Packaged gear for the new webstore. One of the things that keeps life interesting is trying new things: a new ...

Ganymede: a heavy, full-keel, gaff-rigged cutter. It has probably become obvious to the alert reader that I’m partial to full-keel, ...

Ganymede sailing hard with synthetic rigging. Masthead with soft attachments and the Lashing Tang When we first rigged Ganymede’s light-pole ...

Picking Ganymede up with an hydraulic trailer Launching by trailer at a public launch ramp in Bristol The surest way ...

The beginning of the method And if I haven’t had time to update this blog lately, dear Reader: be comforted! ...

For the enthusiastic boater, that last little bit of autumn when the daytime temperature still gets above fifty degrees is ...

The Arctic is not most people's "normal" I wondered, as Polar Sun rolled downwind across the Beaufort Sea along the ...

Gjoa Haven, on King WIllian Island, Nunavut. It was as if the world had run out of interesting, that week ...

Hanging out in Pasley Bay We weren’t expecting to get out of Pasley Bay on our last day there, and ...

Pack ice approaching Pasley Bay. “Well,” we thought. “Here we are again!” I’m talking, of course, about the south arm ...

Beechey Island, at 74 1/2 degrees North latitude. It was cold as Polar Sun motored at length into the spacious ...

Crossing Baffin Bay from Greenland to Baffin Island. The tricky thing about expectations is that no matter how well you ...

The Icefjord I'm about to talk about. We didn’t spend a whole lot of time in Aasiaat. To begin with, ...

Nuuk is very lovely when the weather's good... Nothing I had ever read or heard had led me to believe ...

Red Bay, Labrador It was supposed to be an easy run from Flowers Cove, Newfoundland, to Chateau Bay, Labrador: gentle ...

Cruising Newfoundland with the family some years back. There have been, in the nearly thirty years that I’ve been cruising, ...

Polar Sun, a Stevens 47, enroute to Greenland For nearly a year before this trip began, neither Mark nor I ...

Breadboat on a trailer A test-row on Psammead. When only a few weeks were left before my departure for a ...

Ganymede's cabin getting stowed and sorted for a voyage to the tropics. Once there, all you need is bare feet ...

The final blow to the canopy, after the snow receded. I mentioned, a few posts back, the ill-fated bow shed ...

Adapting a bracket for the windvane while at anchor One of the reasons that the old saw about necessity being ...

Ganymede uncovered in winter In a huge departure from my normal practice of letting everyone forget I even have a ...

A half dozen or so blog posts back, before getting distracted by the tiny schooner Pshrimp, I hinted at a ...

View from Cathedral Ledge in New Hampshire For about a week after the first failed launch of Pshrimp that I ...

Emily paints Pshrimp's name on It happens, from time to time, that an alert reader or acquaintance will express wonder ...

Spring, where we live, always comes in fits and starts. Last month I wore shorts to work; two days later ...

February in New England When King Solomon famously said that there is a season for everything, he obviously had not ...

A tiny schooner, a canopy, and a dinghy. Of all the advantages of owning a decent-sized property rather than renting ...

When I pitched the idea of a series of boatbuilding articles to Cruising World magazine fourteen years ago, I sent ...

What goes around comes around, they say. I little imagined, when I gave away my first cruising boat more than ...

I had hoped, while writing the last blog post, that by the time I wrote this next one the whole ...

For the last, oh, more than a year now, the realization has been growing that it’s been a long time ...

Life—at least mine—seems to come in phases. There are seasons when it feels like all I do is grind itchy ...

After spending only half the winter grinding fiberglass in the boat shop I mentioned in my last post, my full-time ...

And if I haven’t blogged all winter, it’s mostly because, unlike last winter when I had plenty of time to ...

My wife Danielle and I have been married for quite some time. How long exactly I can’t say—no doubt my ...

Every once in a while, the changing tides of life and work leave me not with a mountain of things ...

With the coming of summer, and having the dinghy project wrapped up, I was finally free to turn to a ...

Of all the benefits of warm weather, being able to work outside is one of the finest—having the dinghy twenty ...

While I was willing, as the last blog post illustrates, to paint in almost all conditions in order to get ...

There was a delay of some weeks in working further on the dinghy, since Ganymede needed to be finished and ...

With the buffing to shiny of the dinghy plug, which is where the last blog post left her, things could ...

It is telling, perhaps, of how uninteresting sanding is, that every time you get to move from one grit to ...

There seem to be three choices open to the person who finds he keeps needing to do something completely repugnant ...

Given the severity of the last several winters, I had never imagined that it would be possible to do fiberglass ...

It was pretty agonizing, trying to decide whether to make any modifications to Ganymede's cockpit geometry. I mean, since I'm ...

It's the dead of winter again, and with all my rigging projects wrapped up till spring comissioning time, I have ...

Some years ago, when nearing the completion of our home-finished boat, I testified in a magazine article that once I ...

I'd like to say (and think) that the reason I haven't written a blog post all summer is because I ...

When I became captain  of an 80-foot sailing schooner roughly one year ago, I really didn't want too much more ...

A couple of blog postings ago I promised you, my readers, details on Ganymede's new plumbing setup. This will probably ...

One of the things I almost regretted giving up when we went cruising was a workshop—a place to fiddle about ...

After the dreadful hue and cry of the past three winters, each marked by some extraordinary extreme—whether violent gales, or ...

I had reproached myself on more than one occasion last winter for leaving Ganymede in the water rather than hauling ...

Ever since our move ashore, the care and upkeep of Ganymede has been necessarily pushed to the back burner. It ...

One of the best parts of preparing for a cruise on Ganymede (and on Capella before her), was the day ...

One of the advantages of living and working in a boatbuilding town is that you’re surrounded by boatbuilders, and boatbuilding ...

