As I look back on the 2015 cruise and my overreaction to cruising in the ocean,  I remember feeling guilty over wanting to leave and fly home, rather than continue out in the Atlantic. To my surprise, that eleven-hour cruise on a glassy Atlantic Ocean was glorious. We sailed along, just offshore, enjoying the scenery … Read more

A profound fact about the eight-month cruise in 2015 was this: Mark and I rarely had words, you know, the kind of words you wish you hadn’t said. As I’ve gotten older, patience seems to be more difficult to maintain. To my children’s mock horror, I’ve been known to use the F word on occasion, … Read more

There were many times Capt. Mark probably wanted to toss me overboard on the 2015 cruise. This was surely one of them. Boaters depend on weather reports. There are many safety issues to consider, so national reports as well as local ones are consulted before getting underway.  In our case, my poor spouse had a … Read more

If I learned anything about the 2015 Great Loop cruise, it’s this: peaceful and rewarding can instantly turn into a rolling nightmare and sometimes you don’t see it coming. But let’s explore peaceful and rewarding first. We left Deltaville and anchored out near Oxford, Maryland on a calm day. The anchorage was surrounded by mansions. … Read more

Weather was probably the most important unknown we faced when cruising. Wind speed and direction, wave height and speed, long and short-term forecasts—all this information impacted our schedule. We’d listen to reports from all the weather sites plus a few cruiser broadcasts, but as you can guess, none of them were one hundred percent correct. … Read more