SAIL.SailMagazine

The wind was too light to sail, so we started out motoring. Soon, however, my buddy’s motor started heating up. The access hatch was buried under camping gear, and he didn’t want to investigate right then, so he shut his engine down, and I took his boat in tow.

After replacing our cadet-gray Sunbrella twice and replacing zippers and restitching countless times in our first six years cruising, we decided there had to be a better, more cost-effective way to maintain our cockpit canvas.

By the time you read this, Kinship, an American-flagged Saga 43, will have made its second Atlantic crossing in little over half a year. As I write, the yacht is staging in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, just off the coast of Morocco.

A dinosaur of an engine that is over 70 years old can push a much larger boat than ours, weighing eight times as much, at similar speeds with more-or-less the same fuel consumption!

Energy and excitement crackled in the rigging around us as we prepared to set sail on the shimmering Adriatic Sea. We, a group of 31 adventurous Canadian sailors, were setting out in a charter flotilla to explore the beautiful islands of Croatia.