I appreciate a little subjectivity in cruising guidebooks, so I love the Dreamspeaker series which includes hand-drawn charts of most of the anchorages in the Salish Sea with notes on where to find rope swings and blackberry bushes. Now that we’re outside Dreamspeaker territory, I find myself Googling…

Returning from the comforts of Philadelphia to our boat in Monterey was a little deflating — and not just because we’d accidentally left some Brie out on the counter for a week. Maybe that explains our sense of urgency to get off the dock and on our way…

The West Coast of the US is peppered with family. Of course we knew this when we departed Seattle, but it has been such an unexpected joy to reconnect with them in the midst of this adventure. And our arrival in Monterey was no exception – my cousin,…

Cruising is often described as ‘fixing your boat in nice places’ and on Flyer I like to live that adage every day. In San Francisco, our urgent project was to install an improved seawater pressurization line to our shaft seal, to prevent our engine flooding with seawater again…

Remember Kevin from our detour to Newport, OR? We met him on the dock and bonded over being towed in by the Coast Guard after engine trouble. He came aboard to survey our engine and exhaust configuration and helped Steve crack the code. We had a feeling he…

This was James and Paul’s first trip to San Francisco and they arrived by sailboat under the Golden Gate Bridge with family waving to them from shore. In keeping with the non-traditional entrance, we did not see the typical tourist sights. We didn’t visit Alcatraz, Coit Tower, or…