In what has been described as one of the biggest, most complex rescue efforts ever undertaken on the Irish coast, two Irish Coastguard helicopters, three RNLI lifeboats, and a flotilla of various other craft saved all 30 crew and trainees, most of them teenagers, off the Dutch sail-training vessel Astrid after she went up on...
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...
MAYBE MY SAILfeed COLLEAGUE Pat Schulte of Bumfuzzle, who is in the midst of comparing cats and monohulls, can help us out with this one. The viddy comes courtesy of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, which reported last week that a volunteer crew from the Mallaig Lifeboat Station in Scotland rescued seven survivors off the bottom of...
Trybooking.com arrives in Port Fairy carrying survivors from Inception It's been an awful month for racing sailors in California. First came the well-publicized loss of Low Speed Chase in the Farallones Race off San Francisco, which resulted in five fatalities and an unprecedented Coast Guard ban on further offshore races in the area. Now this...
When I first stepped aboard the bright orange Gunboat 66 Phaedo while chatting up ARC sailors here in Rodney Bay, I had no idea at first who I was talking to. A soft-spoken not-quite-clean-shaven young man in a t-shirt invited me aboard after I hailed the boat from the dock, and I naturally assumed he...
Given the name of this blog I would be remiss if I failed to mention the massive tsunami that trashed northeastern Japan today. You can watch an absolutely horrifying video of the big waters sweeping through the city of Sendai here. In other unrelated bad news, the Danish Cruising Family Johansen (including three children and...
I'm still up to my eyeballs in Miami. I've sailed three boats here over the past two days, and tomorrow I'm driving five hours to sail two more up in St. Augustine. But in between boats I have been following the news and thought I better throw in my two cents on the latest...
Here's another casualty of the annual fall exodus south to the islands. Emma Goldman, a 41-foot wooden ketch departed Martha's Vineyard bound for Bermuda on November 6, was rolled and dismasted in a Gulf Stream gale, then drifted for 12 days with two survivors aboard. They were picked up Sunday by an oil tanker. Unfortunately,...
I first met Poppa Neutrino (aka William David Pearlman) in the summer of 1995 on Long Island Sound, when both he and I were preparing to cross the Atlantic to Europe. He was aboard a 50-foot raft made of floating debris he called Son of Town Hall; I was on my Alberg 35 yawl Crazy...
Some Australian news outlets reported yesterday that Plastiki, the unique 60-foot plastic catamaran constructed of 12,500 plastic bottles, had "come to grief" some 200 miles off the east coast of Oz and was in the midst of being rescued. The crew of Plastiki, meanwhile, have adamantly insisted they are fine and merely called for a...
