SAIL.SailMagazine

Cruising Grounds We got a late start departing Ventura Harbor that Memorial Day weekend. Arriving at their Swan 40, Blue Moon, on Thursday, my hosts Mark and Christine Mohler discovered there was a problem with the shore-power main breaker. The Mohlers hadn’t been cruising for a couple of months, and now found their dead house batteries needed replacing.

We finally got underway late on the Friday

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New England

The sun shone a milky white. Its weak rays were barely able to drive off the damp chill of the early afternoon as we made our way eastward in the Deer Isle Thorofare, a passage snaking between Deer Isle and the beautiful smaller islands of Merchant Row in Down East Maine. I carefully checked the chart against the red and green buoys marking the channel, mindful that straying off course could mean

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Profiles In a classroom on Captiva Island in Florida, six students gather around a white board and watch their instructor draw a diagram of the points of sail. The students range in age from 30 to 70 and hail from Ireland, South Africa, Texas and New York. As their minds take in the new information, a door opens behind them. “Hi, we’re Steve and Doris Colgate!” says a grinning Doris. “Just stopping by to
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Cruising It's the best part of the day—relaxing in the cockpit with good friends, sharing another spectacular sunset with a cool drink. As the sun fades, growling stomachs remind us it’s time for dinner. Rather than jumping in the dinghy and heading ashore, though, we opt to lounge in our cockpit. Nothing is easier than lighting the grill and enjoying the tantalizing aromas that soon waft through the
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Boatworks THE TECHNOLOGY

Conventional “old-fashioned” high-frequency radios are quite capable of communicating worldwide, just as they did throughout most of the 20th century. But they suffer from two main problems.

The first is that radio communication over distances of more than a few hundred miles can be achieved only by reflecting radio waves off electrically charged

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