Over twenty years ago I received an offer from Britain’s leading whale and dolphin researcher to become a reserve skipper on his annual survey in the western isles of Scotland. Wow, I thought, what an opportunity, and promptly seized it with both hands. Which only goes to show that you should always look before you [...]

Question: What do these two photographs have in common?

The liveaboard life appeals on many levels, but in common with many cruising couples that we have encountered, we have found that it can feel a little purposeless at times. This is partly due to us still shaking off many years of frenetic career work, but we’ve found we’re far from alone in this regard. [...]

When you cast your mind back at the end of a season, what do you remember from it? Memory being selective as time passes, the bad stuff tends to get filed under futile, and the good just keeps coming into focus.

Phyllis and I recently prepared for and executed a two-month trip that included 11 flights and a month on a sailboat wintering over in Greenland. Since we were traveling on some small aircraft, all of our combined checked baggage had to total less than 40kg, together with two small 8kg carry-on bags. Included in this [...]

There is nothing quite like the final moment of departure at the start of a long cruise or voyage. A strong mixture of anticipation and apprehension, it generally follows a stressful period, with all of the usual last minute glitches and hassles, however careful your planning and preparation. Then there are the goodbyes to friends [...]

We received a question a while ago that got us both thinking: “Why did you start cruising, why do you keep cruising, and how long will you keep doing it?”

Our last extended cruise ended in the fall of 2003 when John and I hauled Morgan’s Cloud in Maine so that we could spend the winter at our house in Bermuda. We had a big decision to make: If we wanted to refit Morgan’s Cloud and keep on cruising, the house would have to be [...]

Three weeks ago we sailed away from our cottage in Nova Scotia where we had spent most of the summer while Morgan’s Cloud went round and round her mooring and we did boat chores in an effort to tie up the loose ends left over from our refit.

Though John and I always feel totally disconnected with our destination after flying somewhere, when sailing from place to place on Morgan’s Cloud we feel like active participants in the small bit of the world surrounding us.

We are in the third year of a one year refit and up until two weeks ago it was getting to me—big time. As far as I was concerned, all marine equipment was junk and almost everyone in the marine business was a crook. Our boat seemed to be a collection of half finished projects [...]

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours in our neighbour’s Boston Whaler sounding out the inlet our cabin is on and then carefully positioning a plastic bottle anchored by a rock as a marker for the barge that will drop our new mooring.