Continuations

Growing up in Germany my parents and I would spend two weeks every summer going to the Chiemsee to sail. We stayed at Gästehaus Grünäugel in Gstadt (no that’s not the resort in Switzerland). I learned how to sail from my Dad who was self-taught. Thanks, Dad! It was a ton of fun to be out on the water and I also built a deep association between sailing and vacation. What a great way to take one’s mind off things! I wound up not sailing during college and for quite a few years after that. But t...

I have just returned from an exciting voyage: crossing the Atlantic on a sailboat. You can find updates from along the way on the J44 Frolic website, Twitter/X and Instagram accounts. In this post I am gathering up my lessons learned. Some of these are just about sailing, in particular passage making, and some are broadly applicable life lessons.Offshore sailing is intense. I always had great respect for offshore sailors, and in particular solo sailors, and this voyage has only deepened that....

Last week I had the opportunity to cross something off my bucket list: sailing faster than the wind. Now at first this sounds like a preposterous idea – if the wind is pushing you, then how could you go faster than it? It seems the equivalent of the Baron Munchausen pulling himself from a swamp by his own hair. Or powering a sailboat by blowing into the sails (maybe with a huge fan?). Before providing an explanation, here is a brief video I filmed on the Lending Club 2 in the San Francisco ba...

I have been reading a fascinating book about nautical charts. It turns out that there are many pitfalls in using GPS navigation that result from the translation processes that take place between the original survey data (some of it quite old) and the GPS devices. It would be great to use a Bug to store a history of lat longs and depth soundings each time one goes out with a boat. The data from many bugs could then be used to improve the accuracy of existing charts. But even before getting qui...

Yesterday I took a little bit of time off from an otherwise very busy day to watch one of the America’s Cup races. I had watched a couple of them previously on “TV” and on Youtube. But seeing it in person was even more impressive. The true speed of the boats is hard to appreciate on a small screen. From the stern of the SS Jeremiah O'Brien I was able to see the entire race course and it was spectacular: The AC72s are to a boat such as the J100 that I sail like an F1 race car is to a norm...

Sorry, no Tech Tuesday today as I am catching up on email. My excuse: I took our daughter out for an evening sail and overnight on the boat last night which I had originally promised for the weekend …

Last Friday to Saturday I had the good fortune of being invited to crew on my friend Mark Hansen’s boat Sweet Lorraine (a beautiful J-145) in the 2012 Vineyard race. The course starts near the Stamford Harbor, goes up to the Buzzard’s Bay Light Tower and then returns south of Block Island all the way to Stamford for a total length of about 238 nautical miles. We are the rightmost boat in the picture below, taken shortly after the start. The crew consisted of extremely experienced and successf...