Armchair sailing

This BBC story of the 40' catamaran found off the Australian coast, table laid for dinner, engine running, sails up and all three crew missing is one of the wackier ones from the cruising world for a while.

Some wild and woolly capsizes and high speed sailing here. One of the better dinghy sailing videos I have seen.

Looking for something completely different on Google, I came across (as you do) SetSail.com . This looks like an excellent resource for cruisers including lots of tips and ideas as well as cruising sailors' logs. The home page makes it look as they're mainly trying to sell you things (and maybe they are), but there's a lot here.

The magazine Business 2.0 isn't the place you would most obviously go to look for fun stuff about sailing. But, browsing their blogs today, I came across the Waterlog which includes some interesting posts including the latest with a marvellous photo of VC Tom Perkins' Maltese Falcon in all her glory. One question, though: I saw some posts somewhere a few weeks ago asking how well she sails. Look off her port quarter. It looks as though the rudder is well across to port and kicking up a heck of a lot of spray. Is she about to tack or is this a nasty case of lee helm?

My first ever sailing cruising was in Greece. The family and I also had a wonderful holiday there a couple of years ago with a flotilla (great for the kids). I was interested, then, to stumble across the Sailing Issues web site which provides some general sailing information (including a basic navigation course) as well as some really good information on cruising in Greece and Turkey.

I mentioned before that I enjoy the Furled Sails podcasts. I was intrigued by the one I listened to today about the Atlantic InterCoastal Waterway caught my attention. The idea of taking a sailing boat on inland waterways from Boston to Florida is an intriguing one. Having spent several family holidays in the Outer Banks soaking up the history of shipwrecks along the Carolina coasts, I can see the attractions of missing that part of the ocean trek south although I'm not sure how much sailing you'd get in. Even if you join the AIW in Norfolk, Virginia , it would still be 1,200 miles which could be a lot of motoring in a small boat! The podcast was an interview with the authors of the Managing the Waterways books which sound like just the thing if you wanted to do this trip. Other interesting resources were here , here and here .

Back down to cruising speeds and planning the trips we're going to take. I have begun to browse the passage planning software that's out there - not PC-based chart plotter stuff of which there is plenty, but packages devoted to voyage planning. I have enjoyed in the past playing around with Virtual Passages which describes itself as "The Ultimate Passage Planning Tool". The company adds "Take Armchair Voyages Across the World's Oceans using Actual Daily Weather and Nautical Charts". Sounds just like this blog, eh?