The Figure Eight Voyage

Posted on April 22, 2018 by Jeffrey

I have been thoroughly enjoying following Randall and Mo’s Figure Eight Voyage the last couple months. If you are hearing about it for the first time, Randall Reeves left aboard Moli, his 45-foot aluminum boat with a rich history of challenging voyages and firsts, from San Francisco, intent on rounding Cape Horn, circumnavigating Antartica, rounding the Horn again, sailing the length of the eastern coast of the Americas, navigating the Northwest Passage, and then returning to San Francisco in a single season, non-stop.
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The First Week of Boat Work

Posted on April 16, 2018 by Jeffrey

It has been a week since I really started working on the boat here in Deltaville. I have crossed seven things off my list of 35 projects. That sounds fairly good, but none of those seven tasks were among the 13 jobs that I consider the more involved, time-consuming, and difficult of the lot. And I feel like I spent a good portion of the week still getting up to speed by ordering parts, getting a handle on jobs, and just getting in the swing of boat work again.
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Back on Bear and Starting Boat Work

Posted on April 8, 2018 by Jeffrey

After packing up and leaving Peoria the previous day, I arrived in Deltaville this past Wednesday night. Bear was right where I left her, awaiting my return.

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Introducing DoubleEnders.com

Posted on March 24, 2018 by Jeffrey

While we cruised Maine last summer, Margaret and I started talking about building a site dedicated to canoe-stern sailboats. Before too long, we were taking pictures of all the double enders that we came across. And we even registered the domain name, doubleenders.com. Then, we returned to Peoria, turned our attention to other things, and stopped thinking about the project.

DoubleEnders.com - The site for fans of canoe stern sailboats

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The Scurvy Pirates

Posted on March 7, 2018 by Jeffrey

One of the things that I have on the list of things to do before I head to the boat in a few weeks is to organize my digital files. I am in the midst of doing that now, and I wanted to quickly share a find, The Scurvy Pirates.

Somewhere long ago in the Napster days, I happened upon an mp3 entitled “The Scurvy Pirates, You Gotta Fight for Your Right to Plunder.”
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Sabbatical Upgrades: Satellite Communications at Sea

Posted on February 23, 2018 by Margaret

As we prepare for our extended cruise we have been making a list of equipment purchases and repairs that we need to do to outfit Bear, our Tayana 37, for more extensive cruising. Though we have lived aboard for the past 4 summers and sailed extensively between Maine and Georgia, our cruising has been mostly coastal, save a few offshore hops. During our sabbatical we plan to take Bear on her longest offshore voyage – from Norfolk to the BVI – and would like to upgrade our communication capabilities, especially for this passage.

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Sabbatical Upgrades: Cockpit Enclosure

Posted on February 12, 2018 by Jeffrey

As we start to get into the final preparations for sabbatical, we are making some fairly big and expensive upgrades to Bear. I thought I would discuss our thinking on and plans for a few of them here, starting with a new cockpit enclosure and bimini.

When we bought Bear, she had a new dodger and bimini. Oddly, the canvas on these was tan whereas the rest of the boat had blue canvas. That bothered Margaret a lot more than it did me, but the stuff was brand new, so we were both comfortable living with the situation for a while.

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The Last Six Weeks: Iowa, Milwaukee, Chicago, Indianapolis, Deltaville, Annapolis, and More!

Posted on December 1, 2017 by Jeffrey

The last time I posted, about six weeks ago, I had just returned to Illinois after bringing the boat from Maine to the southern Chesapeake. It goes without saying that Margaret and I have been neglecting the blog and our YouTube video channel since then (and maybe before then too). In our defense, we have been quite busy.

The photographic educators conference that Margaret had been planning for two years finally went down. We made a birthday trip out to Mason City, Iowa, to stay at the Frank Lloyd Wright designed Park Inn Hotel and see the other Wright and Prairie School homes in town. The following weekend we went to Milwaukee so Margaret could give a talk at UW-Milwaukee, stopping to see our friends and their new baby in Chicago on the way home. And, a week later, we were out in Indianapolis to see family. But really, that only scrapes the surface of everything that we did and accomplished over the previous month and a half.
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Photography Inspired By The Sea

Posted on November 16, 2017 by Margaret

As some of you know, in addition to being a part-time cruiser, I am also a professor of photography. Over the past 4 years I have been making work inspired by my time living on the water. The video link below is to a talk I gave last month at the Peoria Riverfront Museum about the development of my recent work using bioluminescent organisms in photography. I spend the first part of the talk discussing how the purchase of our Tayana 37, and subsequent cruising, has changed the type of photographic work I make. I also weave a thread about following your passions and curiosity – a regular mantra in the cruising world – through the lecture. I hope you enjoy this look into my life outside (but intimately related to) sailing.

Margaret LeJeune Peoria Riverfront Museum Artist Lecture

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Thoughts on Inspecting Chainplates

Posted on October 19, 2017 by Jeffrey

At the Annapolis boat show, I had a conversation with friends who are planning a full refit, but are not intending to pull the chainplates. I said something about new rigging not meaning a thing if it is attached to chainplates that are going to give way and pointed out that crevice corrosion is going to happen exactly where you cannot see it, as the plate passes through the deck. They argued that the metal they could see looked great and that checking the chainplates would require dismantling some of the interior wood and joinery, which would, obviously, be a colossal and potentially costly piece of work.

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