The Cruising Club of America has selected Annie Hill and Trevor Robertson to receive its prestigious 2009 Blue Water Medal in recognition of a life of cruising and voyaging that best exemplifies the objects and goals of the CCA. The award will be presented on March 5, 2010 by CCA Commodore Sheila McCurdy (Middletown, R.I.) during the club's annual Awards Dinner at the New York Yacht Club, in New York.
Along the Pacific west coast of Mexico, the hurricane season was ending. It was late November and the time had come for Anna, our Tayana 37 cutter, to begin working her way southward, from Baja California Norte to Manzanillo, Mexico; a gritty, colorful industrial port located just beyond the Tropic of Cancer.
Laura Dekker, the 14-year-old Dutch sailor who was barred by a Dutch court from setting out on a solo circumnavigation and who went missing from her home in the Netherlands has been found in the Caribbean and sent home. Police located the teenager on the island of St. Maarten. Dekker had left her home and her boat in the Netherlands.
Earlier this year, our insurer lifted the ban on mariners wishing to visit Albania, so it wasn't a difficult decision for my husband Con and me to sail there aboard our Nauticat 51.5, Big Sky. We've sailed Big Sky in and out of 23 countries since April 2007, when we took possession of her in Finland, and we were eager to visit Albania for the sense of adventure in seeing places off the beaten path.
Midnight on July 27, 2007, was the start of my 38th birthday. What normally was a happy time turned grim when my Westsail 32, Wanti, slammed into a remote section of the northeast Brazilian coast.
Bring a few Ocean Navigator magazines with you when you travel, they might save you some money. That's what happened recently to Geert Van Der Kolk. Dutch sailor Van Der Kolk is leading the Haiti Sailing Project, an effort to build a boat in Haiti and sail it to the U.S. with a mixed Haitian/American crew to draw attention to Haiti and its plight as one of the Caribbean's poorest countries.
One of the most impressive feats of ocean voyaging ever accomplished had its 40th-year anniversary last week. Sir Robin Knox-Johnston's record as the first man to sail solo, non-stop around the world was remembered on April 22. And Knox-Johnston wasn't sailing one of today's go-fast skimming dishes or multihulls.