I was just pulling into a mooring field in Sebasco after sailing across Casco Bay from Portland, when I got a phone call from Phil "Snake Wake" Cavanaugh, who was somewhere in central Europe at the time, telling me that Oracle had just won races 17 and 18 and had forced a final race 19...
I have a few distant memories of Bustins Island from when we used to visit my father's sister Cynthia and her family there. I remember Archie Ross, a larger-than-life character who used to run the little ferry boat that trundles back and forth between Bustins and nearby South Freeport. I remember walking in my bare...
I was out on the boat with my bride last week (hence the big void in the blog) and made a point of stopping in at Monhegan Island. We were last here eight years ago--aboard my Golden Hind 31 Sophie, with infant Lucy in tow--and I seem to recall spending several hours hiking some very...
I spent Monday out on Lunacy again and revisited Wills Gut, or McMansion Cove, as I've come to think of it, for the first time in three years. Before the sun went down I installed the new "disc springs" on my Andersen winches, a seemingly easy job that turned out to be not so easy...
Even in this age of push-button electronic navigation, it's not too hard to hit the bricks when cruising the Maine coast. The photo up top is of Archangel, a Hylas 70 on charter that hit some rocks in Penobscot Bay near Lasell Island on Wednesday. Reportedly, they were under sail at the time, sailing east...
Last Wednesday, after sailing out on my own from Portland, I spent the night aboard Lunacy on a mooring at Cliff Island. I awoke the next morning to fog, thin tendrils that first filtered in from the east with the spreading sunlight then thickened and obliterated everything. Later, after it cleared off, I motored just...
ON SATURDAY, the day after I got back from the Newport show, daughter Lucy and I decided to head out on to Casco Bay for an overnight aboard Lunacy all by our wild lonesomes. As you can see from the photo up top, after seven years of incessant indoctrination (courtesy of yours truly), she's become...
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....
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...
