Laura S. Wharton’s debut novel The Pirate’s Bastard, is set in colonial America in the first half of the 18th Century. This was an exciting place, especially for a young, ambitious man like Edward Mar...
A good writer doesn’t tell readers their story, they show readers their story. I know that Randy Baker succeeded on this front because I felt like I was almost aboard with he and his wife, Cheryl, whe...
As the title suggests, protagonist Paul Williams lives a simple life. He’s a single dad living aboard a 26-foot plywood boat, moored in an almost abandoned marina known as Davison’s Dyke, ...
Glen Patron was born, as he says, “on the wrong side of the docks,” and grew up on Great Neck, on Long Island, New York. As a young boy, Glen developed a love for all literature that had anything to d...
Run for the Devil centers around protagonist Simon Donovan, a sailor who ferries people and supplies along the shores of Mexico’s Bay of Campeche aboard his 65-foot schooner, Siete Mares. He’d brought...
Sometime in the late 70s or early 80s I became obsessed with the idea of owning a sailboat after seeing one on a trailer with a “For Sale” sign hanging from the bow, and soon found myself ...
When author Jim Trefethen wrote Sailing Into Retirement, he combined some information from his previous book, The Cruising Life, first published in 1999, with a second, updated edition in 2015. But, i...
I’ve been sailing Tortuga, my 1969 Westerly Centaur, since 2003, and about 75 percent of the time I’m alone, so needless to say I was thrilled when asked to review Andrew Evan’s book, Singlehanded Sai...
I first got the bug to own a sailboat sometime in the late ’70s and for a while I toyed with the idea of building one. However, as the years went by and I came to understand myself more, I realized th...
Let’s face it. “The rest of us” are on a budget and have to watch how much we spend on our boats, which is why we read this magazine. Many of us have also had the grand dream of sail...
In the summer of 1998, Christopher Madsen came across Rowdy, a 59-foot Nathanael Herreshoff-designed sloop, in an Oxnard, California, boatyard. He bought her for $5,000, and thus began what would beco...
One of my favorite genres is historical fiction. Over the years I’ve read James A. Michener, Herman Wouk, C.S. Forrester, and many others, so when given the opportunity to review a work on the h...
“August 12th, 1983, was a day that Stewart Vogel had looked forward to with apprehensive anxiety.” So begins Paroled, by Charles Manion, the story of Vogel’s release after finishing ...
During the off season I read to wile away the hours, days, weeks, and months until I can once again feel the deck moving under my feet, the spray on my face, and hear the wind and waves press against ...
I recently opened my latest issue of Time and saw on their Milestones page that Stanley Dashew passed away at the age of 96. As a young man growing up during the Great Depression, Dashew started a num...
In the mid-1970s the world changed forever as we, the general public, were made aware of just how fragile our way of life is during the first oil shortage. Those of us who are old enough can remember ...
There’s an old adage among pilots: “Those who have and those who will,” meaning that sooner or later, every pilot will come close to landing an airplane without extending the landing gear. Similarly, ...
As a kid I was kind of a klutz. In fact, I can still hear my buddy Chuck calling out to me from second after yet another strikeout, “Wayne, I’ve never seen anyone as uncoordinated as you!” Almost 50 y...
As the old saying goes, variety is the spice of life. That’s why I try to listen to different types of music and eat different types of foods. But I definitely have my favorites: listening to classic ...
When I first looked at SEAsoned I didn’t know what to expect. The front cover has a picture of one of those mega-yachts we see from time to time that make us wonder if the helipad is on the bow or ste...
(MAXING OUT MEDIA, 2008; 82 MINUTES, DVD; $19.95 PLUS $5.00 SHIPPING AND HANDLING IN THE U.S. AND CANADA; $19.95 PLUS $10.00 SHIPPING AND HANDLING INTERNATIONAL. REVIEW BY WAYNE GAGNON Maxing Out; Red...
Admittedly, I’m not what you’d call a “hands-on” kind of guy. But in the eight or so years that I’ve owned Tortuga, my 1969 Westerly Centaur, I’ve become handier than I ever thought I’d be, and I’ve e...
J. P. White is an accomplished writer whose work has appeared in over 100 publications in the past 30 years. He also has four anthologies of poetry to his credit, the earliest in 1978, the most recent...
Most of us, I’m sure, have at least one edition of Chapman’s Piloting. I personally own two copies, a 51st edition and a 60th edition, both given to me as gifts when owning a boat was still a dream. T...
Author, chiropractor, and therapist Clyde Ford has written ten books — five non-fiction and five fiction. Whiskey Gulf; A Charlie Noble Suspense Novel, is Ford’s fifth work of fiction, and the t...
When Englishman Geoff Holt was a young man, he was living the dream — making three transatlantic voyages and one round trip from Great Britain to the Mediterranean and back. Then, while preparin...
Those of us who dabble in boats, especially sailboats it seems, have entertained the idea of a circumnavigation at one time or another. We dream of exotic ports, days spent basking on the beach of som...
Not found on AMAZON If you need an appointment book to organize your life, and who doesn’t, The Mariner’s Book of Days — 2009 is worth looking at. If you’re a maritime aficionado, a...
According to the back cover of Cruising Catamaran Communique, Charles E. Kanter has been a marine surveyor for over 36 years, and has been a liveaboard-cruiser for 15 of those years. So to say that he...
As is true with many books, the last page of Up the Creek is devoted to a brief biography of author Tony James. From this we learn that Tony James is a freelance journalist and writer . . . author of ...