202444°17′N
68°19′W
The First Trial
Malabar left Southwest Harbor, Maine in June 2024, bound for Europe by way of the Azores — a boat freshly refit after back-to-back Category 5 hurricanes in the Caribbean, and a captain who thought he was ready. He wasn't wrong about the boat. Cold Gulf of Maine water, sleep deprivation, and long stretches of whale-watching gave way, once past the Gulf Stream, to a morning when the wheel spun free in his hand. Below, the autopilot ram had sheared from the rudder post and the steering cables had jumped their sprocket — almost certainly a collision with something unseen, half-submerged, in the dark. A jury-rigged fix, talked through by satphone with the Hinckley yard in Maine, held just long enough for three days and nights of hand-steering to the nearest harbor.
Route: Southwest Harbor, ME → Halifax, NS (voyage aborted) · 3 days hand-steered · boat trucked home
202544°17′N, 68°19′W
→ 37°01′N, 8°58′W
Solo, Alone, Across
A year and a full rebuild later — new heater, new autopilot, new steering gear, spares for the spares — Malabar sailed out of Southwest Harbor again, solo, in June 2025. A gale off Cape Sable put her through her paces; sailing on under a double-reefed main and staysail was the better bet over heaving to, though the cross-seas eventually threw her captain headfirst into the stove, breaking his wrist (a fact he wouldn't learn until a Mayo Clinic visit six weeks later). A furling jam, a headsail lost overboard and hauled back aboard, a snapped lifeline, and one more gale before landfall — sixteen days and roughly 2,000 nautical miles out of Maine, the volcano of Pico rose out of the Azores on the horizon, the same sight Joshua Slocum described in 1895. Five days in Horta for repairs, then back out for the final leg to Europe — a last gale off the Portuguese coast, and on July 3rd, anchor down at last off Cabo São Vicente. The next day, Independence Day, he motored up the canal to Lagos under the Stars and Stripes to clear customs.
Route: Southwest Harbor, ME → Horta, Azores → Lagos, Portugal · ~2,900 nm · 16 days to the Azores, solo
