In winter 2022, I asked son Randy when we’d last cruised Downeast, thinking it was two or three years. When he said, “2018,” I was shocked. And Muscobe’s home waters of Maine welcomed us big-time.

A day alone on the water is greatly rejuvenating

The truth is, no matter how often I see it out there beckoning, no matter how many times I’ve set a course for it, I’ve yet to circumnavigate it.

A matter-of-fact chronicle of a bold cruise – from Providence, R.I., to Bar Harbor, Maine, and back – by an intrepid grandmother and her partner, on a minimalist 25-foot pocket yacht.

June 2024 By John Murray Editor’s note: this year’s Downeast Challenge, which takes place on July 26-27, is from Marblehead, Mass., to Portland, Maine. The following is a charming first-person account from one of the 2022 race’s participants, who ended up double-handing with his 12-year-old son. In 2022, I plannedRead More

June 2024 By Don Street For decades, prior to reliable weather forecasting, skippers delivering yachts in the fall from the U.S. East Coast to the Caribbean relied on a narrow weather window. Basically you had a month between the end of the traditional hurricane season in October and the galesRead More

Blue Skies’ stability and versatility made her an ideal sail-training platform, on which more than 100 adults learned to harness the wind, and one particular Buzzards Bay outing proved her merit as an able microcruiser.

When the Catalina Rendezvous invite arrived, we were thrilled. We’d meet Catalina Yachts principals, compare notes with Catalina owners, and be with our people, at Block Island, for three whole days.

Feeling the energy of three geezers: check. My mighty seven-foot craft is nice and dry and bobbing at the float ready to go.

It was mid-July and only the third trip of the season, as the summer of 2023 was proving to be unusually wet and gray. Too many days had been overcome by fog on the coast of Maine, but this particular day was warm and sunny as we headed south on the Kennebec River. My 2000 SeaRay 215 Express Cruiser, Tegoak, was working fine – until it wasn’t.