An Easy Sail to Nantucket Gets Tough

Heidi Coutu and I had been enjoying the easy life of a warm July week moored in the inner harbor of Menemsha on the western end of Martha’s Vineyard. Heidi—then my girlfriend, now my wife—is a professional oil painter, and in the normal course of rotating her work, we had a vague plan to sail to …

Experience: A Broken Bowsprit

Is any command less welcome on a boat than “all hands on deck!”? And short of “man overboard!” is any cry more guaranteed to wake you instantly from the deepest of slumbers? It came, as such things do, in the wee hours of the darkest of nights. “The bowsprit’s broken,” the skipper, Casey, said …