Oct. 21/2024: The opening photo here says it all for me. Thomas Tangvald’s youngest half-sister Virginia sitting in the same spot I sat in some time prior to her, researching the tragic Tangvald legacy. This from her film Les enfants du large (translating as Ghosts of the Sea in English), which premiered at a film...
Oct. 6/24: Back in August, while crawling around for a while in Lunacy’s engine bay, on top of and behind the engine itself, I somehow injured my elbow. On my left arm, same side as the now mostly healed fractured wrist. I didn’t even notice at first. But after I got home to Portsmouth, my...
Aug 28/2024: It certainly isn’t every day that a 183-foot superyacht sinks in a matter of minutes, while at anchor, with 12 crew and 10 guests aboard. So it’s entirely understandable that the very abrupt sinking of Bayesian, an enormous Perini Navi sloop, at around 4am on August 19 off Porticello, Sicily, resulting in the...
July 9/2024: I cannot pretend otherwise. My brand-new 2017 Boreal 47, Lunacy, overall winner of Cruising World’s Boat of the Year rumpus of 2018, ain’t so brand new anymore. Maintenance is inevitable… and more and more frequent these days. Case in point: the aft daggerboard control lines. I had, of course, noticed they were looking...
June 26/2024: My lowly connections in the sailing world had nothing to do with this experience. This was entirely due to my wife, a corporate M&A legal maven, who does a ton of work for Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund that is now title sponsor of the SailGP circus. She was handed some...
June 25/2024: It’s not often I become an “early adopter” of anything, much less navigation electronics. But this is a bit of kit I was seriously curious about. I’ve never been a fan of having a chartplotter permanently mounted in a cockpit, for various reasons, but mostly because I’d rather focus on what’s around me...
June 14/2024: I’m guessing not too many folks remember Bill Butler these days, but he had his 15 minutes of fame back in 1989, when he and his then-wife Simonne survived for 66 days drifting across the eastern Pacific Ocean in a liferaft. I met Bill a few years after that, in the summer of...
May 23/2024: I did try to enlist crew to help sail the good ship Lunacy home from St. Thomas, but I will admit I didn’t try very hard. A good part of me wanted to do this singlehanded, fractured wrist or no. I had previously done some solo passages between the W’Indies and Bermuda, and...
May 17/2024: So… it happened again. I go off on the good ship Lunacy for a month of the detached life afloat (more on that in a minute), and another important person in my sailing life crosses the bar. Thus… another tardy obit. Last time it was Patience Wales, my first boss at SAIL Magazine....
April 12/2024: First things first. A short profile I wrote on Daniel Hays and his semi-famous boat Sparrow appears in the most recent (May 2024) print issue of SAIL. It ends with a postscript (complete with Dan’s e-mail address) that he is looking to sell the boat. But if you think you might be interested…...
