LandfallVoyages

It really was a dark and stormy night, some fourteen years past and I guess it must have been around 2 in the morning when a storm rolled in and engulfed our little anchorage off the oyster shell beach. It was our first winter living aboard our trimaran Night Heron. I slipped out of bed […]

A lot of people dream about buying a boat and sailing away. A few of them buy some books and magazines and a few of them travel to places where there are boats to see and they dream there for awhile and then have fish for lunch. A very few of them will look at […]

Happy hour comes twice a day at the 8th Street Cafe in Oakland’s Chinatown. There’s an almost cafeteria-like feel to the place, with its nondescript booths and industrial linoleum. The walls are plastered with a hodgepodge mixture that is one part pictures of food, to two parts hand-lettered specials. In Chinese. Because why not? Where […]

This was a lot of work and it was worth it as you can see. Now that the bilge is white, we can actually see in here. The trusty old Perkins diesel is almost ready to bolt in to its new and improved home.

After working all last week and all weekend, we’re finally preparing to go to the boat so we can, you guessed it! Work. If you want to do something big like a circumnavigation you’ll need to work pretty hard at some point. Sailing around the world is harder than something like watching TV and ordering […]

Tri-tip may be the most wonderful food on the planet. Tri-tip is the very end of the beef sirloin. It isn’t the nice big tender end, it’s the small, tough end. It was cheap once but now it’s popular and expensive. It looks like a 5 pound triangular roast with a thick slab of fat […]

This is the story of my family’s long nautical tradition. When I was small, in the 60’s, my family made a trip to the Salton Sea. My dad was a bit of a partier and his boat was a classic P.O.S. It was a 16′ flat-bottomed lake boat with a big V-8 and a direct […]