March 27/2025: I wanted to take a more “cruiserly” approach to bringing Lunacy back to North America from the Caribbean this year, and I also decided it was well past time to get my shoal-draft centerboard boat into Bahamian waters for a change. Thus the hatching of an obvious plan: to island-hop from the south...
Jan. 16/2025: ‘Tis a bit discouraging, I have to admit. The last time we cruised the Spanish Virgin Islands as a family was 12 years ago, and when I asked the kids (now ages 25 and 19) what they remember about it (they were then ages 13 and 7), they said they recalled very little....
Nov. 20/2024: This is getting tedious. First it was my fractured left wrist, nursed through a Caribbean cruise and a solo passage back home earlier this year. Then bursitis of the left elbow, endured through some coastal summer cruising in Maine. Now it is a badly sprained left ankle. Not a boat-related injury (unlike the...
Jan. 25/2023: You absolutely cannot make this stuff up! The true story of Thomas Tangvald—born and raised at sea, orphaned in a wreck and cast ashore at age 15—is finding traction with both sailors and land folk fascinated by “the freedom one finds in any life close to nature.” As previously mentioned, I have many...
Dec. 6/2022: As mentioned in my last post sharing extra pix of Thomas, the first boat he owned himself was a scrappy little Chapelle-designed scow, Spartan, that he bought in Puerto Rico for just $200. This boat, along with L’Artemis de Pytheas, the boat he grew up on, was destroyed in the terrible wreck that...
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...
IT IS DIFFICULT when visiting Vieques by boat these days to get reliable information on where exactly you're allowed to go. During my exploration of the Spanish Virgin Islands this winter I've had three different set of charts aboard--all published after the U.S. Navy stopped using the island as a gunnery range--and they are maddeningly...
One thing that has changed since the last time I cruised these waters in the late 1990s is that now everywhere you go in the Spanish Virgins and the east coast of Puerto Rico you see these tsunami warning signs. I wasn't aware that tsunamis are a serious threat in the Caribbean, so I'm wondering...
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...
O FUN-LOVING BOAT-WORSHIPPING CHILDREN of the Internet! Forget what you heard about doing up New Year's on St. Bart's. Tis a hyped-up overrated overcrowded experience if ever there was one, IMHO. I'm here to tell you: Culebra is the place to be (or have been). None of this dandified Beautiful People On Their Superyachts pretense...
