It all started with YouTube. Last year, when my wife, Marjorie, and I began planning to include the Exumas in our upcoming three-month cruise through the Bahamas, I searched the internet for information on what we might find there. As I was doing so I happened across a video of ...read more
On this idyllic California summer morning, Soncy, a classic 40ft Rhodes-designed sloop built in 1957, is on her way to Santa Catalina Island. On board are owner John Clark Jr., his 10-year-old son, Ian, and me. As we motor out of Newport Harbor while raising the sails, two other ...read more
Back when I was a young man, sailing back and forth across the North Atlantic in an old fiberglass sailboat, it seemed fairly obvious to me how all that was wrong in the world might be set right. Everyone should be issued a boat at birth! Or so I declared to any who would listen ...read more
Steve greeted my boyfriend, Phillip, and me as soon as we tied Plaintiff’s Rest, our 1985 Niagara 35, up to his dock on one of the Berry Islands in the Bahamas. He was tall, cheerful and clad in a hodge-podge of clothes one might wear to paint a house: oversized, grungy and old. ...read more
It was the summer of 1952. The Eisenhower/Stevenson race was in full swing. I was in my junior year, studying naval architecture at the University of Michigan and had been offered a summer job at Jakobson Shipyard in Oyster Bay, Long Island. Practical experience is very useful ...read more
What is it that makes someone want to sail alone and nonstop around the world? I’m just an average guy from Petosky, Michigan, who learned to sail on his dad’s Hobie 16. When I first started sailing offshore in my 20s, mostly working as crew on delivery trips, I found the same ...read more
My first exposure to Nigel Calder, same as most people, was through reading his great marine technical bible, The Boatowner’s Mechanical and Electrical Manual. I studied it constantly during the years I spent as a liveaboard cruiser during the 1990s and referred to it simply as ...read more
The dark is alive when you are surrounded by water. Black is tinted blue and silver, and sky meets surf with electricity and the lapping sounds of silence. Inside our 36ft catamaran, moored off Cooper Island in the BVI, the raw nature outside, just now settling down from a late ...read more
It seems that we all struggle to make our start in life, searching for something that we would enjoy doing, something that not only challenges us today but will stay that way year after year, all the time giving great rewards along the way. Most things we are introduced to early ...read more
. Figure 8 solo sailor Randall Reeves takes advantage of some fantastic weather in the Deep South to bake a loaf of bread for himself. Click here for the complete post. January 2019 ...read more
As he awaits the arrival of yet another low, Figure 8 solo voyager Randall Reeves explains how he manages and prepares one of his “four major food groups,” namely, coffee! See complete post… January 2019 ...read more
Stumbling upon art while out sailing is an unexpected pleasure. Finding colorful glass balls that have washed across from Japanese fishing fleets is certainly magical. But it’s the purposeful art left for the enjoyment of others that most moves me. One example was a deer made ...read more
If you were in Gotland, a popular island vacation destination off the coast of Sweden, on the morning of July 3, your holiday might have been interrupted by a startling sight: a tiny island of trash approaching shore with people aboard. It was, in fact, a sailboat made from ...read more
In the broad spectrum of human sailing endeavors, few confuse the uninitiated more than the desire to sail around the world in a small boat. By “small” I mean really small—like less than 20ft small—and in some cases much tinier than that, like the 5ft 41/2in Vera Hugh, which the ...read more
“Tucker!” I snap at my little brother. “You have to be on lookout!” Two years younger than I am, he just looks at me and shrugs. He continues to stare at his computer screen. On watch without the calming experience of my parents, I cannot relax. Saphira seems wild and out of ...read more
Bucking decades of precedent, a Florida elections officer is refusing to allow customers of a popular mail forwarding service to register to vote in his county. Since 1988, St. Brendan’s Isle of Green Cove Springs in Clay County has provided transient Americans with mail ...read more
I began my sailing life as a kid in an 8ft El Toro and a 16ft Snipe on Lake Millerton in California’s San Joaquin Valley. I am concluding it as an 80-something in a Rhodes 19 on Lake Damariscotta on the coast of Maine. So what does this have to do with the hardy, oceangoing ...read more
Experience is a fine thing. You may think there is no substitute for it. Every sensible sailor would agree, but when it comes to extreme weather or generally rare events, there aren’t many who can put hand on heart and say that it’s all “old hat.” Luckily, sailing is rich in ...read more
Behan and Jamie Gifford set off from Seattle, Washington aboard Totem, their Stevens 47 sloop, in 2008. They’ve been sailing the world ever since, documenting their travels on their blog, Sailing Totem, and raising their three children, Niall, Mairen and Siobhan, who were nine, ...read more
The Baja Ha-Ha is a high point of the West Coast cruising calendar. Each year, at the end of October, around 150 boats make the 750-mile voyage from San Diego to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, with stops at the small Mexican settlements of Tortuga Bay and Bahia Santa Maria. This popular ...read more
Imagine you’re driving an old rusted-out pickup truck over railroad tracks,” my boyfriend, Phillip, said while trying to answer one of the many questions our friends had for us after we’d just spent the last five weeks crossing the Atlantic Ocean on a catamaran. I didn’t agree ...read more
So you wanna be a sailing video star, and sail around the world funded by people living vicariously through your experiences? All things are possible... In the five years Julia and I have been making sailing videos—vlogs—we have watched the industry change ...read more
Like most soon-to-be cruisers and fellow dog owners, I fantasized about life on the boat with woman’s best friend. I pictured cruising the waterways with my faithful companion, his ears flapping in the wind as he stood on the bowsprit looking down at the dolphins in the bow ...read more
Mine is a fishing family. Whether we are running lines off the stern, spearfishing or casting from the boat, we’re always fishing. So, of course, we were fishing while we sailed as part of the 2015 Pacific Puddle Jump. Among our mini-group of boats, a competition had been ...read more
