound in Georgia—first in November 2019, just two months after the giant brick of a ship capsized. Then again in May 2020, as I departed...

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...