January 24, 2019/Day 112

Noon Position: 45 52S  115 10E

Course(t)/Speed(kts): ENE 6

Miles since departure: 15,665

Avg. Miles/Day: 140

Flat gray sky and a nearly flat gray sea. The only excitement is a wind that refuses to settle, but rather meanders from just S of W to just W of S and blows at either 10 knots or 23.

Big weather is on the way. Three lows, one that arrives tonight and blends into another on Saturday that, with a small break, opens the way for the third on Sunday/Monday. It’s the second and especially the third of ...

One thing that never ceases to amaze me is that the literature of the sea is nearly as vast as the sea itself. It seems there are always new landfalls to make. Here for example we have yet another fascinating character I never dreamed existed. Henri de Monfried, son of a minor French artist who associated with Gauguin, was a devotee of sailing since childhood and as an adult roamed the Red Sea in various native craft before, during, and after World War I. He supported himself trying to cultivate pearls and by fishing for them, but mostly ...

One thing that never ceases to amaze me is that the literature of the sea is nearly as vast as the sea itself. It seems there are always new landfalls to make. Here for example we have yet another fascinating character I never dreamed existed. Henri de Monfried, son of a minor French artist who associated with Gauguin, was a devotee of sailing since childhood and as an adult roamed the Red Sea in various native craft before, during, and after World War I. He supported himself trying to cultivate pearls and by fishing for them, but mostly ...

January 23, 2019/Day 111

Noon Position: 45 58S  111 52E

Course(t)/Speed(kts): SExE 6

Miles since departure: 15 526

Avg. Miles/Day: 140

Today’s news is that by early evening, Mo and I will have crossed half the meridians between Cape Horn and an east-about course ending in Cape Horn again, this just as we begin to dip under western Australia.

Notice, above, total longitude made good of 179 degrees and 9 minutes as of noon; that leaves 51 minutes (roughly 35 miles at latitude 46S) to 180 degrees, or half the degrees in a circle. Which is what Mo and I ...

Sometime on a pitch-black night off the New Jersey coast this past November, I was having serious reservations about cruising under sail. The promised 15-20 knot northerly had morphed into a 20-25 knot easterly with prolonged gusts in the low 30s, and the sea state was, to put it charitably, confused—“a cement mixer,” as one of the cruisers who followed us into Atlantic City later that day described it. I’ve sat out 50-knot blows in the Gulf Stream that were a hayride by comparison. In those long hours between 0200 and dawn, I would have given almost anything to be ...

January 22, 2019/Day 110

Noon Position: 45 38S 108 29E

Course(t)/Speed(kts): E 5

Miles since departure: 15,383

Avg. Miles/Day: 140

Wind went light overnight. I woke to sails slatting gently on a small sea. A full moon. Cloud seen only as an erasure of stars. The morning lumed flat gray; rain in the distance never approached. Wind had moved west after coffee. Mo unfolded her wings.

Today, as weather was finally subdued and the sea, quiet, I employed my Monte jury-rig and with success.

Mo is the perfect boat for what I am doing, but she does have her idiosyncrasies. ...

Before heading from Chicago down to the Mobile, AL, I had two new holes drilled in the bottom of Have Another Day to install  Garmin Panoptix PS-51 and Simrad Forward Scan forward-looking sonar transducers.   Our travels down the debris-filled rivers revealed a potential problem with anything protruding below the hull, but it also showed how robustly these transducers are built.

Our departure south was already behind schedule when I decided to install the FLS transducers.  So, I wasn’t able to do the wiring and commissioning work the manual suggests.  Without proper commissioning, I wasn’t confident in the information they ...

January 20, 2019/Day 108

Noon Position: 45 44S  101 12E

Course(t)/Speed(kts): ENE 7

Miles since departure: 15,077

Avg. Miles/Day: 140 (!)

It’s been a big sky day here on the ranch. Expanses of powder blue above and all the way to the cobalt blue water top we had, but rarely. More usual was a profusion of light, white cloud; leaning towers like one sees in the tropics but never down here, and squalls.

The squalls defined the day for Mo. When they moved through, they bent the wind and sped it up, and Mo would take off like she’d been ...

Ahoy! Readers of this blog will have almost certainly noticed a slight gap in posts as of late. The news is that while living on the boat in Baltimore last summer and fall we were also hard at work rebuilding a home on the foothills of the Appalachian outside of Baltimore/Washington, D.C.  After being on the water for two-plus years we decided it was time to head inland and live in the shadows of oak and poplar trees that adorn our patch of earth. 

In the same way that rebuilding a boat demands almost a singular focus, the home build took all of our ...