THE SKY TO THE SOUTH as we sailed away from the island of Gomera looked bruised and hazy, as though the blue had been sucked out of it by some meteorological vampire. By this time, November of 1996, I had been cruising full-time and living aboard Crazy Horse, my Pearson Alberg 35 yawl, for almost...
WE'RE HERE! In the photo, if you look carefully, you'll see the lumpy bumps of dry land--the island of Culebra to be precise--that we encountered at sunrise yesterday morning as we swooped in from the north on a moderate east-southeasterly breeze. By 1030 hours we were tied up at the fuel dock at the Puerto...
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...
HE WAS THE FIRST profoundly deaf sailor to circumnavigate the British Isles (1981), the first sail a solo transat (2005), and now Gerry Hughes is going for the big enchilada: solo non-stop all the way around the world via the Southern Ocean. He left Troon, Scotland, on September 1 and is currently south of the...
HERE'S ANOTHER STORY for the Creepy Cruiser Killers file. Or not. Did Stefan Pokorny (see photo up top), an Austrian dive instructor who was crewing aboard Finnegan, a 40-foot yacht belonging to Sean Terry, somehow kill Terry this past June somewhere between Chagos and the Seychelles? Or did Terry throw himself overboard in "a fit...
HERE'S A POSTSCRIPT to a sad story. Triple Stars, the Island Packet 380 from which cruiser Jan Anderson was lost overboard last November, was towed into Bermuda last week by a fisherman. The boat has been adrift ever since Jan's husband Rob abandoned it about 285 miles northwest of Bermuda, after a search for Jan...
JUST RETURNED YESTERDAY from delivering the Akilaria Class 40 Amhas back from the Onion Patch with Brian Harris (that's him up top), who runs the boat for her owner, MacKenzie Davis. Brian and MacKenzie finished third over the line in the Doublehanded Division in the recently concluded record-breaking Newport-Bermuda Race and corrected out to 6th...
NO DOUBT YOU'RE WONDERING what happened with my cousin Nick Kats, who was planning to transit the Northwest Passage from Ireland to Oregon this summer aboard his steel ketch Teddy. In the end he decided to punt and cruise to the east coast of Greenland instead. He and his young crew (pictured up top) took...
THIS YEAR'S BERMUDA RACE, which starts today out of Newport, is looking to be a fast one. That wind chart for this afternoon you see up top is representative of the predicted conditions--moderate to strong northeasterlies right on the beam--from now until Sunday. Already the pundits are speculating that the fastest boats may finish in...
I'VE BEEN MEANING TO SHARE more about my time in Bermuda visiting the ARC Europe fleet, but I hadn't thought I'd end up having to write a post like this. You may have heard the news over the weekend: one of the 33 boats that departed St. Georges for the Azores last Wednesday was abandoned...
