Adventures

June 2023

Pontchartrain and Maurepas

Sailing the estuarine lakes of Louisiana

Peter Sawyer takes his Norwalk Islands Sharpie sailing across Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Maurepas, two vast brackish lakes trapped in Louisiana’s Mississippi River Delta.

May 2023

My Texas 200

A five-day sail-and-oar raid along the Texas coast

David Zumwalt joined a fleet of 80 sail-and-oar boats in a five-day raid along 200 miles of the Texas coast. Sailing his home-built cat-ketch, REDWING, on her first long voyage, he endured equipment failures and mud banks.

April 2023

Sunlight’s Wake

An inland cruise aboard SOUL CAT, a solar-powered catamaran

Phil Boyer takes us along on his west-to-east return journey on Ontario’s Trent-Severn Waterway, becoming the first to do the out-and-back trip, solo, in an all-solar-powered boat.

March 2023

A Sneakbox on the Gulf Coast

Rowing and sailing from New Orleans to Cedar Key, Florida

After rowing down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, Christopher Cunningham arrives at the Gulf of Mexico for the last leg of his 2,400-mile sneakbox adventure.

February 2023

A Sneakbox on the Mississippi

850 miles from Cairo, Illinois, to New Orleans, Louisiana

After rowing his sneakbox down the Ohio River, Christopher Cunningham continues on the Lower Mississippi River, hoping to outrun the advance of winter’s cold.

January 2023

A Sneakbox on the Ohio

980 miles from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Cairo, Illinois

Inspired by “Four Months in a Sneakbox,” Nathaniel H. Bishop’s account of a 2,500-mile cruise in the winter of 1875, Christopher Cunningham built a sneakbox and followed Bishop’s route from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Cedar Key, Florida. In this first of three installments he takes on the 980 miles of the Ohio River.

December 2022

The Broughton Archipelago

A British Columbia cruise

The myriad islands between Vancouver Island and the intricate mainland coast of British Columbia provided a rower and a paddler with unspoiled waterways shared with orcas and humpback whales.

November 2022

Two Tramps and a Lady

A 280-mile row across France along the Two Seas Canal from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean

For over 150 years, the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts of France have been connected by a series of canals and locks that were nearly two centuries in the making. In 2022, a couple from England were the lone rowers on the canal in the company of motorboats.

October 2022

A Week on Georgian Bay

Thirty thousand islands, two small boats

On another sail-and-oar cruise of Ontario’s Georgian Bay, Tom Pamperin and his brother explore the islands clustered along the coast and the narrow, rocky inland waterways of the French River Delta.

September 2022

A Portage Too Far

A tidal rapid, a beaver dam, and an impossible haul

Tom Conlogue and Delaney Brown took a shot at circumnavigating Maine’s Blue Hill Peninsula by rowing a dory along the coast, down the gullet of a tidal rapid, and across a salt pond to a portage used centuries ago.

August 2022

Sailing to Denton

Two canoe yawls on the Choptank River

Two 18’ Autumn Leaves canoe yawls follow in the wake of 19th century cargo schooners to ascend Maryland’s Choptank River under sail and oar.

July 2022

Norway’s England Sailors

Crossing the North Sea to honor Norwegian heroes of WWII

During World War II, hundreds of Norwegians took to small boats to escape their enemy-occupied homeland. Eighty years later, four Norwegian mariners repeated their North Sea crossing to Scotland.

June 2022

Padre Island

Soloing along a Texan barrier island

Padre Island stretches for 113 miles along the Texas coast and separates the Gulf of Mexico from Laguna Madre. Roger Siebert, soloing his 15′ lug-rigged skiff, explores the protected west coast of the barrier island.

May 2022

Pond Island

A dinghy built for two

A September weekend cruise from Bass Harbor to Pond Island aboard an 11′ sail-and-oar dinghy made a pleasant Maine-Coast getaway for two.

April 2022

Umbagog Lake

Paddling in the Great North Woods of New Hampshire and Maine

Umbagog Lake straddles the north end of the New Hampshire/Maine border in the midst of the Great North Woods. Tom DeVries and company take us on a paddling tour of the lake with a freight canoe and two homebuilt sea kayaks.

March 2022

Sailing the Archipelago Sea

A father-and-daughter cruise on Finland’s coast

Finland’s Archipelago Sea is dappled with countless islands, making it an idyllic setting for a cruise aboard a faering. Mats Vuorenjuuri and his daughter Inari sailed a crooked path to an island far from the mainland coast.

February 2022

Pen Lake

Cruising Canoes in Algonquin Provincial Park

There are more than 1,500 lakes within the borders of Ontario’s Algonquin Provincial Park. Phil Boyer and friend spent four days exploring three of them in canoes that Phil designed and built.

January 2022

Thwarted

A solo row to Florida’s Dog Island

Something would be missing if every cruise went as expected and that’s the satisfaction in rising to meet the unexpected. A lot of things went wrong during Bill Hutton’s short cruise to one of Florida’s barrier islands, but the experience was more fulfilling than what he’d imagined.

December 2021

Downed Trees and Muddy Feet

Rowing the Chippewa River Floodplain

For his rowing cruise of Wisconsin’s Chippewa River delta, Tom Pamperin intended to find a loop of the interconnected waterways but found only one dead end after another.

November 2021

A Tale of Two Boats

Building the PM-38 once as a teen and again 50 years later

A 7-1/2-page article published in a 1962 issue of Popular Mechanics might seem, by any standard, to be an insufficient guide to building a boat, but Terry McIntyre built the magazine’s PM-38 twice, once in 1962 and again in 2019.

October 2021

A Quiet Time in a Big Estuary

A Columbia River cruise

Bruce Bateau takes a California couple cruising on his home waters, the tidal reaches of the Columbia River that form the border between Oregon and Washington.

September 2021

Fifteen Years of the Small Reach Regatta

A retrospective

After 15 years, the Small Reach Regatta has come to the end of a long and successful run. Tom Jackson was there from the very beginning and takes a look back at the popular Maine Coast cruise.

August 2021

A Wright Brothers Moment

1972, three friends, and a homebuilt hydrofoil sailboat

Mike Jacker, along with his friends Louis and Marty, had just graduated from high school and would have spent the summer of ‘72 sailing Lake Michigan at a local club, but a book on hydrofoils set them on a quest to design and build their own sailing foiler.

July 2021

Gile Flowage

Working with the wind

The Giles Flowage, a reservoir in northern Wisconsin, can get rather choppy when the wind picks up, but Tom Pamperin wasn’t going to be deterred from taking a weekend getaway there.

June 2021

Baker Lake

The mirror of a mountain

Baker Lake is an 8-mile-long reservoir that lies at the foot of a 10,781’ volcano in Washington. On a summer weekend it can be crowded with hundreds of boats, campers, and beachgoers, but on a midweek cruise in May, our editor had the lake almost all to himself.