I have to say, I really dig Matt Rutherford's new ride (pictured above). It looks to be a Colvin Gazelle, a boat I've always admired, but with an unstayed cat ketch rig. Very interesting. But that's not what we need to discuss right now. You may have noticed, per a recent post by my SAILfeed...
Great video here! A midshipman at the naval academy in Annapolis gets sent out on a sailboat offshore for the first time and has a little trouble with the motion. The camera is perfectly stabilized, which creates an interesting effect. Great soundtrack, too. Tip of the hat to my old buddy Elizabeth Wrightson, a.k.a. E-Woman,...
It's not very often I have a "major motion picture" about ocean sailing to look forward to seeing. Must be the end of days or something, because now there are two. Usually, of course, these movies are pretty terrible--I'm thinking The Dove or Waterworld, for example--but it's seems there a chance both the films I'm...
Just arrived yesterday in Portland, Maine, with crew members Billy "Swizzle" Springer and Adam "Twinkletoes" Cort after another reasonably fast passage on Lunacy. This time we covered a distance of 820 miles in 5 days 6 hours, again without using too much fuel for motoring--just 13 gallons. Which means in all, moving the boat 1,670...
Practically the first thing I learned on flying back to Bermuda to rejoin Lunacy this past Thursday was that there would be dinghy races here in St. George's Harbor on Friday. That and the prospect of a front moving through on Saturday immediately put my inchoate plan for a Memorial Day weekend mini-cruise with the...
Editor's Note: Those studying my recent account of Lunacy's passage from Puerto Rico to Bermuda may have noticed that we did NOT find that abandoned Swan 48, Wolfhound, ex-Bella Luna , that I blogged about earlier. Ah, well... You can't always find that needle in the haystack, but I can deliver on my promise to tell you...
This was a fast passage with very little motoring. My mate Mr. Lassen and I covered the 830 some miles between Fajardo and St. Georges in less than six days and burned only about five gallons of fuel in the process. Not my fastest passage ever between the Onion Patch and the W'Indies, but I...
Just figured something out. That Irish-owned Swan 48, Wolfhound, currently adrift twixt Bermuda and the W'Indies, is ex-Bella Luna, the same Swan 48 that my buddy, A.J. Smith, skippered through Tropical Storm Sean (see photo up top) during the ill-fated 2011 NARC Rally (the one in which Jan Anderson lost her life aboard the Island...
There she is folks... yours for the taking. This empty Frers-designed Swan 48 of mid-90s vintage, worth I'd guess $500K or more, was adrift approx. 800 southeast of Bermuda as of this past weekend. She was abandoned just north of Bermuda by her Irish owner, Alan McGettigan, and three crew back in February. At the...
Over the weekend I had a chance to watch Maidentrip, the new documentary film about Laura Dekker, after Jillian Schlesinger e-mailed me a private Vimeo link on Saturday. This is Schlesinger's directorial debut--her "maidenfilm," if you will--and whatever Laura might think of it, I thought it was pretty damn good. Coincidentally, Lyall Mercer, who did...
