What Is It With Yachties?

Reading Time: 3 minutes

John and I were working below, tied up to the dock in Hermitage—a place that doesn’t get a lot of visiting boats—when we heard a thump on the deck. Poking his head out the companionway, John was met with a bag of perch fillets, from fish caught in the bay that day, landed from a speedboat across the wharf from us. John, our benefactor and the fish buyer, gave directions for cooking the fillets, and then jumped back on the dock to continue moving fish crates around.

The Ethics Of Cairn Building

Reading Time: 3 minutes

We just got an e-mail from our friend Louis Nielsen. Louis has lived for over 20 years, mostly alone, in a remote cabin on the west coast of Spitsbergen. He is one of the last, perhaps the very last, people to make a living as a trapper in the Svalbard archipelago, some 500 miles north of the northernmost point of Norway.

Q&A: Which Ensign?

Reading Time: < 1 minutes

Question: I liked the beautiful twilight photo of your boat in Hare Bay, Newfoundland in this month’s Cruising World, and I showed it to a friend who’s been reading a manual on marine flag etiquette. He asked me what flag you’re flying on the backstay…and if the boat is an American registered boat from the US east coast, why the flag looks like a British naval ensign instead of an American flag.

I suggested maybe the boat is registered in Bermuda and so the flag on the backstay is a Bermuda ensign. He bet me a beer…could you help us by explaining the flag?