Guest perspective/Michael Long What good is a 1,000-mile delivery run without a bit of melodrama? Creature comforts and picturesque anchorages are in short supply when you leapfrog down the coast from Portland, Maine, to Jacksonville, Fla., in October. So some compensatory excitement is a welcome prospect. That was my attitudeRead More

“We could have at least looked at the chart . . .” someone said. “Or we could have turned on the GPS,” I said, reaching across to the boat’s Garmin unit and pushing its little red button. “Well,” said Beth, reaching into her canvas bag and pulling out a bottleRead More

Guest perspective/Larry Wardwell The following is an excerpt from the book “Confessions of a Closet Yogi” by Larry Wardwell. In this true account, which took place in 1959, 18-year-old Larry is on leave from the Air Force, hanging out in his hometown of Natick, Mass., when he and some friendsRead More

Guest Perspective / Hank Garfield Sailing is the ultimate slower traffic. When I’ve got the boat trimmed just right in a fresh afternoon sea breeze, with spray flying and my crew laughing in exhilaration, it’s doing maybe seven miles an hour. Nonetheless, I do occasionally use it for transportation. IRead More

In this column, I share stories from the Isles of Shoals and beyond. Some six miles south-southeast of the mouth of the Piscataqua River, this amazing place is host to a variety of interesting vessels, wildlife and people – a rest stop on the East Coast maritime highway. August: theRead More

Guest perspective/Paul Brown I bought my first sailboat in 1987, when I was 52 years old. It was a Thunderbird 26 sloop, a pretty little one-design built for cruising and racing. One could sit on the un-enclosed marine toilet and touch all four berths, the stove and sink. Needless toRead More

Can a sail across Maine’s Casco Bay qualify as a cruise? Yes, when the vessel is a nine-foot Nutshell Pram with a podiatric whisker pole and the skipper has prehensile toes.

I blame it on the fried clams. Yes, like Captain Queeg and his strawberries, I’ll prove beyond the shadow of a doubt, and with geometric logic, that it was my fondness for fried clams that caused us to run aground that fine August day.

Sometimes dumb choices work out okay. Sometimes they don’t. Mostly they don’t.

Michael Camarata’s article, “Dumbest Boating Decision Ever,” about a bridge too narrow, published in the Midwinter issue of Points East, hit very close to home for me. I have also made a dumb boating decision involving a bridge.