I could not discern if the moisture was falling under its own weight, or if we were simply interrupting its suspended state as we stood waiting. Water spouts had been spotted in the area we were planning to sail. One woman described pulling her car over to let a squall pass so she could see the road to the marina. This was not the weather we had hoped for. Read more

Dieting is not fun to talk about, unless you are having great success. I’m not.

Since my New Year’s resolution to lose ten pounds of plastic this year, I have stayed vigilant, however the amount of plastic I have done without probably does not amount to more than a few ounces. At some point I will go to the post office and use a scale to weigh what my poly sacrifices add up to. This may be difficult, as you can imagine, estimating the weight of what you don’t have possession of will not be better than a wild guess. Regardless, I am fairly sure that in spite of my efforts, I have not kept more than seven or eight ounces of plastic out of my trash in the last 42 days. Read more

There are some great women sailors. Isabelle Autissier, the woman who inspired me, was credited by BBC Sports with “smashing sailing’s glass ceiling”. Autissier had the ear of the sailing gods but was bedeviled by astounding bad luck in her Around Alone races. In 1994 after flying past the pack Autissier capsized in the Southern Ocean. She had the same bad luck again in 1999. In 1996 she was disqualified when she needed assistance to repair her broken rudder. Australia’s Kay Cottee, was the first woman to circumnavigate the world alone, non-stop and unassisted. Ellen MacArthur, the current darling of sailing who held the record from February 2005 until early 2008 as the fastest person to round the globe, is a peanut of a young woman at 5′, 2″ and perhaps 110 pounds.

I wonder, how did these women get so good at sailing? Read more