I've been putting off visiting the dentist for years, too many years in fact, using excuses like it takes months to get an appointment and I'm never in one place long enough. That's true; but when you get right down to it, I was just being a big fat chicken: I knew there was a problem with one of my teeth and I was afraid it was going...

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Taking a walk out to Turn Point Light on Stuart Island is one of the many ways I've been keeping busy this week. When the week started, we were in the U.S. and now we’re not. We’re in an entirely differently country. For most cruisers, that would mark the end an epic journey. For us, it was a simple matter of five miles. Checking into a new country...

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This blog post was first published on Three Sheets Northwest, on online boating magazine local to the Pacific Northwest, in February of 2015. The original article can be read here.  We were motoring up Fitz Hugh Sound along the Central Coast making our way to Ocean Falls on June when the engine started hunting, fluctuating 150 RPM from where it was set. It’s always a concern when there’s...

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We didn’t know much about Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument before we went. For example, we didn’t know it’s the only place in the U.S. where the organ pipe cactus grows . . . or what an organ pipe cactus was, for that matter. We didn’t know that’s it’s a UNESCO biosphere reserve and a Globally Important Bird Area. And we didn’t know that it was deemed the...

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We may not have decided exactly where we’re going this season, but our journey had to begin somewhere and with an initial step. We took ours a couple of weeks ago when we dropped our lines for the first time in six months, leaving Kingston behind in our wake. We didn’t go far, only 20 miles north to Port Ludlow, but it was a world apart from life...

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Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman";} Leaving White Sands National Monument behind, the next stop in our late-winter campathon was City of Rocks State Park near Deming, New Mexico. It’s not a large park, covering only one square mile, and the hiking in isn’t what I’d call...

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We hadn’t planned on going camping. In fact, we hadn’t planned on being away from the boat much during the winter. I was going to fly to Wichita to spend Christmas with my family and David was going to stay aboard Cambria to start tackling his to-do list after a long cruising season. But then we received an invitation to spend Thanksgiving in Las Vegas from one of...

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What does it take to cruise from the Seattle area to Southeast Alaska in your own boat? Miles. A lot of miles. Most of which will be done under motor. And to go along with those miles, you’re going to need a lot of time and patience. You probably won’t need as much time as us. We’re pretty slow when it comes to cruising and we like to...

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