Sept. 26/2023: Having failed to do as much sailing as I would have liked through July and August, I had big plans to get a bunch of cruising in during September and blocked off the middle two weeks as non-stop boat time. One big fly in that ointment was Hurricane Lee; the other was a...
Aug. 10/2023: My summer sailing schedule has been chopped up by intermittent book appearances, and it certainly didn’t help that the first several weeks were unremittingly rainy, foggy, and windless. The last few weeks I’ve been more active, but my outings have been limited to only a few days at a time. Another limiting factor—now...
July 5/2023: This was the scene last week off Chandler Cove, on the bar between Great Chebeague and Little Chebeague Islands just north of Portland, after I intentionally grounded Lunacy to give her bottom a scrub and check on her prop zinc. This bar is quite close to my mooring behind Maine Yacht Center, with...
June 16/2023: In the wake of my earlier post, I did receive some advice on the feasibility of escaping to open water from Oriental, North Carolina, via Ocracoke Inlet. The majority opinion was that to transit any of the three inlets between Pamlico Sound and open water (Ocracoke, Hatteras, or Oregon) in a cruising sailboat...
May 29/2023: I originally had high hopes as I plotted to liberate Lunacy from Palmetto Bay Marina on Hilton Head Island to sail her north toward home waters. Long-range forecasts per both the ECMWF and GFS weather models showed strong rivers of southerly wind blasting up the East Coast, and I speculated I might even...
March 21/2023: After leaving Lunacy ensconced at Brunswick Landing Marina down in Georgia back in November, I did return to visit her the following month for several days. But I didn’t sail anywhere. I spent time instead working on a few boat jobs and also confabbed with an old sailing journalism associate, Tim Zimmerman, who...
Sept. 23/2022: I didn’t get in as much sailing on the Maine coast as I hoped this summer, for various reasons. But I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the sailing that did take place. Back in ancient times, when I was a young person, summer sailing in this part of the world was...
June 12/2022: Job one when I returned to the South Jersey Marina at Cape May on Monday, May 16, was to climb up Lunacy’s mast and invert the VHF antennae back to their upright positions. (You’ll recall I had previously flipped them upside down to fit more comfortably under bridges on the ICW.) I had...
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...
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...
