A new sailing friend asked me recently, “Do you ever buddy boat?” “Not really,” I started to say, but then changed my answer to, “Sure, often.” She could see the confusion her simple question had created and laughed. “Betsy, is everything about sailing and cruising always so complicated?” Let this article be my answer to my friend and to others who wonder the same.
When we arrived in Cartagena, Colombia, after a year of cruising, I knew we had work to do. While we had kept up with the necessary (read: constant) maintenance on our 45-year-old Bill Tripp yawl Papillon during our first year aboard, now it was finally time for some major upgrades.
For dreamers of all ages, the idea of cruising has an inescapable allure. But the question always remains: “When should I go? When can I realistically trade my current life for the freedom of cruising?”
When we took our laptop in for repairs in Panama, we knew there was a chance it was irreparable. But we hadn’t thought it might get stolen.
Can pigs swim? In the Exumas they can. The Bahamian island of Big Majors Spot in the Exumas is home to a small herd of free-range domestic pigs.
On my old yawl, Iolaire, I always used a mainsail reefing method that seemed odd to guests, but was very fast and worked well. After first casting off the mainsheet, we would hoist the end of the boom a full six feet into air—the depth of the reef—with the topping lift…
Without a doubt the most magical moments I’ve experienced as a sailor have occurred after the sun was down. I will always recall one summer night I spent off the Carolina coast—horizon lost in a low-lying blanket of fog, brilliant shotgun blasts of starlight directly overhead…
Night had fallen several hours earlier. The full moon was bright enough to cast shadows on the deck. But as we reached along through the tropics, an ominous line of black clouds slowly obliterated the stars behind us. A squall line was overrunning us from behind.
I took up sailing in my 30s after poking around Maine for some time taking photos. My first sailing experience was aboard a windjammer in Camden, and it was glorious, but it was the photos I’d taken of the small sailboats at anchor nearby that really stuck with me.
This is what singlehanded sailing is all about: magical moments that fill the senses, where it’s just you and the boat and the open sky. Singlehanded sailing offers a rare chance in this noisy hyper-connected world to step off the fast track, slow down, and listen to the quiet, if only for a short while.
I didn’t come up with the title to this story on my own. I actually saw it on a T-shirt in downtown Bayfield, Wisconsin. At
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