'On passage with Jimmy Cornell' - Charles Doane

Charles Doane, editor at SAIL Magazine, joined Aventura from Ft Lauderdale to Panama and on through the canal. He reports (on WaveTrain: A Blog About Cruising Sailboats and Other Aquatic Miracles):

1) On Passage with Jimmy Cornell: Ft. Lauderdale to Panama

 26 March 2015

O how fickle the Wind Gods! A couple of weeks ago while aboard Lunacy with the family in St. Martin you’ll recall we had far too much of it. Wind, I mean. Then just two days after returning from that venture, I sallied forth to join Jimmy Cornell aboard his new Garcia Exploration 45 Aventura (same name as his last three boats) to crew on a 1,300-mile passage across the entire breadth of the Caribbean during prime-time tradewind season, and what do I see on prognosticatory WX charts while waiting to board a flight to Florida? A most emphatic lack of wind, 10 knots or less, all the way from the shoal-spangled Bahamas to the chicken-neck isthmus of Central America. For one whole week, at least.

Read the full article (on the Wave Train blog)

2) On Passage with Jimmy Cornell: Panama Canal Transit

 1 April 2015

I’ll be honest, folks. When Jimmy Cornell shot me an e-mail after his new Garcia Exploration 45 debuted at the Annapolis show last fall and asked if I could carve two weeks out of my schedule in March to join him on a passage from Florida to Panama and on through the canal, I was skeptical. Not about the bluewater bit. I was sure we could pull that off inside two weeks. But I wasn’t so sure about having time to make it through the canal. I’d heard wait times for yachts seeking transits can run from one to six weeks, so when Jimmy assured me he had connections in Panama and could get us through with the quickness, I took all that with the proverbial grain of salt. Worst case, I reckoned, was I’d do the passage and miss the transit, which in the cosmic scheme of things seemed a pretty good worst case.

Read the full article (on the Wave Train blog)