ATTENTION EARTH PEOPLE! As I write this I am approaching Bermuda, blasting along but 70 miles out on what seems a perpetual close reach, due for a landing sometime in the wee hours tomorrow, of which more later. What I really want to spout off about right now are inflatable tenders. I was thinking about...
WHEN I FIRST SAILED through the Spanish Virgin Islands back in the late 1990s, the prospect of visiting Vieques was rather daunting. The U.S. Navy, operating out of its old base at Roosevelt Roads, was still using the island as a firing range and both the cruising guide and charts I had on hand were...
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...
The Lagoon 380 is not the smallest Lagoon catamaran ever built--both the Lagoon 37, its immediate predecessor, and the Lagoon 35CCC were smaller--but it is the smallest Lagoon currently built and one of the smallest dedicated cruising cats that succeeds in combining both reasonable performance and a "big cat" accommodation plan in a single package....
CLARE AND I FINISHED BRINGING LUNACY back to Portland this weekend and spent the last night of our mini-cruise on a mooring at Cliff Island in Casco Bay on Friday night. Soon after we settled in a massive thunderstorm started zooming in from the southwest. The photo up top depicts its initial approach.
ALTHOUGH THIS IS ONE OF MY FAVORITE SPOTS on the coast, I haven't been here in almost 10 years. All that time I have been dreaming of coming back. On the chart it doesn't look like anything special--just another tiny uninhabited islet in the small archipelago that stretches around the southern end of Vinalhaven Island...
I USED TO COME OUT HERE when I was young, in an outboard skiff or a Drascombe longboat with a spritsail. I was in love with the abandoned Coast Guard station at the entrance to the tiny slit-trench harbor and often daydreamed I would someday live out here in that house, all on my own....
WHEN IT COMES TO AUTOPILOTS it is always best to divide your affections. No sense in being monogamously faithful to just one unit, giving it names and all, only to have it crap out on you in some less than sanguine circumstance. One reason I fell for Lunacy was because she came equipped with three...
BACK IN THE LATE NINETIES when I quit my job as an associate editor at Cruising World, Elaine Lembo was hired to take my place. We've been good friends ever since. We usually have furtive encounters in vans running between BWI Airport and Annapolis in October and swap all kinds of juicy gossip about sailing...
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...
