Opinion

An Englishman I met in British Columbia once told me that sooner or later every sailor falls in love with an older woman. His name was Duncan, and the moment he saw my boat, Drummer, he was awash in longing…

Dropping the hook in remote Bahia Magdalena—on the Pacific coast of Mexico’s Baja peninsula—I was instantly attracted to Puna, a plucky little fire engine-red cutter anchored nearby.

We have an inflatable globe that hangs in our saloon, and it is ruining my life. It is an innocuous-looking thing: the different countries are decked out in cheery purples and oranges, and a there’s jagged Sharpie line showing our route from the Chesapeake to the South Pacific. But somehow, whenever talk turns to the future, the globe jumps off its perch and into someone’s hands. Mesmerized, we turn it and turn it, trying to take in every country, every possibility, every tiny harbor. And we begin to play an endless game of And Then We Could.

One beautiful afternoon last August I sat on an old-growth cedar stump that had washed up on the beach in a winter storm and watched a blue gale blow up the Straits of Juan de Fuca. The straits are straddled to the south by the aptly named 11,000-foot-high Hurricane Ridge and 20-plus miles to the north by the beach where I sat.

Over his three decades of ocean voyaging, author John Kretschmer has been in more than his fair share of heavy weather. In this excerpt from his new book, Sailing a Serious Ocean—Sailboats, Storms, Stories and Lessons Learned from 30 Years at Sea, he looks back at his darkest hour at sea

John D. Macdonald, through his iconic character Travis McGee, observed that one thing never goes wrong on a boat. Instead, things go wrong in threes.

Sailing makes the news when there’s a disaster. The rest of the time, thousands of small boats traverse the oceans in safety, carrying hundreds of families with young children.

I’m not sure what madness made me decide to fix our generator myself. Maybe I was feeling especially talented that day. Or cheap. Or downright insane. Back on land, I would never try to penetrate the mysteries of our furnace—I didn’t even change the filters myself. But life aboard changes you.

Nothing dispels winter’s gloom from the dyspeptic souls of Salish Sea cruising sailors like sunshine, blue skies and a juicy bit of gossip with your morning coffee. When the rite of spring commissioning comes around in the Pacific Northwest…

SAIL Editor Peter Nielsen reminisces on first meeting Don Street some 25 years ago.