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Feb 19, 2025 | 
sailmagazine.com | Charles Doane
We have a sad note from Don Casey’s wife, Olga, that Don, one of SAIL magazine’s most popular and prolific writers, died suddenly of a heart attack in his backyard in Miami Springs, Florida, on January 25. He was 77 years old. His very first book, Sensible Cruising: The Thoreau Approach, published in 1987, quickly established him as a leading voice in the Keep It Simple Stupid school of cruising under sail.
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Feb 19, 2025 | 
sailmagazine.com | Charles Doane
We have a sad note from Don Casey’s wife, Olga, that Don, one of SAIL magazine’s most popular and prolific writers, died suddenly of a heart attack in his backyard in Miami Springs, Florida, on January 25. He was 77 years old. His very first book, Sensible Cruising: The Thoreau Approach, published in 1987, quickly established him as a leading voice in the Keep It Simple Stupid school of cruising under sail.
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Jan 10, 2025 | 
sailmagazine.com | Charles Doane
Charlene Gauthier, who goes by the diminutive Char, is herself a rather diminutive person. Not even 5 feet tall, weighing less than 100 pounds, just turned 70, she’s never been one to let her size, gender, age, or grievous misfortune stand in the way of what she’d like to do next. Twice divorced by age 37, with two daughters by her first husband, Char once worked as a professional truck driver, owner of a big Peterbilt 18-wheel tractor-trailer she ran for nearly 15 years.
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Nov 26, 2024 | 
sailmagazine.com | Graham Cox |Charles Doane
By Graham L. Cox, Vol. 1 (301 pp) $35; Vol. 2 (351 pp) $35, Random Boats Publishing, May 2024 Like many cruising sailors of my generation, Graham Cox was first inspired to dream of bluewater voyaging by teen circumnavigator Robin Lee Graham. Unlike most of us, however, Cox had a chance to actually meet Graham in mid-voyage.
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Sep 15, 2024 | 
soundingsonline.com | Charles Doane
In the early spring of 1893, a seemingly unassuming young man, a clerk who then worked in the British House of Commons, made a fateful decision—he would learn to sail. His name was Erskine Childers. He had a slight build, poor eyesight, a weak chin, and was partly disabled, walking always with a limp to favor his left foot, the result of a hiking injury years earlier.
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Jul 22, 2024 | 
sailmagazine.com | Charles Doane
In the early spring of 1893, a seemingly unassuming young man, a clerk who then worked in the British House of Commons, made a fateful decision—he would learn to sail. His name was Erskine Childers. He had a slight build, poor eyesight, a weak chin, and was partly disabled, walking always with a limp to favor his left foot, the result of a hiking injury years earlier.
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Jul 10, 2024 | 
sailmagazine.com | Charles Doane
Shortly after I first met Mary Therese Kubek last October, aboard her 1968 Alberg 30, I handed her a copy of Bernard Moitessier’s first book, Sailing to the Reefs. I explained the connection—that the names of the two boats featured in Moitessier’s famous memoir, Marie Therese, were the same as hers. I mentioned also that Moitessier, unfortunately, had wrecked both these boats. I’m not sure Ms. Kubek appreciated the coincidence.
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Apr 24, 2024 | 
sailmagazine.com | Charles Doane
Daniel Hays, at age 63, is now almost 10 years older than his father David was when they sailed around Cape Horn together in a tiny 25-foot cutter named Sparrow. That was back in the mid-1980s. They co-wrote a book about their adventure and spent seven years pitching it. When finally it was published in 1995 as My Old Man and the Sea, it became an instant bestseller. A fine photograph of Daniel sailing Sparrow singlehanded graced the cover of the November 1995 issue of this very magazine.
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Apr 2, 2024 | 
sailmagazine.com | Charles Doane
Ever since the government started polluting our fuel with ethanol, I’ve agonized over how best to power the dinghies I use when cruising. I did experiment with an early version electric motor years ago but was not impressed, as the battery sometimes went flat with no warning. Since then I’ve defaulted to hunting out ethanol-free fuel for my small outboards and often end up buying expensive “engineered” fuel in hardware stores.
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Jan 24, 2024 | 
sailmagazine.com | Charles Doane
Jan. 11/2024: Here’s one of the more interesting things that has happened to me since the publication of The Boy Who Fell to Shore, my biography of Thomas Tangvald, October before last. This past November a woman named Suzanne Heywood reached out to me, wanting to talk about children raised on cruising boats. She had just published a memoir, Wavewalker: A Memoir of Breaking Free, about her own decidedly negative experience growing up on a schooner named (you guessed it)… Wavewalker.
