Sail Far Live Free

1,000,000 pageviews. That's the number that SailFarLiveFree.com recently surpassed, thanks to you all! Actually, I'm officially at 1,035,614 as of today, but who's counting? And in reality 900,000 of those pageviews could be directly from my mom for all I know.  In any case, I want to sincerely thank anyone who's been a reader of my musings here. Pageviews are nice, but I prefer this view. I started this blog in 2007 to simply chronicle the restoration of our first sailboat , keep myself accountable for my dreams and keep a journal of our adventures for my kids and I. I never intended to build an audience, but you've shown up nonetheless. And you've brought with you tons of inspiration and encouragement. Again, THANK YOU! To show just a smidgen of my appreciation, I'm offering a pair of brand new recently published cruising books, As Long as It's Fun by Herb McCormick and A Sail of Two Idiots by Renee Petrillo , free for two random read

Purple Haze by K. Walters

"If a man's fortune does not fit him it is like the shoe in the story; if too large it trips him up, if too small it pinches him." - Horace This is starting to look bad. I never intended it to turn out this way. However, I can no longer deny that my collection of boat shoes has now surpassed my wife's total amount of shoes. The latest culprit to push my tally past Erin's? The Porter shoe from Astral . Astral is probably best known for producing lifevests and shoes for kayaking and river water sports, but the Porters can easily cross over to sailing. In any case, the crew at Astral seems to know water and water recreation quite well. I was first drawn to the Porter by their simple looks and color combinations, so apparently my vanity initially ruled over my sense of comfort and function. But it didn't last long because the Porters are SOOO comfortable to wear. They're light and airy (much more so than they look in pictures) and for once have ze

"Live in the sunshine, swim in the sea, drink the wild air." - Ralph Waldo Emerson It seems many of the trips I plan have a mission statement similar to Emerson's prose. The sun, the sea and wild air sum it up nicely for me. This trip began with an amber moon setting quickly in the west as we motored out the channel to Lake Michigan at about 4:45am. We raised the main and motorsailed north for about an hour before the winds were up enough for full sails and the quiet calm that comes when the motor sleeps.  And so the motor slept all the way to the Manistee channel where our first night began at the recently renovated municipal marina. The last time we were here (~2010) the shower facilities were akin to standing under a leaky pipe in a musty basement. I'm happy to report that the new clubhouse features private showers (with doors!), painted walls, and just about all the amenities (cable TV, WiFi, nautical periodicals, etc.) many of us leave port for in the f