Sailboat Cruising

Philip Armand Leudiere, age 61, the skipper of a French catamaran skipper was shot dead last month during an attack on board his boat at anchor outside Marina de Caraballeda, on the Central Litoral coast between La Guaira and Cabo Codera, Venezuela.Four robbers boarded the boat undetected. In resisting the attack, the skipper was shot several times in the head. His wife, Catherine Marie,

By Clark BeekIn the September issue of SAIL, Clark Beek writes of cruising the extensive, remote southern coast and the much warmer, more popular northern coast of Peru (Ceviche + Process Knitting). Here are the notes that did not fit into the story.For many North American boats, the west coast cruising route has been pushed farther and farther south each year, so

No, it’s not about watching the leaves (both of them) change colorBy Kimball LivingstonSomehow, calling it Santa Catalina Island just seems redundant when I talk about Catalina. Both of my recent trips were dolphin-blessed. Once we saw the blue whale that was all the buzz in the anchorages. Always, there was somebody ready to observe that millions upon millions

Here’s a chartplotter photo that shows the boat plunked into the local parking lot. In fact, it was tied alongside the pier northwest of number 4. The distance to the apparent position was over 200 yards. The fault lay in a discrepancy between the GPS lat-long data and the electronic chart itself. In other words, it’s a classic datum shift. Think about what could have happened to the boat

We love our slab-reefing setup but constantly had problems with the reefing lines getting tangled up around the end of the boom. The solution was simple. We always carry a couple of spare battens inside the boom, and we discovered that leaving one poking out prevents this from happening. Kitty van