Environmental Issues

Phyllis tackles the thorny subject of garbage management on an offshore voyaging boat.

Colin is back from sailing in Scotland with one of his lovely marine wildlife articles. If this doesn’t move you…well, you are some cold hearted.

As an ocean sailor, or an aspiring one, we are sure you are as concerned as we are about the rampant overfishing of the world’s seas. But there is some good news: you can eat fish sustainably and avoid dosing yourself with horrible industrial toxins at the same time. Learn how from this book.

So how do you unwind from a long and challenging voyage across the Atlantic to Brazil by sailboat? Well, if you are Colin, you do a long and challenging science project by…you guessed it, sailboat.

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.

Collisions with whales and dolphins are becoming an increasing concern for offshore cruisers, as I outlined in a previous post. But up until recently there has been no serious attempt made to quantify the level of actual collision events, or to plot their geographical distribution. Obviously, having some idea of where and when collisions might […]

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. […]

John and I have a longstanding interest in collecting books on historical and present-day exploration of the high latitudes, or “death and destruction on the ice” as we call it. But it looks like climate change could put an end to this genre more quickly than we thought: This summer, for the first time in […]

Many yachtsmen who have visited the Rias of Galicia have remarked that they resemble the sea lochs of Scotland (but without the rain or the midges!). And they do, although they are far busier than Scotland, not just in terms of population and boat traffic, but also because of one of the cornerstones of the […]

I have, with a few short breaks, lived either on, or within a stone’s throw, of salt water all my life. My earliest childhood memories are of commuting by boat from a small island where we lived to a larger island called Bermuda. I have spent the majority of the last twenty years voyaging on […]

Another race, another whale collision, yet again ending in the loss of a boat and injury to a whale. Thankfully no loss of life, although one day that may not be the case. What is happening out on the oceans? Pirates everywhere, climate change driven hurricanes, and now homicidal whales?