People & Books

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.

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. Complimentary Post

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? Complimentary Post

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 [...]

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 [...]