Why We Go

There’s so much writing about the latest and greatest gear in the cruiser’s world. Here’s a pleasant break from that in which Colin shares simpler gear that takes him back to a time when his fascination and love for voyaging was still fresh and new.

It’s funny…people we meet often assume that Phyllis and I are great travelers. And it’s easy to see how they might come to that conclusion. After all we have spent most of the last 20 years moving from place to place around the Atlantic rim. But actually nothing could be further from the truth.

This morning I have a musing about one of the more obscure, but none the less, wonderful benefits of offshore voyaging.

Question: How do you make great travel photographs? Answer: F8 and be there.

Over twenty years ago I received an offer from Britain’s leading whale and dolphin researcher to become a reserve skipper on his annual survey in the western isles of Scotland. Wow, I thought, what an opportunity, and promptly seized it with both hands. Which only goes to show that you should always look before you […]

Though Amundsen said that adventure is the result of poor planning, when we say we go north for the adventure, we mean the chance to explore “off the charts”.

Question: What do these two photographs have in common?

We were tied up alongside a fishery wharf in northern Newfoundland when the roar of powerful engines brought us tumbling up from below to see two seine boats attached stern to stern by a thick line and both at full throttle.

Though this is third in the series explaining why we keep going north, it’s not down the list in our hearts: the people we meet in the north are a big reason we keep going back.

This one is almost too much of a cliché to mention but, since we are talking about why we go north, the scenery is definitely one of the big draws.

When you cast your mind back at the end of a season, what do you remember from it? Memory being selective as time passes, the bad stuff tends to get filed under futile, and the good just keeps coming into focus.

Phyllis and I recently prepared for and executed a two-month trip that included 11 flights and a month on a sailboat wintering over in Greenland. Since we were traveling on some small aircraft, all of our combined checked baggage had to total less than 40kg, together with two small 8kg carry-on bags. Included in this […]

There is nothing quite like the final moment of departure at the start of a long cruise or voyage. A strong mixture of anticipation and apprehension, it generally follows a stressful period, with all of the usual last minute glitches and hassles, however careful your planning and preparation. Then there are the goodbyes to friends […]

We received a question a while ago that got us both thinking: “Why did you start cruising, why do you keep cruising, and how long will you keep doing it?”

Our last extended cruise ended in the fall of 2003 when John and I hauled Morgan’s Cloud in Maine so that we could spend the winter at our house in Bermuda. We had a big decision to make: If we wanted to refit Morgan’s Cloud and keep on cruising, the house would have to be […]

Three weeks ago we sailed away from our cottage in Nova Scotia where we had spent most of the summer while Morgan’s Cloud went round and round her mooring and we did boat chores in an effort to tie up the loose ends left over from our refit.

Though John and I always feel totally disconnected with our destination after flying somewhere, when sailing from place to place on Morgan’s Cloud we feel like active participants in the small bit of the world surrounding us.

Why do we keep returning to the north, you ask? For one thing, there is a quality to the light in the north that is indescribable—you have to see it to believe it!