Adventures and Cruises

While I have made many hundreds of trips from Portsmouth Harbor to the Isles of Shoals across the full range of weather and seasons (wind, rain, fog, snow and freezing spray) I had never been thoroughly scared until one afternoon a few weeks ago.

Part 2: Some hairy autumn sea miles remained between Sea-Finn and her Midcoast Maine destination, including a forecast of 17- to 20-foot waves, 65-mph winds – and infamous Kennedy Rock.

By Pam Humbert For Points East The new year was still young and unsullied back in mid-January when our club met to unveil their summer cruising plans. The room was abuzz with dreams and the anticipation of a fresh new year and a season yet to unfold. Wearing a genuineRead More

The fates conspired against me in my attempts to visit Fishers Island, as though an invisible force was blocking my access to it. Last summer, I broke through, with an emotional epiphany.

By Tim Plouff For Points East It was to be a glorious summer day in Maine, and the promise of making new discoveries – as always, to us – was as exciting as the forecast. Our boating friends Allison and Andy Moorwood had proposed a trip Downeast to Jonesport, Maine,Read More

How do you get a teen-age boy to go cruising in Maine with his father (no, this is not the lead to a new joke), to share in the joy of quiet nights under a blanket of stars, to be away from his friends, from the activity and noise of youth...from chicken fingers...from girls?

When my son and shipmate Randy, and his family, rented a cottage in Chilmark, on Martha’s Vineyard, I decided to solo my 33-foot Young Brothers Jonesport-type lobsterboat south for a visit.

By Nim Marsh For Points East Magazine November 12 breaks in high overcast, 52°, wind southwest, 10. At mid-day the air is still raw, but the compass reads 180° – due south – and all is right with the world. At roughly Mile 34 on the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) justRead More

Part 2: Contending with windless seas, tipsy restaurant diners, and the threat of leisurely breakfasts and shopping sprees, the J/30 Mojo finds herself near the doorstep of the Maine coast.

Part 1: With crew unavailable, the author, a relative cruising greenhorn, chose to singlehand to Downeast Maine from New York. He reached Kennebunkport, learned a lot, and nobody got hurt.

Mark and the indomitable Diana set sail from Buzzards Bay’s Red Brook Harbor aboard the J/30 Mojo, destination Mount Desert in Downeast Maine. The first leg, to Gloucester, was almost flawless.

By David Roper This year’s cruise to Maine was supposed to be a quiet, reflective time spent mostly anchored alone in a bay I’ve always loved. For the first time in many years, my wife would sail with me on the Downeast leg from our homeport of Marblehead, Mass. IRead More

A medical emergency cuts short a cruise of a lifetime

Some of the coast’s most interesting eel ruts are invested of a particular attraction because only rarely do the tides, our timing, and the weather align, at which occasion we get to plumb the depths of interesting places like Pleasant Point Gut. Only a few hundred yards long, the slenderRead More

Home: safety, quietude, belonging. Port: haven for mariners and vessels. Saquatucket Harbor, in Harwich Port, Mass., has been our home port – away from our true home port – for 20 years.

I promised I’d buy a bigger boat, with a standing-headroom cabin, if she survived a summer cruising on my J/24. She not only endured, she thrived. The ball was in my court. Big time!

June, 1994. 200 miles south of The Cape. Wind 40 knots, gusting higher. 20-foot waves. Water north of the Gulf Stream 50 degrees. Destination, Spain. This is the story of how we almost got there.

Let’s join this peripatetic cruiser aboard his Saga 43 ILENE, around the cabin table, for a breezy account of a monthlong cruise along tiny Rhode Island’s extensive and varied shores.

Cruising under sail is one of the few places in life in which we can escape a world certain it has a right to be in our faces 24/7, to always be badgering us to buy stuff, act now, shape and share our views, to know our exact location, whoRead More

We always spend as much time as possible on our Finngulf 391 sloop West Wind, a 39’ masterpiece from Finland. Whether we would be aboard this past summer was certainly in doubt.

By Marilyn Pond Brigham From 2005 to 2009, I was a Waterlily. Waterlilies are members of the mostly over-40 ladies sailing program at Quissett Yacht Club (QYC) in Falmouth, Mass. The Waterlilies program meets on Friday mornings, July through August, and has done so since 1959. I first wrote aboutRead More

By Frederick Findlen One beautiful October morning, my wife and I, both novice mariners, decided to take our last boating trip of the year. We checked the marine forecast, then launched our 17-foot motorboat in the New Meadows River in Brunswick, Maine. The plan was to run down Harpswell SoundRead More

Ride the prevailing southwest wind north and east along the New England coast, and you’ll ultimately find yourself in the pristine waters of Downeast Maine. Take the offshore fast track there.

I married this man because, well, sailing was part of his fabric, and I was determined it would be part of mine, too. Little did I know then that I also had a magic boating key to pass on to my family.

By Dick Klain My last cruise down the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) was several years ago. Since that time, I have stayed up to date on the ditch through friends. When the coronavirus hit, I wondered what my friends who were still down south would be doing. Molly and Bill areRead More

This means we’re going to cruise clockwise around a figurative clock face in Gloucester Harbor, check out the seaport’s charms, and learn of the weed-bearded growlers and hazards that abound there.

