Jan. 26/2026: EDITOR’S NOTE—This is, I believe, the first time we’ve had a guest post on WaveTrain written by someone other than me. The author of this post, Dylan Flack, got in touch with me shortly after he and four others abandoned the catamaran Magic Bus via Coast Guard helicopter almost 300 miles off the...
Aug 8/2025: There was a time when survival drift stories involving bluewater sailors were not unusual. From the early 1970s to the late 1980s, as bluewater cruising became increasingly popular, but the technology involved remained relatively primitive, we saw a steady trickle of them. These days, what with modern sat comms and global 406 EPIRB...
June 11/2025: I first met Zdenka and her husband Jack in an entirely conventional shorebound way, through my cousin Charlotte, who is an old childhood friend of Jack’s. This at a lunch Charlotte hosted in her home in Portland, Maine, soon after Jack and Zdenka finished sailing around the world on Kite, their Valiant 42....
Nov. 20/2024: This is getting tedious. First it was my fractured left wrist, nursed through a Caribbean cruise and a solo passage back home earlier this year. Then bursitis of the left elbow, endured through some coastal summer cruising in Maine. Now it is a badly sprained left ankle. Not a boat-related injury (unlike the...
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...
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…...
Jan. 11/2024: Here’s one of the more interesting things that has happened to me since the publication of The Boy Who Fell to Shore, my biography of Thomas Tangvald, October before last. This past November a woman named Suzanne Heywood reached out to me, wanting to talk about children raised on cruising boats. She had...
Dec. 15/2023: I have long been a fan of canned fish. It may be this is why I took up cruising under sail in the first place, so I’d have a good excuse to eat more of it. When provisioning a boat, particularly for a long voyage, one often defaults to canned food, primarily because...
Nov. 29/2023: And here I am—way late—with a description of how the good ship Lunacy and her faithful Lunatics finally finished their voyage down to the warmth of the W’Indies. The last photo in my previous post, some may recall, was of a massive barge/crane/ship thingy that I found anchored across the way in Jamestown...
