Bizarre whale tales
Who can forget the photos of the 40 ton southern right whale (Eubalaena australis) that breached onto a 33ft sloop in South Africa in 2010, breaking the mast before sliding into the water with an ‘eerie …Read more
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Category: STORIES Most sailors setting off on a passage dream of encountering wildlife at sea. Yet ask blue water sailors about their biggest fears, and near the top of the list is likely to be ‘striking a whale’. It’s one of the events most likely to be catastrophic at sea. Today, we can usually avoid really bad weather, but can we avoid a sleeping whale at …Read more  “What did we sign up for?!” I thought after our first day at anchor in the Sea of Cortez. We had spent the prior night and wee morning hours fighting through a 30 knot coromuel to get to the anchorage. Both us and the boat were covered with …Read more  At 16o 36.050 S and 97o 31.080 W we turned around. It was not equipment failure or dangerous weather; it was fatigue.  The captain put me in charge of getting us from point A to point B. I was responsible for upping anchor, route planning, navigating and dropping the hook at our destination. My cruising life started and nearly ended in 2007. It just wasn’t what I thought or hoped it would be. It was clear: never darken the …Read more  During our stay in Tauranga, New Zealand, the kids from two boats (Namani and Alouette) really hit it off. One activity they particularly enjoyed was learning to program computer graphics using a program called KTurtle. Seeing their enthusiasm for this, we parents agreed to assign the kids a group project as part of their …Read more  “The world was theirs” is Mattie McAlarney’s favorite headline written about her seven-and-a-half-year trip around the world with husband Henry. The couple wrapped up a 70-country cruise aboard their 39-foot Corbin Center Cockpit 2 Extreme in 2009. “I wanted to be home for my 70th birthday,” Mattie tells me as I admire the aft-cabin …Read more  Testing our fuel tank sender float It’s a shame that more girls aren’t trained as marine mechanics because, frankly, with the tiny spaces one has to maneuver in to work on a boat, most men, with their big, cumbersome frames, just aren’t built for it. The job we tackled on Monday, after putting off boat work to …Read more  “You baked that? On your boat?? In a solar oven???” Whenever I present a double-layer homemade carrot cake like this one I’m sure to be met with incredulous guests. Most cruisers do little baking anyway, so I had them on “from scratch”. Trusting their culinary fortunes to the sun is a real stretch – no …Read more  Am I the only one who finds this cringe-worthy? What offends me to the bottom of my unabashedly feminist soul …Read more  It’s OFFICIAL! Transfer of ownership of SPARROW, a classic Marshall 22′ catboat for picnic charters on the Swansboro waterfront 2013. In 1997, 15 years ago I began a journey with a vessel along the Carolina coast with my two children. We intended to give other sailing kids a sense of their seafaring heritage. That journey …Read more  Photo by Janna Cawrse Esarey There are many things I love about sailing: The quality time, the travel, the beauty. The exhilaration of being propelled by wind. The comfort of cockpit cushions when curled up with a good book. But another thing I love about sailing, truly, is its wealth of metaphors for life and love. Forgive me. …Read more |
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Blog • Sponsored by Kathy Parsons, author of Spanish for Cruisers and French for Cruisers |
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