And it looks so easy...

by Avery "SwinginFish" Ellisman

I was born and grew up in So. Cal, and lived close enough to the Pacific to ride my bike to the Ventura pier where, in addition to tormenting seagulls, I tossed “shiny sinkers” for bonito at a very early age.  As time passed, my interest in the ocean broadened, and at 14 I was trolling jigs in the local marina from my own little 10’ O’Day Sprite.  Not surprisingly, the sailing interest soon gave way to surfing, which became an obsession that lasted some 20+ years, saw me through - and extended - my adolescence, and aside from shaping me into the chick magnet I never was, helped me develop a fairly appreciable respect for the Ma Nature.  Read More

The 10 All-time Greatest Sea Kayaking Expeditions

By Dexter Mahaffey

 To take to the sea in a kayak is to know humility. To cross the sea in a kayak alone is to know God. It’s no wonder then, that sea kayak expeditioners are, by and large, a modest bunch. They’ve been there and back, and are a different sort from the rest of us. Undoubtedly that’s why so little is known about the great sea kayak expeditions: The practitioners aren’t all self-promoters. But the tales bear telling: surviving for months on cans of condensed milk or staving off starvation by eating toothpaste; crossing the ocean alone with no radio; facing a heaving slurry of sea ice in the surf zone. The greatest sea kayak expeditions brush up against the limits of human endurance and mark the frontiers of the human experience.

They are:

1. Franz Romer’s Atlantic Crossing, Portugal to Puerto Rico, 1928
2. Hannes Lindemann’s Atlantic Crossing, 1956
3. Paul Caffyn’s Australia Circumnavigation, 1981 
4. Ed Gillet’s California to Hawaii Crossing, 1987
5. John MacGregor’s Rob Roy Expeditions, 1860s
6. Derek Hutchinson’s North Sea Crossings, 1975, 1976
7. Frank Goodman et al., First Circumnavigation of Cape Horn, 1977
8. Peter Bray’s North Atlantic Crossing, 2001
9. John Dowd’s Indonesian Journey, 1969 
10. Jon Turk’s Japan to Alaska Expedition, 2000

Read More          

Cool Stand Up Board Vid

Sailing a Tin Can

My first time sailing a canoe: the naïve approach 
Ed Maurer, Dunedin, Florida

It has been almost 40 years since I first sailed a canoe, and now is the time to share the experience. I’ll ask the reader to do the same when the time is right, especially if it’s a good story.

I was with my Boy Scout troop out of Miami. We went for a canoe trip into the 10,000 Islands area of Florida, a place where the land and sea fight for preeminence over the very southern tip of the state.

We paddled a mélange of canoes out to an island, maybe just a couple three miles or so. We made camp on ground barely above the high water mark, scattered with coral and transient soil. Plants consisted mostly of sea grape and whatever weedy stuff grows in such inhospitable conditions good only for crabs, mosquitoes and the ubiquitous sand fleas. Read More

Capsize Your Boat ~ Bailing and Flotation

An all too likely event can be controlled with the right knowledge and gear
Hugh Horton, Contributing Editor, Harrison Township, Michigan 

After I gybed back to the swamped sailing canoe at the Killbear Canoe Rendezvous in September ‘05, I thought of Roger Taylor’s series about seamanship. The swimming sailor’s tube style pump wasn’t getting it done. Wavelets instantly refilled what dozens of pump strokes had squirted out.

I sailed up, held her against my boat, Walela, and used Walela’s bailer. In two dozen scoopfuls, she was left with a quart or so under the floorboards, along her ribs and lapstrake planking. Wind was offshore, and I drifted a couple boat lengths away. Her canoeist, a young man, tried again to climb in over the stern. But the boat was still too unstable, so I came back and steadied her. Just the afternoon before he’d gone over in a lighter, onshore breeze. But Lake Huron was warm, and he swam her in. Read More