experience

Gragkkkk! Schschs! These are NOT the sounds you want to hear as you trailer your boat to the launch ramp. I was about a mile away from the ramp at the time, and looking in the rearview mirror I immediately noticed Betty Jane, my 1982 Mystic 20 Catboat, was now riding a good deal ...read more

There is something almost mystical and more than a little eerie about scuba diving in the deep ocean, hundreds of miles from land and a mile from the bottom. You are surrounded by blue, all shades of blue, vanishing into deep black as you look down. No fish, no coral, just ...read more

Pitch black in a narrow, unlit canal, my only two points of reference were a pair of red and green navigational buoys half a mile ahead. As I approached them, the water under the keel of my Bristol 40 yawl, Daydream, kept diminishing, now at 4ft, now at just 6in. Stuck! Twice I ...read more

When a winter norther blows through the Bahamas, the northeast trades can reach gale force as they funnel through the Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti. After waiting for a lull, though, we had a fabulous beam reach aboard our Liberty 458, Distant Drummer, from Santiago de ...read more

February 2, 2020 was a beautiful Sunday afternoon. The temperature was in the upper 60’s, the wind from the southwest at a steady 8 knots—an ideal day to take my Catalina 270, Pneuma, out for the first sail of the year in my home waters of north Alabama. After a few extra ...read more