Archive for February 2020

Sunday, March 7, 2004: N    18o15.224′,  W 078o21.870′ (Mooring off of Rick’s Cafe, Negril Jamaica)                                                                       As indicated by the latitude and longitude we have moved well south, and the Lillian B. is now in Jamaican waters. More specifically, we are in Negril, which has metamorphosed into the “MTV,” spring break capital of Jamaica. Fifteen…

Sunday, February 29, 2004: N    23o38.545′ W 074o50.918′ (Ft. Nelson, Rum Cay) Right now it is 6:00 am, Sunday morning, with the crew sleeping after a well deserved rum ration (more precisely, Dick’s Bushmill Irish whiskey) and a full night’s sleep. We arrived yesterday at Rum Cay at daybreak after 48 hours of sailing from…

Wednesday, February 25, 2004: N    27o31.087′      W 078o38.186′ (Port Lucaya, Grand Bahamas Island) We have arrived in the Bahamas! Today and yesterday were very long days. The trip over was eventful and served as a good shakedown trip. The training started with the exit from the Manatee Pocket, during which time the autopilot engaged, locking…

Monday, February 23, 2004: N    27o08.998′, W 080o11.629′ Today was a three-steps-forward, two-steps-back sort of day. In the morning, Mike, the electrician at Hinckley, installed the stereo. Unfortunately, when we tried to insert some Crosby, Stills and Nash, the new unit proved to be defective. We set that problem aside and after verifying that the…

Saturday, February 21, 2004: N    27o08.998′, W 080o11.630′ Lillian sits in her slip at the Hinckley Yard in the Manatee Pocket in Stuart Florida. At low tide she settles into the silt. The engine has been serviced, including the replacement of a disintegrated cooling water impeller and equally disintegrated sacrificial zincs in the heat exchanger.…

After bringing the Lillian B. down from Maine in November, she spent the winter in a small marina in Stuart Florida while I attempted to finish and delegate tasks at work. At home, the guest room began to fill up with crates of food, charts, and other supplies. Two weeks before departure, my wife Kay…

The first time I met Dave Dickerson was on the eve of the winter solstice, 2000, on a blustery night in Gloucester Harbor, Massachusetts. He and his daughter Heidi were in the process of delivering the Lillian B., then Carpe Diem, from Westbrook Connecticut to Rockport, Maine. They were hurrying northward under the threat of…

Various books stress the value of getting outside one’s “comfort zone” as a means of self-improvement. Part of the rationale of taking an eight-month sabbatical on a sailboat is to literally and figuratively expand my horizons. Unfortunately, the consequence of stretching one’s limits is that it is, by definition, uncomfortable outside the comfort zone. This…

Lillian B. The Lillian B. is a forty-foot ocean going sailboat, a Baba 40’ designed by the renowned naval architect Bob Perry. She is a cutter rig, which translates to a single mast with a mainsail and two foresails. Her stern is canoe shape, to better accommodate following seas. Below decks, she has key amenities…

January 2004: The Pacific voyage of Thor Heyerdahl  in Kon Tiki, Henry Dana’s “Two Years before the Mast,” and Gauguin’s paintings of Tahiti have all been inspirations for the classical romantic dream of sailing the South Pacific, amplified, perhaps by a stereotypical mid-life restlessness. In defense of middle age, my own dream of sailing the…