It was May when my wife Ellen gave me the go ahead to cross the Atlantic. In June, four short months away, my cousin Marta Downing and I would depart New England for Ireland in Far and Away, Ellen’s Cabo Rico 34.  Preparing the yacht for a transatlantic passage drew on my experience at sea (many years of coastal cruising and blue water, but no passage longer than 1,200 miles), and also on guidance from authors and sailors Eric Hiscock, Hal Roth, Bob Griffith, Don Street and many others. This received wisdom, absorbed since childhood, allowed me to do a…

Voyage planning and prepping starts with choosing your schedule based on weather, desired route, and many other considerations that require both online and offline information resources. In addition, a critical planning component is deciding what spare parts and supplies you will need, based on your boat’s characteristics, the length of your voyage, and its destinations. Obviously, the first consideration that will determine all else is where you want to go. For most of us that is the easy part of the process. We have been dreaming about the big trip for years and imagining what it will be like. But…