Rhumb Lines

Many of the most interesting cruising areas in Florida are inaccessible to the average cruising boat. The Florida Bay between the southern tip of Florida and the Keys is a minefield for boats drawing more than three feet, as is much of the peninsula’s Gulf Coast. The panhandle area is riddled with shallow bayous and […]

The past couple of months I’ve been engaged in an ongoing struggle to remove all the deck paint and primer from Opal, the 1971 Sparkman Stephens designed Yankee 30 that I’m restoring with the help of local professionals in the St. Petersburg, FL area. One would think that after 10 years of full-time cruising, and […]

Another runner has made it! It’s always nice to get an email or letter from an appreciative reader letting me know they’ve escaped the land of the dirt dwellers. The shot above is from John Stone’s single-handed passage Beaufort, North Carolina to St. Thomas, USVI this fall aboard his refit Cape Dory 36 Far Reach. […]

The first issue of our 48th year of publication is as good a time as any to play curmudgeon. So let’s talk about the dream of sailing away—what it was, what has become of it, and what it will be like tomorrow. Sailors today are truly lucky to live during a time when the act […]

You don’t have to spend much time in the sailing world to recognize it is filled with some of the planet’s most creative, good-spirited and generous people. Must be something in the wind . . . or water. We lost one of those people on September 30—yacht designer Edward “Ted” Brewer, who died at home […]

Rigger Glenn Mooney of Yacht Riggers in St. Petersburg, Florida has no choice but to be organized. A veteran rigger with more than three...

Amidst the excitement of launch day—your desire to be back in the water, and the yard’s eagerness to make room for another customer (chaching)—...

My last big haulout was careening an old wooden boat on a mud flat in Benoa Harbor, Bali. We had hired a crew of...

During our decade of cruising, my partner and I spent most of our days within 20 degrees of the equator. In many tropical ports...

The forlorn monuments to Sisyphus are clustered in one corner of the boatyard where the summer weeds grow tall. They arrive by towboat, strapped...