Offshore Sailing - Ocean Navigator

The Whale’s Way

We had tacked past the mighty seamark that is Barra Head and out past St Kilda, carrying a reduced sail plan into the wide Atlantic on our passage from Oban in Scotland to Reykjavik in Iceland aboard the Clipper 68 CV6, operated by Skirr Adventures, based in the UK. We were accompanied by a second Skirr Adventures boat CV11. The rising sun was scraping filigree from the wavetops and burnishing the clouds’ undersides. The watch was alert on these night-blue ocean swells. Then — a blowspout. Only one, and it was huge. Then all suggestions of its existence disappeared. ‘Did…

A Tale of Two Rallies

A Look at Autumn U.S. to the Caribbean Sailing Rallies Thinking of taking your boat south to the West Indies for a winter of sailing among the tropical islands of the West Indies? Each fall, hundreds do. Some go on their own schedule, but the majority, hundreds of boats, join a rally. There are two, the North American Rally to the Caribbean (NARC) and the Salty Dawg Rally, that depart the U.S. East Coast in late October or early November, for the 1,500-mile offshore voyage to the Eastern Caribbean. This past fall, those two rallies experienced different conditions, and therein…

Mischief in the Keyway

An autopilot failure forces an offshore crew to improvise We had just entered the Gulf Stream heading north from Palm Beach with some 1,100 nautical miles to Martha’s Vineyard when our autopilot failed. Even though we were in settled conditions, we instantly knew the gravity of the issue – that without a reliable repair we would need to turn back or face more than a thousand miles of hand steering including hundreds of miles in the stream, not a pretty prospect, especially with just three on board. Sea Witch is John Stephenson’s 53-foot Pearson ketch. She displaces more than 40…

The first six thousand miles without Patrick

Rebecca Childress readies the wind vane self steering rig aboard her Valiant 40 Brick House. Rebecca with her late husband Patrick Childress who died of COVID 19 in Cape Town in 2020.Rebecca aloft on Brick House performing a pre-departure rig inspection. Brick House’s route from Cape Town to Greneda.The stack pack arrangement for Brick House’s mainsail. Rebecca and her captain for the trip Michael Hayward.The rugged and distinctive landscape in the vicinity of Cape Town, the starting point for Brick House’s passage to Greneda.A rainbow appears as a good omen for Brick House in the anchorage at St. Helena Island.…

Fall rallies recover from COVID slowdown

Boats in Gran Canaria preparing for the 2021 ARC crossing to the Caribbean. Rallies are a popular way for voyagers to cross oceans in the company of other boats. The transatlantic rally known as the Atlantic Rally for Cruisers (ARC) (www.worldcruising.com) has been around for 35 years. In this year with the COVID pandemic still lingering, there seems to be pent-up demand and the ARC event has 150 entries and even spawned added interest in the ARC’s associated rally the ARC+. The ARC starts from Gran Canaria in the Canary Islands and proceeds 2,700 miles through the northeast trades to…

Sail Training in the Gulf of Maine

The schooner Harvey Gamage under sail. Admiral Robin Graf, left, oversees knot-tying practice on the first day of the voyage. Cadets man the jibs during a practice tack. Nothing, not even heavy weather, preempts a birthday cake at the appropriate time. With the foresail already reefed, the Cadets wait for the predicted wind. The training sail took the cadets out into the Atlantic, then back to the Isles of Shoals. Previous Next The sails themselves tell the story: A double-reefed main and single-reefed foresail announce that the ship expects wind, lots of it. The 131-foot schooner Harvey Gamage, operated by…