A fall offshore voyage to Bermuda

A fall offshore voyage to Bermuda

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…
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Networking: a tale of two technologies

Networking: a tale of two technologies

As we cross oceans on our vessels, we spend a great deal of time studying our chartplotter, autopilot, depth sounder, radar, AIS transponder, knot meter, wind-speed indicator and so on while also tending to the deck winches just to squeeze that extra half knot of speed out of our sails. That’s a lot of information to be churning in our heads as we constantly make decisions and course corrections on the path to our next landfall. Over the last 20 years or so, manufacturers of navigation and communication gear for pleasure craft have recognized the need to consolidate these myriad…
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Belaying Pins on a Modern Sailboat

Belaying Pins on a Modern Sailboat

I started sailing as a boy on my father’s heavy, wooden ketch, the Windjob, on Puget Sound. Then as a young man, I began to learn about real seamanship as crew on Jack Carstarphen’s 74-foot, gaff-headed ketch Maverick in the Caribbean. Both ships had plenty of control lines, especially Maverick, and both had pin rails at the base of the mainmast and shroud-mounted pin rails at the mizzen shrouds. There were always plenty of belaying pins on which to tie the sail control lines, and it was easy to attach each line onto the proper pin at the mast because…
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Captain Nat: Part 2

This is the second part of our story about Captain Nat Palmer. The return passage from China to New York was very slow, and Capt. Palmer, frustrated with the progress, took to carving a design from a block of wood combing a sharp, concave bow with a fuller, flat-bottomed hull. A fellow passenger was William Low, one of the family that ran the shipping business A. A. Low & Bros., a highly successful firm in New York. Low was very impressed with Captain Palmer’s design and when they arrived in New York, he brought Palmer and his new design to…
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