August 2007 By Dodge Morgan Technology is the sweet siren on the rocks wearing a Medusa headdress. The call from a distance is seductive but the closer you get, the uglier she is, and the lopping off of one snake of confusion only produces a plethora of bewilderment. If youRead More

July 2007 By Dodge Morgan The ravages of time can cause troublesome consequences for the sailor and his mate. The pair has sailed together over so many years that individual roles on the boat have been refined with precision and become unquestioned habit. When circumstances challenge the established routine, itRead More

June 2007 By Dodge Morgan My long personal familiarity with Einstein affords me the privilege of calling him Albert. I bonded with Albert because I had the natural gift of knowing how to expand the scope of his thinking to levels of pragmatic understanding – and also because we agreedRead More

May 2007 By Dodge Morgan The word “spandrel” began life in an architectural lexicon. It defines the accidental and useless spaces between functional shapes, like the “V” that appears between a pair of arches and the triangle of space that happens beneath a staircase. I think it is wonderful thatRead More

April 2007 By Dodge Morgan Does someone make an instrument that measures a boat’s vertical movement? There’s a confusion of choices for the horizontal: speed paddles, GPS machines, chip logs, patent logs. Why I’m wondering is that I would really like to know if, during our passage from Quahog BayRead More

Midwinter 2007 By Dodge Morgan Voice No. 1: “You look like an old sailor.” Voice No. 2: “I am that, especially the old part, but you look like you are in costume, just dressed up as an old sailor.” No. 1: “Let us talk sailing anyway. Are you good atRead More

December 2006 By Dodge Morgan I read that the remains of legendary fighter pilot “Earthquake McGoon” McGovern, who flew for the Tiger Shark squadron for China before we entered WW II and later for a CIA combat “airline” in Indochina, has just been found and returned for burial with familyRead More

October 2006 By Dodge Morgan I read “We, the Navigators” by David Lewis during an eight-day solo cruise this August. The author has intensely studied the navigation techniques of the South Pacific islanders as they linked Polynesia to Melanesia to Micronesia by sea voyages in outrigger canoes from a time,Read More

September 2006 By Dodge Morgan It is true that any decision is better than no decision when sailing. There is a commanding ring to phrases like “hard-a-lee,” even if one is sailing by the lee at the time, a state that confuses which side the lee really is. The artRead More

August 2006 By Dodge Morgan Columnists write non-fiction as a rule. Or maybe they write true stories as hallucinations as a rule (hallucination here being an accurate replacement word for opinion.) Excepting for Dave Barry and Tom Snyder, columnists do want more than anything else to be insightfully believed. OnlyRead More