Tag: boats
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Learning Celestial Navigation
In my continuing effort to acquire miscellaneous skills, I took up celestial navigation a little while ago. Yes, I mean using a sextant, some printed tables, and a rudimentary grasp of the principles of spherical trigonometry to find my position on Earth. It’s unlikely anyone really needs to do this here in the 21st century,…
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MAIB, R.I.P.
The weirdest, and for my money most delightful, publication in the boating world has ceased operations. Messing about in Boats, which began as a bimonthly journal in the early ’80s, covered a broader and stranger beat than any other regularly published magazine I’ve ever encountered. Named for a famous quote from Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind…
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My First Complete Audiobook
My first complete solo audiobook is now online and free for anyone to download at Librivox. The Track of the Typhoon was a book I read in serialized form several years ago, in the delightful zine Messing About in Boats. It’s a travelogue from a slightly insane sailing voyage in 1920, written by the aptly…
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Sorting out Wesorts
Editor’s note: This is the second of two posts about an obscure sailboat design that was once popular on the upper Severn River, a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. The posts got lost in a site update in 2024, so I’m now reposting and backdating them for the sake of anyone else who…
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Welcome to Wesort World Headquarters
Editor’s note: this post originally appeared in 2012 on my alandove.com blog, but it got lost in an update of both of my sites in 2024. I’m putting it and a companion post back online now, backdated to their original publication dates, after hearing from someone who was looking for them. Wayne sent this note…