SAILtheCHANNELdotCOM

Most cruising guides tell you that stopping in El Salvador is not a very good idea. They say that the place has no safe harbors and has been at war for a long, long time. But we’d been at sea for almost five days, including the night we spent hove-to off the entrance to Bahia del Sol.

Last week a sailing student of mine asked the question, “Can you water ski behind a sailboat?”
If you want to water ski”, I replied, “you’d probably be better off getting a powerboat”.
I stand corrected. Here’s proof that, when it comes to scurfing (and water skiing I suppose), a big, high performance trimaran will do the trick. [...]

Download Bahia del Sol, El Salvador
Download Listen to story as a podcast
Let us know what you think of the podcast idea [ratings]
 
Here’s the story…
 
After a week of Tehuantepecers, a weather window finally opened and we departed Huatulco, Mexico in the company of several other boats bound for Costa Rica. We crossed the infamous Gulfo Tehuantepec [...]

Download Night Watch
In daylight, the watch is bounded by a vast circumference of ocean that stretches off to the horizon on all points of the compass. Daylight affords the comfort of the familiar—boat, sea, and sky. The pencil scratches on the ship’s charts lend reason and form to the seascape. We see what’s there and [...]

Download Las Canarias to St. Lucia
The rhumb line from the Canary Islands to St. Lucia is about 2600 miles but in sailing, a straight line between two points is rarely the quickest. Ever since the Spanish began plying this route in search of plunder among the Americas, seafaring wisdom has dictated sailing southward on the [...]

Download Melges World Championships, Santa Cruz, 2007
This clip is from footage I shot at the 2007 Melges Worlds Championships in Santa Cruz, California. My thought was that it might provide some interesting footage for our DVD project, “Around Monterey Bay”. In years past I raced quite a bit– as skipper aboard my Moore 24, Presto, [...]

Download Libertad
Tenicatita Bay is one of the sweetest anchorages on Mexico’s Gold Coast. Joel and I had just finished surfing at the river mouth and we were lounging aboard Songline, blissfully tired. As the sun dipped westward our reverie was broken by an approaching motor yacht. She was about 85 feet long. She came roaring [...]

Download Pacific Coast of Nicaragua
We departed Barillas Marina in El Salvador and cut across the Gulf of Fonseca. We’d been warned that the Nicaraguan navy was conducting raids on Salvadoran shipping in the gulf. We’d had enough of men with guns while in El Salvador so our plan was to make all haste down the Nicaraguan [...]

Download Mid-Atlantic
I find the sound of the boat making way at sea comforting. Michael sent me the following quote as an accompaniment.
Share This

Download Golfito, Costa Rica
Torrential rains drench the tropical rain forest of Golfito, Costa Rica. The town is ensconced on a lagoon that lies within a larger lagoon called the Golfo Dulce. Squeezed onto a sliver of land at the foot of steep and densely forested hills, as summer approaches, everyone and everything sweats profusely in [...]