Sailing season has returned to New England again, and is quickly going into full swing. There’s nothing like the strong ...

It seems pretty cliché to say that winter seemed long—no doubt every winter in every generation has seemed long, especially ...

It is, by all appearances, the dead of winter. There’s piles of snow all around—not as big as when we ...

There are few things more satisfying to my seafaring soul than periodically emptying the boat of EVERYTHING and giving her ...

One of the pitfalls of reading too many books in your youth is that you’ll go into situations with preconceived ...

One of the hardest things about setting out cruising five years ago was closing down the business I had created, ...

One would think that having a job where you spent twelve hours a day sailing would leave you ready to ...

Even though it’s happening more and more often, it doesn’t fail to astonish me whenever I get an email from ...

Going to captain’s license school is kind of like getting a college degree in English: it’s absolutely useless for any ...

For the nearly five years that we’ve been living full-time aboard Ganymede, our lighting situation has been a never-ending saga ...

Inevitably, the arrival of spring in Newport heralds the arrival of boats—boats by the hundred, flocking to the sailing capital ...

For as long as I can remember there has been a story of how the particular sort of boat known ...

There’s a lot of talk, in online forums, on blogs, and in magazines, about what exactly constitutes ‘Good Seamanship’. For ...

We had begun to despair, some of us, that spring would ever arrive. As the season advanced into what should ...

Every so often, an aspiring seafarer will log into an internet sailing forum and ask, “Exactly what is the perfect ...

What do sailors do when they come ashore? Build boats, of course. When Ganymede launched, three years after construction began, ...

I saw one time, at a museum in Virginia, a curious watch with only ten hours marked on the dial ...

The worst thing for me about taking a break from cruising is having to find a job. Not the job ...

As we had struggled up the St Lawrence River and down the canal systems toward the Hudson river, discussion of ...

They say that one can get used to almost anything, if done often enough. I wasn’t so sure of that ...

Our last day in Canadian waters began with a bang; a series of bangs actually, as the first grey light ...

“No worries,” I had been telling everyone for the last month—everyone who had pointed out that to go through the ...

The charts we bought in Newfoundland for the St Lawrence River have a neat feature: a letter inside a little ...

Matane, Quebec, is on the south shore of the St Lawrence River just at the edge of where it narrows ...

I’ve never been good at reading tide tables—not because I can’t muddle out an answer from them, but because my ...

It seems a shame to break the flow of narrative as succesive blog postings take you with us from faraway ...

Natashquan, Quebec, was until very recently the literal end of the road. Though it now goes a few miles further ...

There was ice on Ganymede’s decks the morning we left Harrington Harbor. No surprise—it had been chilly enough to have ...

La Tabatiere, which evidently comes from a French word meaning “The Tabatiere,” is the hub of the outport settlements between ...

Our first stop in the province of Quebec, at a little place called La Falaise, was all among rocky islands ...

“Dig out some more rice while you’re down there,” I called, upending the last little bit out of the ready ...

The very top of the Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland, at almost 52 degrees of North latitude, is a chilly place ...

St Anthony, Newfoundland, was not an unpleasant place to spend a week. There were two decent grocery stores, a public ...

La Scie, just on the north side of Cape John, is the first of the old French fishing ports encountered ...

We were talking about Labrador, a local and I, and I asked him whether a place was further up along ...

At first, Twilingate appeared to brim with promise. Negociating the approach channel we saw the back of a Foodland supermarket ...

Blown Away in Lumsden It blew near-gale or gale force four out of the five days we were at Lumsden ...

Berry Bounties Ganymede likes what every sailboat does; give her a wind just forward of the beam, a little more ...

The north coast of Newfoundland is indented by three or four deep bays, each full of islands, fjords, tickles and ...

Puzzled in Old Perlican It was our first stop after leaving St John’s—a small, crowded harbor, very busy, and full ...

One feels like a chump, almost, motoring through a calm with storm canvas up, but it had seemed prudent, given ...

We had been sailing through heavy fog for two days as we approached Trepassey harbor, helped along for the last ...

To the very end, I think, we did our utmost toward the big transatlantic plan. Rushing through Nova Scotia and ...

Summer, it seems, has arrived at last here in the middle north, and we got a beautiful weather window to ...

We had arrived in Canso with a slight feeling of urgency. Originally we had hoped to be sailing across the ...

In winter I get up at night And dress by yellow candlelight. In summer, quite the other way, I have ...

At the tail end of the weather forecast on the VHF radio, the only sort we can pick up on ...

Lunenburg proved everything we could wish in the way of amenities. Two grocery stores, a big hardware store, laundromat, library, ...

Shelburne, NS is a good harbor, in spite of a local Katabatic-sort of wind effect, where every afternoon we were ...

The wind finally laid down in Provincetown, though not until it had gotten really ugly, with Ganymede bucketing in three-foot ...

When I am in my ship, I see The other ships go sailing by. A sailor leans and calls to ...

“Ready to go yet?” I heard the question over and over today. Fair enough—we’ve been ‘getting ready to cruise’ ever ...

I’d like to say that we’ve accomplished much in the week and a half since Ganymede relaunched and we returned ...

Just Like Old Times After spending two days working on Ganymede’s outboard engine, trying to get gasoline through the fuel ...

And if the morning begins inauspiciously, should you still carry on with the plan? That was the big question Saturday, ...

Six Simple Alternatives to Common Cruising Clutter As we prepare Ganymede to head off on the next and biggest leg ...

It has been the longest, coldest winter Ganymede has ever seen—rightly so, since it’s our first in these northern parts, ...

Welcome to Zartman Cruising, the blog with which we hope more fully to chronicle our family’s sailing adventures, with all ...