Out The Gate Sailing

Brady Trautman and Alex Blue are a filmmaking and sailing due who met cruising on SV Delos . For the moment, they’ve left the high seas and are starting a new adventure on Lake Tahoe - a sailing school called the Cruisers Academy . I talk with Brady and Blue about their time sailing on Delos, their adventure sailing in Svalbard, the resulting documentary series “ 80 Degrees North ,” and their new...

Ron Elliot probably has more close encounters with great white sharks than nearly any other person. Ron is a retired urchin diver who has spent countless hours underwater at the Farallon Islands. He continues to dive at the Farallons, even after a recent encounter during which he found himself facing a massive shark charging him with open jaws…. He didn’t escape unscathed. Watch Near Miss , a film...

Brooks Watson started sailing about a year ago. But he’s jumped in with both feet, not only getting out on the water, but building a new community for sailors on the Clubhouse social media platform and launching a non-profit, Watts on Water that will enable cruisers to bring solar powered lights to those in need all over the world. He’s currently focused on the recent disaster in St. Vincent and i...

James Dilworth is a sailor and boat builder. He built a 17-foot catamaran, strapped it to the roof of his car, took it down to Mexico and spent time exploring the Sea of Cortez. Once, in a challenge from the Discovery Channel, he built a boat with 3-grand in 3-days and attempted to sail it to the Farallon Islands. When I first met James he was getting ready to fly to the Philippines where he’d bou...

Joe Balderrama loves the feeling of sailing alone - and he’s done a lot of it both in the San Francisco Bay and across oceans. He’s currently the Commodore of the San Francisco Bay Singlehanded Sailing Society . We talk about everything from the Three Bridge Fiasco to surviving squalls in the Pacific.

In January, Ryan Finn left New York on a single-handed, non-stop passage to San Francisco around Cape Horn - a feat that’s never been done. But only a day out from shore he heard a bang and found a gaping hole in the hull of his 36-foot proa. He was able to make repairs and limp back to the east coast of the United States. After interviewing him before his departure ( Episode 62 ), I caught up wit...

Mike Scheck is President of Scanmar International , the Bay Area company best known for making the Monitor Windvane. A long-time Bay sailor, Mike took over the company from founder Hans Bernwall in 2014. Scanmar actually sells a few different windvane models and autopilots. Mike and I talk about the advantages of different kinds of steering gear, the new emergency rudder system for the Monitor, th...

Graham Balch is the Managing Broker at Green Yachts - a new brokerage in San Rafael that is dedicated to selling, servicing and promoting electric boats. He shares with me the latest advances in electric propulsion and other green technology for sailboats. Graham recently spent time with Kika and Dan of Sailing Uma to test sail a Salona 46 in Croatia and you can see their video review of that boat...

Kimball Livingston covered sailing for the San Francisco Chronicle for fourteen years. He then moved to a position as the West Coast Editor for Sail Magazine. His assignments took him around the globe and had him covering everything from local races to the America’s Cup. His coverage has been seen and heard on NPR, Radio New Zealand, and the CBS Evening News. He’s a past Commodore of St. Francis Y...

Ernie Koepf has seen the many sides and many eras of commercial fishing on the west coast. He grew up fishing with his family out of Half Moon Bay, and took to the life, buying his own boat to search the seas for crab, salmon, herring and more. His book Opening Day is a fictionalized account of his life and it’s a story beautifully told. Ernie will be reading his writing at the 8th annual Suasalit...

Ryan Finn grew up sailing with his family in the Gulf of Mexico. At 19 he was diagnosed with non-hodgkin's lymphoma and while undergoing cancer treatment he became fascinated by single-handed sailing. Today, Finn has successfully completed three Trans-Atlantic and three Trans-Pacific crossings. Now he's about to attempt the first ever solo, non-stop sail from New York to San Francisco around Cape...

Linda Newland has devoted a good part of her life to expanding the presence of women in the sailing. She is an accomplished sailor herself, having done numerous single-handed races, including multiple San Francisco to Hawaii Transpacs. She holds the record for the “Fastest Woman Single-handed Transpac” in a race from San Francisco to Japan, and she skippered an all-female Transpac team in 1997. Li...

Jeff Cote is the founder and owner of Pacific Yacht Systems . He and his staff provide custom marine electrical solutions for boaters. He thinks of his work less as providing a service and more as enabling dreams. He started the company after buying his own boat and having to redo the electrical system because it was causing him such grief. He wasn’t going to let his dream die due to gear frustrat...

