April 4/2026: A part of me thought this would never happen. When I first met Francis “Nim” Marsh III in Puerto de Santa Maria, Spain, during Jimmy Cornell’s America 500 rally in 1992, I was amazed when I found out he was 20 years older than me. For if anything, he seemed younger. And as...
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....
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...
March 8/2024: I’ve been AWOL on the boat for the past month, with an antique laptop that can’t wrangle posts here anymore, so I’m afraid I’ve been neglecting this space. I’ll catch you up on my own adventures in just a bit, but first we need to discuss a couple of recent events that strike...
Sept. 2/2023: Neither of these guys were on death’s door, at least as far as I knew, so I was a bit surprised when they died within a day of each other this week. They were both sailors, but in very different ways. Bill Pinkney, of course, was the first black man, of any nationality...
Jan. 11/2023: Now comes news over the past weekend that Charley Morgan, one of the great pioneers of fiberglass boatbuilding and design, left this world on Saturday, bound for whatever comes next. He was 93, and reportedly passed just a few hours after his wife Maurine died. Sailors of a certain age will remember Morgan...
Oct. 12/2021: Here we have another sad tale of mortality. On the last day of last month, as I understand it, the well-known yacht designer Ted Brewer passed away peacefully at his home in British Columbia. Born in 1933 in Hamilton, Ontario, he certainly had a good long run on this planet, both as a human...
May 19/2021: Editor’s Note… I was planning here to reprise a fine adventure I had back in May 2003, when I sailed from Cartagena, Colombia, to the western Caribbean islands of San Andrés and Providencia in a local race/rally called La Ruta de Morgan. My host and skipper was a very special man, Eric Thiriez,...
Dec. 5/2020: Dang. You know I’ve been slacking in this blogging game when the Wall Street Journal gets around to running an obit like this before I do. That link there is a couple of days old. The print version ran today. I met Frank Butler a few times in passing over the years, but...
Apr. 30/2020: The North American boatbuilding industry has lost two pioneers this month, one an American, the other a Canadian. The first, Clint Pearson (see image up top), who died at age 91 back on April 4, was better known. He was renowned in the industry as a founder, with his cousin Everett Pearson, of...
