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...
I USED TO COME OUT HERE when I was young, in an outboard skiff or a Drascombe longboat with a spritsail. I was in love with the abandoned Coast Guard station at the entrance to the tiny slit-trench harbor and often daydreamed I would someday live out here in that house, all on my own....
WHEN IT COMES TO AUTOPILOTS it is always best to divide your affections. No sense in being monogamously faithful to just one unit, giving it names and all, only to have it crap out on you in some less than sanguine circumstance. One reason I fell for Lunacy was because she came equipped with three...
BACK IN THE LATE NINETIES when I quit my job as an associate editor at Cruising World, Elaine Lembo was hired to take my place. We've been good friends ever since. We usually have furtive encounters in vans running between BWI Airport and Annapolis in October and swap all kinds of juicy gossip about sailing...
CLARE, LUCY, AND I (sans Una, who was off jet-setting in SoCal) packed ourselves aboard Lunacy this past Wednesday and were off from Portland none too early, heading east across the whole of Casco Bay, bound for Popham Beach and the mouth of the Kennebec River. I was afraid our late start would leave us...
EVER SINCE THEY WERE INTRODUCED in Europe almost two years ago, Scott Alexander at Selden Mast has been urging me to install a Selden reversible winch on Lunacy. Only problem was he couldn't get me a winch. Well... they finally started shipping these puppies across the Pond this past spring, and now at long last...
HAVING REMARKED in my last post on how my first outing this season was free of mishaps, I suppose it was inevitable something would go wrong the second time I got afloat. Fortunately, I was floating on someone else's boat. My good friend Phil Cavanaugh (fellow SEMOSA founder and officially certified Better Person) enlisted me...
UNLIKE LAST YEAR, Lunacy's first sail of the season with family aboard involved no humiliations or mishaps. We enjoyed a most excellent daysail in sub-10-knot winds (courtesy of the fabulous screecher, now in its second season) and sailed north off the mooring at Portland Yacht Services up to Chandler Cove, where we enjoyed lunch aboard...
FUNNY THING ABOUT SAILBOAT MASTS and bridges: no matter how much clearance you actually have, when you're standing in your cockpit looking up it always looks like you're not going to make it. Of course, the people who think to put bridges in our way do try to provide information on how much space is...
I promised to share pix of my new seacock/sea-chest installation (you'll recall the old aluminum chest had corrosion issues) once it was in place. Lunacy got launched late last week and yesterday was my first chance to visit in a while. I was pretty pleased with what the guys at Maine Yacht Center have worked...
