People/Books

When non-sailors ask John and me what it’s like to live on a sailboat, we often equate it to being in a spaceship, as in the sailboat being a self-contained entity immersed in an environment that’s hostile to human life. But is our analogy correct? What do we actually know about life in a spaceship? [...]

It all started with John’s post on our friend Shelly, whose beautiful voice got us thinking about the connection between sailing and art. I followed that up with a post about our friend Stephanie, who is a very talented painter, and that in turn led me to think about Marcy. We met Marcy and Michael [...]

So much of what is wonderful about voyaging is the people you meet...and sometimes the art they make.

Keeping myself in books is a fulltime job even though I don’t discriminate between eBooks and regular books—it’s all good. Mysteries, biographies, non-fiction, travel writing, the occasional novel—I read them all. My obsession with books is okay when I stick to the swap and sell-off quick tables, but whenever I enter a bookstore with a [...]

We have written before about young people who have chosen sailing as their way to have adventure, see the world, and, for a good number of them, make a difference, whether it’s through their films, photographs, blog, relationships developed while underway, etc. We've just added another young couple to the group we link to—thank you [...]

Jimmy Cornell is undoubtedly one of the most important people to offshore voyaging of his generation. Colin caught up to him for a wide ranging interview on what this consummate entrepreneur is planning next as well as his latest publication.

The red trimaran alongside us crashes through another short steep sea and a jet of water with the ferocity of a fire hose blasts her from stem to stern as she claws her way upwind into a steady 35 knots at the start of the 1986 Route du Rhum race off the French port of [...]

Continuing on with the theme of learning from the best that we started in the last chapter, this chapter is about the many things we learned from Tony and Coryn Gooch about storm survival and drogue retrieval—they know what they are talking about after decades of voyaging in some of the toughest parts of the world's oceans and Tony's single handed non-stop circumnavigation.

This post is a shameless plug for a friend. But what the hell, if you can’t abuse your position for a friend, who can you abuse it for? Shelly and Dave are live-aboard sailors on their beautiful, and beautifully maintained, Apogee 50 Cadence, currently headquartered at Charleston, South Carolina, where we met them the first [...]

I have to admit that I was leery about writing this review of Carolyn Shearlock’s and Jan Irons’ fresh-off-the-press cookbook, since John and I do a lot of cooking, both on and off the boat, and are a long way down the gustatory road from making casseroles with condensed mushroom soup and dried onion soup [...]

Those of you who read AAC regularly will will know that I’m no fan of the current state of the sailing magazine industry. Just how many charter-in-the-Virgin-Islands-with-cheesecake, so-we-can-sell a-bunch-of-advertising, articles do we need? Boring, boring, dull. But there is at least one shining exception to the above jaundiced view: Ocean Navigator magazine, which has always [...]

I recently wrote a post on spreading happiness, inspired by Tassio and Claudia’s website. Well, their website inspired me in another way, as well. So much of what I read/hear/see in the media lately seems to suggest that young people are screwed and can only look forward to dead-end jobs and a lifelong economic struggle. [...]

Last spring I wrote a post about our friend Alasdair, who at the time was planning a trip on his 26-foot Vertue sloop Sumara to Jan Mayen to climb Beerenberg. Well, he and his crew, along with another small sailboat and crew, pulled off the trip with aplomb! For their achievement, Alasdair and Tim, the [...]

On our way to Svalbard (Spitsbergen) in Morgan’s Cloud in 2002, we stopped at Teltvika, a cove on the west side of Bjørnøya (Bear Island), a virtually uninhabited island which lies at the halfway mark on the 550 nautical mile passage from Norway. During our second evening at Teltvika, the fog came in pea soup [...]