Only once before have I departed the W'Indies for Bermuda from the BVI. That was in '97, on Crazy Horse, out of Jost Van Dyke (or Just One Dike, as the famous Foxy Callwood sometimes refers to it). I remember Jost as being a perfect orifice from which to excrete oneself into the North Atlantic. It is very low key. Back then the one customs and immigration officer (who was also the police force) wore shorts and a T-shirt and was quite laid-back. It also offers immediate access to the Big Blue Yonder.

I thought briefly about leaving from there again this year. But this made little sense. Lunacy was already ensconced at Village Cay Marina in Road Town, ex post family cruise, waiting for me to take her away. Road Town not only has an immigration office, but also supermarkets and fuel docks (or so I thought). Logistically, if not aesthetically, it makes a better point of departure than Jost.

This 18-minute talk (click here to watch) by reef ecologist Jeremy Jackson on the degradation on the marine environment is compelling, persuasive, and profoundly depressing. You owe it to the planet to give it a look.

Here’ s a fantastic opportunity for someone to pick up a very swell boat for a fraction of what it’s really worth. This custom one-off cruiser/racer was designed by Chuck Paine for a private client and was first launched back in 2002. I test-sailed it soon afterwards and persons involved in its creation advised me confidentially the build cost was over $800K. The boat has been listed for sale for years now, and the asking price is currently down to $399K. Even better, the original owner already has another boat.

Gusto, as she is now called, offers an excellent example of how traditional design concepts can be blended with more modern concepts and building materials to produce a very unique and appealing vessel.  She is one of several “modern traditional” cruising boats Chuck Paine helped to create in latter part of his career (he is now retired and is hard at work on a book about the boats he has designed).

Of all the deities we sailors must cope with while messing around on our boats none are more ravenous than the dreaded Bilge Gods. As long as there have been bilges on boats, these bogeymen have been lurking down there, waiting patiently to consume any Very Important Object an innocent mariner might temporarily hold in his or her hand.

Even if you are on deck, or at the very top of your rig, as far from the bilge as you can possibly get, it is a proven fact that all you need do is let your grip on a Very Important Object slip for but an instant and said object will immediately be transported all the way down to where these greedy gremlins can have at it.

I wasn't going to blog about this again until Jessica Watson actually completed her circumnavigation, but events (plus the fact that I'll soon be incommunicado on the blue yonder again myself) have forced my hand. News Tidbit Number 1 is that Abby Sunderland has been forced to put into Cape Town, South Africa, to fix her balky autopilot. So her bid for a Youngest Solo Non-Stop Unassisted Circumnavigation (YSNSUC) record is undeniably over. Tidbit Number 2 is that, even as all of Australia quivers on the verge of an orgasm of publicity over the return of Jessica, who is now only a few days shy of finishing her voyage at Sydney, a furious debate has erupted over whether she can truly claim the YSNSUC record herself.

Seems that Jessica's shore team has screwed up badly. In mapping out her voyage, they failed to send her far enough into the Northern Hemisphere to cover the official great circle route distance necessary (21,600 nautical miles, which is the Earth's circumference at the equator) to match the achievement of Jesse Martin, who first set the YSNSUC record in 1999 and covered 21,760 miles. Jessica, it seems, will only have covered 18,582 miles. The immediate result has been a big pissing match between Jessica's PR flack, Andrew Fraser, and Australia's popular Sail-World website, which claims it first raised the question before Jessica left, but was ignored.

Not much information on this one, but the few details available are chilling. Evidently Don Stollmeyer, who runs the famous Power Boats yard in Trinidad, has confirmed via the local Coast Guard there that a German woman, Angelica Ropke-Wiels, was picked up on April 16 by a merchant vessel that found her alone, adrift in a liferaft, near Curacao. She and her husband, Hans Jorgen Ropke, were attacked aboard their sailboat, Spirit of Cologne II, on April 3 about one mile off the north coast of Venezuela's Paria Penisula (directly west of Trinidad on the map above). Hans was shot and killed in the attack.

According to other sources, Angelica, on being taken aboard M/V San Fernando, told her rescuers she'd been adrift for 13 days and had had her husband's body aboard the liferaft with her, but had pushed it overboard. Meanwhile, however, Spirit of Cologne was discovered afloat and reportedly in sound condition off the coast of Venezuela with Hans' body still aboard. According to Stollmeyer's secondhand report, Angelica had sailed the yacht north for four days after the attack, then abandoned it and boarded the raft for reasons unknown.