BARRING THE UNFORSEEN, this is the face of the next winner of the Vendee Globe, Francois Gabart, who should reach Les Sables d'Olonne aboard MACIF very early Sunday morning, thus setting a new race record of 77 days, give or take a few hours. I hope you've been following this one, as it's really been...
IT WASN'T SO LONG AGO that liferaft survival-drift stories were fairly common. I personally know two people who spent more the 60 days in rafts (Steve Callahan and Bill Butler) and have read numerous accounts of similar experiences. Since the advent of reliable EPIRBs, however, it is now unusual for sailors abandoning yachts to spend...
This sad bit of video, posted on YouTube by Yachting World just a few days ago, documents the last few moments of the life of Ciao, a Sweden Yacht 45 that sank in the Indian Ocean back in September during the current World ARC rally. Ciao and her owners, Srecko and Olga Pust of Slovenia,...
HAVING SUFFERED NO DAMAGE while lying in port during Superstorm Sandy, Lunacy at last departed New Hampshire at 1000 hours last Thursday. Aboard with me were two pick-up crew enlisted through Offshore Passage Opportunities: Minnie Burke, 23, a young adventuress from Virginia, and Chris Salas, 41, a doctor from Rhode Island. Neither had much, if...
Big confession here: I have read little of Carleton Mitchell's writing. I was always familiar, of course, with his enormous reputation--three consecutive Bermuda Race wins, etc.--but I never bothered to study any of his seven books until he died at the ripe old age of 96 in the summer of 2007. On learning of his...
A replica of the good ship Bounty, of Mutinous Fame, has sunk off the Carolina coast south of Cape Hatteras this morning and two of the 16 (or 17???) crew members are reported missing. The vessel, under the command of Robin Walbridge, departed New London, Connecticut, on Thursday, bound for Florida. Evidently, the plan was...
I've been scuttling about the past few weeks prepping Lunacy for her trip south to Puerto Rico. On Sunday we moved her from Portland down here to Portsmouth, bashing into some inconvenient head seas along the way, and starting tomorrow we'll take another jump down to Newport. After that comes a big leap to Bermuda....
Here's a titillating bit of synchronicity. It seems that marathon voyaging champ Reid Stowe, who has spent much of the last year living with his family in the jungles of Guyana working to refit his schooner, will soon be leaving South America, just as his old buddy Ivo van Laake sails in from Europe on...
I WAS AMAZED TO LEARN that Bill King, one of the nine sailors who in 1968 joined in the famous Golden Globe Race, the very first singlehanded non-stop race around the world, died late last week. I had assumed he must have died many years ago, but no... he's been alive and kicking all this...
JUST IN CASE you guys haven't been following my cousin Nick's cruise to the east coast Greenland like I told you to, I thought I'd import an entry from the ship's blog so you can get a taste of how things are going aboard S/V Teddy. Nick, unfortunately, came down with the shingles, but is...
