Chagos Archipelagoseven atolls, 55 tiny islands, and the military enclave of Diego Garcialies in the center of the Indian Ocean, 1,000 miles south of India. It is the largest coral atoll in the world, with a reasonable claim to having the healthiest reef and the cleanest water in the world. There are no permanent residents, no shops or businesses. We spent 83 days there, on a mooring left
How do we define heavy weather? For example, a small family cruiser sailing upwind in open water might have a tough time of it in a 25-knot wind even though the same blow is perfect for a boat twice her size. And what about a vessel crewed by a retired couple who dont spend much time in the gym, compared to the same craft manned by the local firefighters tug-of-war team? With the obvious
How do we define heavy weather? For example, a small family cruiser sailing upwind in open water might have a tough time of it in a 25-knot wind even though the same blow is perfect for a boat twice her size. And what about a vessel crewed by a retired couple who dont spend much time in the gym, compared to the same craft manned by the local firefighters tug-of-war team? With the obvious
Everyone warned us about crossing Cook Strait, the stormy stretch of water between New Zealands North and South Islands. One man even asked us, Why are you doing this to your family? Do you enjoy fear? It was a fair question, and we werent sure of the answer. What we did know was that if we had stuck to the usual choices, we never would have sailed across the Pacific in the first
MAINTENANCERepairs on the runWe take very good care of both Yanmar engines on our Outremer 45 catamaran. Before we left Thailand late last year we serviced everything and figured the engines were in good shape for our passage to the Med. Everything worked well until we spent a week motoring in the windless Gulf of Aden and noticed our port engine was using two pints
To sail to windward in heavy weather, you need a flat-cut headsail. A heavily reefed roller genoa typically is anything but flat. The draft in the sail migrates aft as the sail is reefed, and you end up with a baggy sail that presses the boat down and wont allow it to point.One solution is to drop your genoa and hoist a storm jib. Another is to set a storm jib on a detachable inner
From the moment my father first put me in a sailboat he told me that safety and seamanship come first, above all else. He served in the Coast Guard in the North Atlantic during World War II and knew why these things are important. Later, when I went sailing with his wartime crew, every one of them put the same emphasis on seamanship and safety. They focused not on loading the boat down with fancy
From the moment my father first put me in a sailboat he told me that safety and seamanship come first, above all else. He served in the Coast Guard in the North Atlantic during World War II and knew why these things are important. Later, when I went sailing with his wartime crew, every one of them put the same emphasis on seamanship and safety. They focused not on loading the boat down with fancy
New York City artist, adventurer and sailor Reid Stowe has less than one month left in his epic 1,000-plus-day non-stop, non-resupplied sea voyage aboard the 70-foot. gaff-rigged schooner, Anne. Originally scheduled to return to New York Harbor last winter, when the North Atlantic storms were at their peak, Stowe decided to sail with the variable winds and currents of the Atlantic
On Friday May 13th, 1994, two friends, two other SCUBA divers and I were lost at sea after a dive off the coast of Fiji. That day, an act of luck in the form of a yacht from Boston plucked our soggy bottoms out of the Fijian ocean. I can’t recall if in the excitement of the rescue I managed to thank our unnamed heros, but it was their superb navigation that allowed me to be here today. We
Just because you’re stuck at home self-quarantining, that’s no reason you can’t still hone your skills or teach someone else you know about boathandling with
Stuck at home self-quarantining? How about giving on-line sailboat racing a try? Begun in 2010 and now working in partnership with sailing’s international governing body,
Being a cruising sailor, one is already practicing a kind of social distancing. But coastal cruisers, and those transiting the Intracoastal Waterway, in particular, still have to
Rhode Island native Charlie Enright, 35, has competed in not one but two Volvo Ocean Races (VOR), with Team Alvimedica in 2014-15 and Vestas 11th
There are many mantras experienced cruisers like to pass on to those less experienced. First and foremost among these is: “Never sail to a schedule.”
Learning to sail is an organic process. Often we’re introduced to the sport by a family member or good friend who loves sailing and wants
It was a dark night, utterly black. Any light was blanketed by the fog. My chartplotter was night-blinding me. I looked at the Navionics map
I pretty much took rigs for granted when I first started sailing on other people’s boats. After all, unlike exciting, moving, tweakable things like sails
A dozen or so years ago, my wife, Julie, and I arrived at the Cedar Point Yacht Club’s parking lot in Westport, Connecticut, with little
Panama is truly the crossroads of the world, bridging the North and South American continents, with the Caribbean and Europe to the east and Asia
