If I wanted to I could now blog about this almost hourly and seem relevant, but really I have better things to do with my time. Abby's rescue in the Southern Ocean has unleashed a firestorm of publicity and commentary, with one legion of critics denouncing Abby's voyage and her family and another smaller legion denouncing the larger legion as being armchair after-the-fact ignorant sexist nay-sayers. As a member of the larger legion (one who has been nay-saying, I should note, from the very beginning of the voyage), I'm going to respond to some of the points raised by the smaller legion (which evidently includes my fellow BoaterMouth blogger Zuzana Prochazka) and by Abby and her family… and then that's it. I'm over it!

Abby has been taken off Wild Eyes and is now aboard F/V Ile De La Reunion. The Australian Maritime Safety Authority has released the following statement:

The rescue of 16 year old US solo sailor, Abby Sunderland, from the yacht Wild Eyes to the fishing vessel Ile De La Reunion was successfully conducted at 7:45pm AEST today - approximately 2000 nautical miles off the West Australian coast.

Excellent news! An Australian search plane launched from Perth early today has located and established contact with Abby. As you can see in this photo, the rig on Wild Eyes is down, but the hull is afloat and upright, and Abby reports she is uninjured. A French fishing vessel is expected to reach the scene at about 0730 UTC tomorrow.

This really, really sucks. Teen circumnavigator Abby Sunderland is in serious trouble deep in the Southern Ocean well east of Madagascar. Reportedly her shore team lost sat-phone contact with her very early this morning when they were helping her troubleshoot some engine problems. Shortly afterwards two of her EPIRBs were manually ignited. Evidently she had suffered at least two knockdowns during the night in winds to 60 knots.

SAR authorities are attempting to launch a search, but Abby's boat, a modified Open 40 called Wild Eyes, was reportedly 400 miles from the nearest vessel when its EPIRBs went off. The two closest vessels that might render assistance are said to be 40 to 48 hours away. Her shore team is now scrambling to see if any aerial assets can be deployed.

That ugly thing you see here labelled GALE, right under New England, is why I decided to abort my attempt to bring Lunacy home from Bermuda this week. Back when I lived on the boat I was cruising this wouldn't have been a wrenching decision. There are, after all, worse fates in life than having to wait on weather in Bermuda. Unfortunately, I don't have the time right now to do my waiting in Bermuda. So crew member Jeff Bolster and I reluctantly crawled onto a Jet Blue plane and "jetted" back here to the mainland, just two days after we flew in and boarded the boat expecting to immediately cast off and sail north.

What a difference 12 hours can make. Last Saturday night, when I checked the weather, it looked like we'd have a reasonable window to work with. The following morning, after packing to go to the airport, I checked again and saw the first glimmerings, five days out, of this burgeoning knot of wind. Of course, back when I lived on boats they didn't have such things as five-day forecasts, and from time to time I got caught out in nastiness like this. So of course this time there was a small voice in my head telling me I should just go anyway and everything would be fine. I would survive. But it was only a small voice. The louder ones were spouting off about valor and its better parts.

The Tartan 27 is sometimes hailed as the first fiberglass boat ever to be designed by Sparkman & Stephens. This, however, is not quite accurate, as a few years prior to its creation S&S designed a similar, but slightly smaller glass boat, the 25-foot New Horizons, for Ray Greene. The introduction of the Tartan 27 in 1961 is said to have ruined the market for the earlier boat, a fact that Greene always resented.

The 27 was the first Tartan ever built, though its builder was originally known as Douglass & McLeod Plastic Corp. and did not reorganize as Tartan Yachts until 1971, after its first plant in Ohio was destroyed in a fire. All told 712 Tartan 27s (including 24 built under license by W.D. Schock in California in the mid-60s) were launched over the course of an 18-year production run, making it one of the more successful fiberglass auxiliary sailboats built during the CCA era.