The Tardis Project

April 3, 2020 Since a few of the half-dozen readers left for this blog may be looking for something to do while locked down, I’ll do a few posts on the last month of the Florida cruise. Potentially, it was the best cruise the Tardis ever took — the boat ran great, interesting places, beautiful

March 29, 2020 After escaping from Florida (more in the cruise later),  I arrived home to a stack of mail and in it was a copy of Water Craft, a British magazine that is sort of like WoodenBoat, but more oriented for small craft, builders and designers.  When I opened to the contents page THERE

March 7, 2020On December 26, 2012 renowned sailors and Great Loop bloggers Katie and Jessie landed here at Twin Rivers Marina in Crystal River with their diesel engine “pissing” coolant. Mechanics from miles around dropped everything to come to the aid of the two distressed mariners and quickly diagnosed the problem as a rusted freeze

February 14, 2020 Somehow I missed the launch last December of Friedbert Hennemuth’s exquisite Luna.  This is indeed the “Luna” version of Mark’s Olga 28 design with a small diesel coupled to a saildrive. What beautiful work!  Folks give me a hard time about the amount of brightwork I have on the Tardis, but Friedbert

February 8, 2020 This is our February home in St. Petersburg at Harborage Marina.  A great slip in a quiet corner of the marina.  The ramp goes up to a seawall with fantastic views of St. Pete and also leads to a shower area and laundry. Great trip up from Venice — 46 miles including

January 31, 2020 Coming to you from Venice, FL after a beautiful trip up from Fort Myers.  Spent four nights there in a slip at the municipal marina that was literally right downtown.  So a good place to provision, decompress and get the boat set up for cruising. Then on north with the boat running

January 19, 2020 I can’t believe it has been almost a year since I posted anything on this site, but I had a lot of excuses:  a bruising municipal election campaign (we won!), a trip to France for the 75th anniversary of the Normandy invasion,  the death of my image-stabilized camera, and a fabulous five-week

April 10, 2019 As you could sense from my last post, the engine and all systems were working great cruising around Pine Island Sound. Dave, Peggy and the whole team at Sweetwater Landing Marina did a great job in a difficult situation. I pulled in out of the blue to get a new prop, and

April 7, 2019 Pine Island Sound doesn’t have the reputation it deserves as a cruising destination, because it isn’t very big — about 50 miles long by 20 miles wide — and it’s pretty shallow so the superyachts can’t go there. But it has two delightful small cities, Fort Myers and Punta Gorda, filled with

March 17, 2019 We are safely ensconced in incredible Legacy Harbour Marina in Fort Myers, and all seems well with the engine — but I want to go more than the 8 miles it took to get here before stating that definitely. This has been a really lazy trip.  I brought my sewing machine, all