People/Books

First a book and then an article get Phyllis thinking: What does respectful voyaging mean? How do we know if we have crossed lines as travellers that we shouldn’t have crossed?

So what can we do to reverse the steady decline in offshore cruising? Here’s a book with an idea that just might help.

Managing our money and saving to go cruising is way more difficult than it was. Here’s a book recommendation to help with that.

John nostalgically buys a book written by a cook on ocean racers and Phyllis extrapolates!

Do you want to get a feel for what a long-distance offshore voyage, including heavy weather, is like? Phyllis has a reading suggestion for you. But don’t look at it as just homework! It’s also a good read.

Phyllis reviews Colin Speedie’s new book, “A Sea Monster’s Tale: In Search of the Basking Shark”. If you enjoy Colin’s writing on this site (and who doesn’t?) you won’t want to miss his book.

Lovers of Colin’s lyrical and entertaining articles have a treat coming: he has written a whole book about his decades of professional sailing and work in basking shark conservation.

Phyllis expands a bit on our (very slow) transition to part-time voyaging and discusses the upcoming very important month of December.

I just read Herb McCormick’s biography of Lin and Larry Pardey, As Long as It’s Fun. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that I devoured the book, or maybe to be more accurate still, the book consumed me for several hours. Here’s a short review.

There’s a whole genre of books and articles on how to buy a boat and go cruising on very little money. But really, how often do you meet people who have actually made it work for any length of time?

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?

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

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

It’s strange. I have never had any interest in recreational fishing. When other voyagers talk about the cool gear they have that always hooks a fish on an ocean passage and how good the catch was to eat, all I can think of is the mess on deck. It’s not that I don’t like to […]

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.

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!

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 […]

Last weekend we had a pleasant break from our re-power project while visiting some good friends in Camden, Maine and giving a slide-show to some members of the Ocean Cruising Club. While there, our friends suggested that we visit Ben Ellison, author of Panbo, the popular blog on marine electronics, on his aptly named motor […]

Approaching the lee shore of Nordaustlandet (the uninhabited—or so we thought—icecap-domed island separated from Spitsbergen by Hinlopen Strait) in a building gale in early August of 2002, was intimidating to say the least.

When people, predominately non-sailors, find out that John and I live on our sailboat and cross oceans (well, one ocean—seems we just can’t shake ourselves loose from the North Atlantic), the thing they most often ask is, “Aren’t you afraid out there?”