Sailing Scared: Maine to Florida 2014-15 by Karlene Osborne; Custom Communications, Inc., 2019; 128 pp.; $16.95. Book review by Randy Randall Reading “Sailing Scared,” Karlene Osborne’s new book about a cruise from Maine to Florida via the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW), one realizes early on how entirely appropriate the title is.Read More

Experience is the best teacher, and lessons can be learned by straddling “exciting” and “really dumb.” In that spirit, I planned a 20-mile, Force 5 downwind flier from Portland to Harpswell

Guest Perspective: Paul Brown Fundy Flotilla 2004, from Northeast Harbor to Grand Manan, and then on to Saint John and the St. John River. Brownscow, my Beneteau Evasion 32, had made it to Grand Manan, New Brunswick, and then had to leave the flotilla as my crew, Irv, had toRead More

The schooner was pinned against 40-foot cliffs, pounded by seas that threw spray over their tops. A former owner of a towing and salvage firm, I thought I could haul her off with my 46-foot sedan cruiser.

On their first short cruises as a couple (see “Cruising with Diana, Part 1,” December 2019), it was two boat-lengths forward/one back for Mark and Diana as they set courses – often divergent – to perceived common grounds on which they might sail constructively, as a team, on a minimal overnight boat. However, compromises were made on both sides, and soon they were anxious for an extended adventure.

The first trip to the Isles of Shoals in the new year was a combination supply run for the Star Island caretakers and a reconnaissance mission for upcoming building projects. We loaded a dozen small bags of groceries and a few bottles of wine – enough to get through theRead More

Part 1: I had this great, new girlfriend, and I wanted to take her cruising, but my boat was a 40-year-old J/24 with minimal, claustrophobic accommodations. Well, one step at a time.

 “Low bridge, we’re coming to a town,” the old barge song continues, and these days many of those towns on New York’s Western Erie Canal and Seneca Lake are spellbinding waterfront villages. Aboard Weak Moment, our 32-foot trawler, we’ve now seen quite a few of them.

By Tim Plouff For most Mainers, the name Saddleback has long been associated with the western Maine mountain near Rangeley that was a popular ski resort for decades before successive owners fell on hard times. While the ski trails remain closed, an effort to re-start operations is ongoing. For manyRead More

Many years ago, in the late ’90s, I had an old Star that I loved in a way that was inversely proportional to the aggravation it caused me. One of my top-five epic sails was aboard this boat, as was one of my top-five epic fails. The epic fail wasRead More

We awoke to the reflections of sunlit seas dancing across the cabin ceiling, a rich wash of blue sky overhead and the telltales hanging limp. The mate, who functions better than I in the early hours, pulled up a forecast. “Southwest 5,” she muttered sleepily as we closed our eyes,Read More

The last big weekend of the year promised a full house at the Oceanic Hotel. A two-day island wedding extravaganza was also on the schedule.

Guest Perspective: Capt. Michael L. Martel I awoke in the darkness with a start, disoriented, only to eventually realize that I was still in my bunk, fully dressed and wrapped in my blanket against the cold. Even though the last two days had seen the air grow milder, I wasRead More

 The move aboard Klang II was supposed to be the start of our live-aboard lives and, perhaps, some ocean vagabond years, but a boatyard conflagration made a grand attempt to intervene.

Guest perspective: Christopher Birch “What’d you sail in on?” asked the man shaving at the sink next to me. “A Caravan 18,” I replied, pleased with my quick thinking and grateful for the shaving cream concealing my smirk. It was a beautiful August morning in Northeast Harbor, Maine, and myRead More

Sure, New Hampshire has a paltry 18 miles of Atlantic shoreline, but it packs a disproportionately wide variety of cruising sights and experiences in just New Castle and Portsmouth alone.

And it was a sweet life indeed aboard the 41-foot Concordia yawl Dolce, on a delivery from Boston to the Newport Boat Brokerage Show to be sold. No one bought her, but that isn’t my story.

Part 2: For years, son Randy wanted to spend just one night where no marinas, restaurants, or marine facilities existed, just wildness. Before we turned back to Marblehead, I took him to Roque Island.

The Cape Cod Canal separates the Cape peninsula from the mainland in serpentine fashion, and, as with the notorious reptile of Eden, transit requires numerous encounters with tidal temptation.

Part 1: Glorious sunshine, water glinting like diamonds, spruces above granite-shored islands, a lobsterman’s windshield flashing in the sun. This is what we dream about on dreary February days.

Guest perspective/Randy Randall “Hey Dad,” Jeremy yelled. “Looks like you hit the jackpot! What is all this stuff?” He was right. I’d practically filled the front of my kayak with trash. “Help me unload all this,” I told him. But you see collecting trash is kind of a game withRead More

I’ve explored five Martha’s Vineyard harbors – Menemsha, Lake Tashmoo, Vineyard Haven, Oak Bluffs and Edgartown – and each seems to delight visiting cruisers in its own special way