Lisa Chapin Bullett Grew up sailing sunfish off the beach in Florida. Later, while living in Texas, she jumped to sailing bigger boats thanks to a program called SailTime in which members share boat access. Today, after cruising the East Coast, the Caribbean, and the Pacific as crew aboard various boats, Lisa is the owner of Sailtime San Francisco . As a licensed captain, Lisa has a passion for in...

Will Curry grew up cruising with his family in desolation Sound, Sarah didn’t. But she did grow up reading about families that were out cruising and longed to do it herself. So it’s not a surprise that on their very first date they talked about sailing to the South Pacific.  Five years later, that’s just what they were doing, aboard their own boat. In addition to sailing together, Will and Sarah w...

Tim Henry is a man of many talents. He’s a sailor, a surfer, a windsurfer, a journalist, and an artist. Until recently Tim was Managing Editor at Latitude 38 and he’s uncovered some great stories for the magazine covering the Sausalito general plan, anchor outs in Richardson Bay, the Berkeley marina, and more. We talk about all of these things in this wide-ranging conversation.

In 1999, at age 29, Clark Beek sailed out of Newport Harbor aboard his 40-foot Ketch on what he thought would be a year-long cruise. Ten years later he sailed into San Francisco, bringing with him stories of being torn apart by a Rottweiler, having dengue fever in Costa Rica and dysentery in India, going through a bloody insurrection in Fiji and a tsunami in Thailand, running aground on shoals and...

Philippe Jamotte took up sailing in 2013. In October 2020, he departed San Francisco trying to set a new record for the fastest westward solo, non-stop circumnavigation in a boat under 40 feet. He’s not one to do things by halves. A few of his past passions include long-distance motorbike racing, triathlons, and pottery. Since getting into sailing about seven years ago, he’s crossed the Atlantic a...

Wilbur Spaul has been sailing since the 70s. For over 40 years he’s dreamed of crossing oceans in a tiny boat. On September 27, 2020 he will leave Berkeley, head out the Golden Gate and attempt a record breaking sail to Hawaii in a 9-foot sailboat called Chubby Girl. The San Francisco sailing community has rallied around Spaul to help him bring this dream to fruition. Now it’s time to start the ad...

Ronnie Simpson was badly injured when hit by a rocket propelled grenade in Iraq. After coming home he discovered sailing as an exciting new way to explore the world. Since taking to the water, he’s raced solo to Hawaii, lost a keel at sea, biked across Asia, and set up sailing and surfing clinics to help other wounded veterans. Today he lives in Fiji where he’s running a board and sail shop called...

Chris Neely grew up sailing on San Francisco bay, but met Marissa in the mountains where he taught her to sail on Huntington Lake. Not long after graduating college the two bought a 1979 Cheoy Lee 41, SV Avocet, which they are taking time to extensively refit in preparation for sailing far afield. Follow them on Sailing Avocet, their popular and beautifully produced video series on YouTube documen...

Tor Johnson first set sail as a child in the 1970s, cruising across the pacific with his parents and older brother and sister. It was during these travels that a friend gave him a camera, hooking him on photography. Today his photos appear on the covers of magazine such as Cruising World, Yachting World, Sail, and Sailing. Tor and I talk about the challenges and dangers of capturing unique images...

Martin Machado is a visual artist who finds inspiration form the sea and the people who work it. His paintings and drawings reflect the stories, landscapes and people he encounters when he sails his small boat in the California Delta, or spends six months at sea aboard a 900-foot container ship, or squats in an old cannery with other salmon fisherman in Alaska. We had a fascinating conversation th...

Patrick and Tara Franz, and their son Everest, started sailing about five years ago after moving to the Bay Area. It wasn’t long afterwards they started thinking about living aboard and cruising to distant destinations. The boat they've chosen for the journey is a 68-foot, Britton Chance designed aluminum racer from 1971. The Pandemic has added another element to cruising, but the Franz family con...

John Arndt is the owner and publisher of Latitude 38 , the magazine that is fairly synonymous with sailing in the Bay Area. John started selling ads for the magazine in 1987 and in 2016 bought Latitude 38 from founder Richard Spindler. John also started, and has championed, Summer Sailstice , an event close to the summer solstice that encourages sailors across the globe to get out on the water any...