Voyaging Skills - Ocean Navigator

Prepping for Panama

What goes into planning a 5,200 mile voyage I’ve had a love of the sea for as long as I can remember. I did not have a boat growing up, but I had enough friends and extended family with boats that I spent time on the water every year as a kid, even if it was just a rowboat. I joined the Navy through the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) scholarship program and made my first ocean crossing from Pearl Harbor to San Diego as a midshipman. The ocean cast a spell on me. I spent almost 3 years after…

Voyaging Skills Interview

Sailors in the Vendée Globe faced multiple challenges including icebergs. An iceberg greeted Eric Bellion on the first day of 2025. This was not good news; he was not on a cruise ship bringing tourists to the Antarctic — but alone in the Southern Ocean — on Stand As One, a high-performance 60-foot sailboat weighing only around 8 tons, racing home to France via Cape Horn. The Vendée Globe is a round-the-world, solo, non-stop, without-assistance race that’s been held every four years or so since 1989. Ice is a real threat for any boat that heads into the Southern…

Tackling the Northwest Passage

A harrowing firsthand recollection of sailing from Maine to Alaska on a boat meant for the Caribbean. There are certain things in life for which no amount of research can prepare you — ventures of such breathtaking vastness, that when compared to any previous experience, the spirit would quail knowing what the mind can’t fathom. For me the biggest of these was the transit of the Northwest Passage, from Maine to Alaska in an ’80s vintage fiberglass cruising boat, Polar Sun. It had no insulation, paltry tankage, and a threadbare canvas enclosure barely clinging to its frame, limiting access to…

ARC Fleet Sets Safety Preparations for Transatlantic

The big red “L” on the GRIB file, shown out in the Atlantic Ocean due west of Ireland, wasn’t doing much for anyone’s mood. No one wants to see 960 millibars in a forecast, never mind that the distant system was more than 2,000 nautical miles away from the room in Las Palmas, Grand Canary, where skippers and crew from 140 boats were gathered for the Atlantic Rally for Cruisers (ARC) weather seminar. The data, presented on a Tuesday by meteorologist Chris Tibbs, offered an outlook for the Sunday departure of the 2024 ARC fleet. Weather remains a constant concern…

Detour En Route to Bundaberg

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.…

Voyaging Skills: A family braves the elements together

Jon and Megan Schwartz, along with their sons, Ronan, 16, and Daxton, 14, have been cruising full time aboard their Boreal 47, Zephyros, an aluminum expedition monohull, since 2017. Since picking up the boat at the factory in northern France, they have sailed 40,000 NM together. Driven by a desire to explore the world and experience its disappearing wilds, they have often pursued places less traveled. They started in northern France, the UK, Atlantic Spain and Portugal before heading into the Mediterranean for a season. The Paxtons then crossed the Atlantic Ocean from late 2018 to early 2019. They were…

Voyaging Skills: Night Sailing and Sleep Deprivation

Life at sea is lived 24 hours a day, whether you are a cruising single-hander or a navy destroyer sailor. By this I mean there’s no period in which humans can ignore input from the outside world and just sleep. How do we balance the fundamental need for sleep with the requirement to be vigilant, and what are the consequences of being unbalanced? There’s surprisingly little research on those who live and work at sea, but studies of the effects of sleep deprivation by sleep labs on land are useful. In an effort to find balance, vessels set up watch…

After many thousands of ocean miles, a few good voyages yet to come

At the end of the last century, Dick and Gail Barnes disengaged from the workforce and community volunteer life and began consulting while waiting for the commissioning of a new Nordhavn 50 trawler-style motor vessel. Dick was the President of a natural gas distribution company and a pipeline transmission company. When home in Anchorage, Gail remains active as a volunteer at the Alaska Native Medical Center. Soon after moving from San Diego to Anchorage in 1966 they purchased an aluminum skiff; in 1971 they built a 19-foot rough-water river boat, and in 1991 bought a 28-foot Sea Sport cabin cruiser.…

Getting Covered

Getting marine insurance in the continental US and Canada is simple enough. Most homeowners can add a boat to their home insurance policy. Geico, Progressive and other major retail insurance companies offer marine insurance, but they are typically limited to boats less than 50 feet worth less than $2.5 million. Even with this limitation the major carrier approach sounds like it might work for Robin and Dale, a couple in their mid-thirties living in Annapolis, Md. They just bought a well-equipped 1999 Island Packet 35 for $150,000. The boat is set up for offshore voyaging, with a watermaker, generator, galvanic…

The never ending lesson

Have you ever been in an uncomfortable at-anchor situation? A fisherman friend told me once that anchoring is about 70 percent of boating. Maybe, for some people, but I see a lot of folks sweating it out, and a lot of boats bumping and/or crashing into each other. How could this be? Little or no experience - the test first and the lesson afterwards and we live and learn. Here are some thoughts on anchoring that voyagers can take to heart. Once while anchored on a voyage, I had to confront just such an unexpected anchoring situation. My mariner’s eye…