Blog & Articles

The gentleman who sold me the boat had no idea that the recent work done prior to his Pacific voyage would be in this condition. He and I both assumed that this area of the boat was the one place I didn’t need to worry about, so I could focus on upgrading systems and dealing…

Obviously monies tentatively budgeted for new upholstery, a sun shade, and possibly replacing the historically inappropriate interior furniture installed in the 1970’s with something more Herreshoff-ian are now, and probably forever, reallocated to getting the boat structurally rebuilt and back in the water. Everything else isn’t just secondary, it has dropped off of the list….

Westward’s Big Boatyard Adventure Part I There comes in the life of every antique boat owner a moment of reckoning. The moment typically arrives when we have lifted our treasured vessel onto the work area of a boat yard with the intention of replacing that one fastening, plank or window frame that represents the final step…

I grew up in a small Southern California beach town, my street ended at the cliff above the ocean. I never really noticed the sunsets while growing up, probably the unending sameness of smog-hazed twilights wasn’t enough to distract me from whatever job I had to finish if I wanted permission to go surfing the…

Westward is now less than 40 miles south of Ketchikan where we will clear into the US, make a quick pass at the accumulative shopping list and eat lunch with friends. Then it is back out on the afternoon flood with a course laid in for Petersburg. Moving toward Sitka to begin Westward’s first Pacific…

Among the wonders of owning antique boats is the multi-generational connections that the boats carry with them. I recently had out of town visitors, friends who had traveled with us last summer aboard Catalyst. Catalyst was built by the University of Washington in 1932 to serve as their first purpose-built oceanographic research vessel. She spent…

Twenty miles up a rough dirt road we passed through our last gate. Checho, our guide, opened the fence and waited for us to drive through before closing it behind us. Continuing a few meters further he indicated that we were to park. From here we would continue on foot. We were walking along an…

I was busy in the engine room when an orange glow outside the port hole caught my attention. Sunrise! A scattered layer of clouds promised one of unusual intensity, so I downed my tools, cleaned off my hands and climbed the ladder to the deck. Walking up the side deck toward the pilot house to…

A bit over three hours after leaving the paved road, our four wheel drive truck surged up a steep embankment and stopped in a small corral that was shaded by a few large mesquites. Stepping out of the truck was a step back in time. The wood rail corral was leaning into the surrounding trees,…

We are preparing to get underway from La Paz, Baja. Next stop is San Diego on our way to Alaska. It was a wonderful, challenging, exciting and sublime winter in the Sea of Cortez. And now Westward and Catalyst are heading north for Alaska.

As I prepared myself for my first Baja charter season I acquired as many writings about the region as possible. From beautiful large format photo journals to intertidal organism identification books to awkward, self-published accounts of personal adventures. As I have read through this eclectic collection each one has allowed me to ink in an area on my personal Baja chart where before was written only Terra Incognito. Several of these books address the history, biological make up and current challenges facing Baja’s three gray whale birthing and breeding lagoons. The northernmost of these three lagoons was, until recently, named Scammon’s Lagoon, for the whaling ship captain that discovered it’s labyrinthine entrance, and then exploited his discovery until the whales who sheltered within were thought completely exterminated. This took less than ten years. Scammon had more than the lagoon’s complicated entrance…

We had anchored in Puerto Gato, a beautiful shallow bay that lies on the eastern shore of the Baja peninsula, about midway between the fishing villages of San Evaristo and Agua Verde. Northerly winds had been whipping up the Gulf for the past few days, and the resulting wind swell was wrapping around the point…