On a late September morning, Tom and I left port on New Georgia Island, sailing quickly to escape the high island. We were headed for the east coast of Australia after a year’s cruise in the Solomon Islands and New Guinea and preferred the freedom of open ocean sailing but first we had to get out of the Solomon Sea. As usual for starting a voyage we had a C-MAP chart of Munda up on the computer at the nav station. It was not very accurate but it showed the beacons that provided a range for crossing narrow Munda bar.…

We’re heading south to spend the winter in the Caribbean. The Plan I’d recently retired and was planning to spend the entire winter in the eastern Caribbean. While I already had made the offshore passage from New England to the islands of the Caribbean a dozen times via Bermuda, this voyage would be special. The family was coming along. Julie and our two kids were no strangers to boats. Julie had been sailing with me in Maine since before the kids were born. She and the kids later joined me one winter in the Caribbean, but they’d yet to make…

The voyage from Darwin in northern Australia to the Gulf of Aden by way of Sri Lanka and India’s Malabar Coast turned out to be a daunting feat for my 1966 Cal 30 Saltaire. Gales and calms, along with bizarre currents, posed a challenging obstacle course requiring patience and skill. Few of the cruisers I met in Darwin intended to cross by way of Sri Lanka and India. Rod Heikell, in his Indian Ocean Cruising Guide, warns, “There are few people who have much that is good to say about this route, and it can involve lots of sail changes,…

It was dark with a dimensionless blackness that comes at sea on a starless, humid night. Oddly Enough’s stern faced swells and rising wind. We’d been meeting them head-on an hour earlier when we left the breakwater that sheltered the harbor at Samana on the east side of the Dominican Republic. They had been the cause of our turning back instead of plowing eastward to the Mona Passage. We couldn’t see, just feel them. The blanket of black meant nothing reflected back at us, and like most of the islands we had visited, navigational marks were far apart and their…

Tropical storm Ana, the first named storm of the season, developed early and directly in the path of our Nordhavn 52 trawler Dirona during a May North Atlantic crossing from Dublin via the Azores to Charleston, South Carolina. This was our third Atlantic crossing while voyaging around the world and, knowing that the North Atlantic can be difficult, we had plotted a route for the best weather and were comfortably ahead of the hurricane season. Yet a named storm was lying in wait as we proceeded. Route planning In determining the route for our spring passage from Ireland to the US east…
My young sons and I were about to sail my 50-foot yawl, Empiricus, from Ketchikan to Seward, Alaska. Moving back to my hometown of Seward from my current home in the southeast part of the state with my boat would mean crossing the Gulf of Alaska. “It’s just wind and waves out there, boys,” I assured my sons: Isaac, 10 and Steven, six. “We just have to keep the ocean out of the boat and stay onboard. We’ll be fine.” This would be my first time out of sight of land. Beyond the ripping tidal currents of the inside waters…

Tanzania, if people are aware of it at all, evokes images of safaris on the vast African plains or perhaps the challenge of climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro with its famous snow-capped peak. Prior to the global pandemic, we had no plans to go there on Perry our Privilege 482 catamaran. Not only had we already visited more than a decade before, it sits in a sort of no-man’s land for global cruisers. It’s not on a direct route to the Red Sea from Asia and doesn’t beckon to south-bound Indian Ocean cruisers like Madagascar does. To make our way back to…

For sailors who plan to cruise overseas (including the Caribbean), using satellite imagery is an important subject. Based on our 20 years of experience cruising in the Caribbean, across the Pacific and all over Southeast Asia, we know that commercial charting accuracy away from the U.S. and Europe is not nearly as accurate and detailed as it is in North America. Exclusive use of a chart plotter even with expensive commercial charts can be a big problem if, like many cruisers, you use it to cruise in remote areas. The main issue is that these charts, though loaded with navigation…

The 238-nautical mile voyage from Matthew Town, Bahamas, to Port Antonio, Jamaica, was a navigationally interesting one. Our route transited the Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti close to the Cuba side where a traffic separation scheme is in place. Though relatively short, the dogleg path made things slightly more challenging than our previous open water crossings with no obstructions. It also provided some coastal navigating opportunities. Additionally, our path passed about eight nautical miles from dangerous reefs near Jamaica. One of those reefs is only 16 feet deep with large breaking swell and an exposed shipwreck. My wife Monika…

My husband and I bought Ora Kali, a Sabre 30, in June and just a month later left New Jersey to take her to Maine. We had delivered less prepared boats than Ora Kali; the owner was planning to slip her himself when we made the deal. But the marina was up a shallow tidal creek where we couldn’t do any preparation. So our first foray was the day we dropped the mooring lines and negotiated two opening bridges to get into Raritan Bay. That short sail showed we were not ready to go offshore. We needed shakedown time which…