We are now in full-time cruising mode…

…and we cannot begin to express how good this feels…

…to be back doing what we love.

A couple of recent health issues have been timely reminders that the freedom to cruise is a finite privilege, best done while you are young.

We had a lovely passage north from Beaufort, North Carolina, to New York.

We were accompanied by Cory and Jack McMahon, and Matt Burhenne. Cory and his wife Angela have our favorite boat yard in this part of the world, Triton Marine. They have been doing some fine-tuning on Cochise for us and wanted to see how the new generation of FPBs compares at sea with Wind Horse and the FPB 64s (both of which Cory has worked on and experienced offshore).

It has been our custom in the past to cruise on our own, without crew. But one of the reasons we built Cochise was so that we could enjoy company aboard, with sufficient room for everyone to have a bit of private space.

One of the things we love about the cruising life is that it is never boring, can almost always be varied on a whim, and offers us the ability to enjoy a constantly changing environment.

Plan A would have had us in Greenland right now, cruising the Prince Christian Channels at a more leisurely pace than our previous visit. Plan B is in effect due to knee surgery, the result of a stupid accident (that should have never happened had your humble correspondent followed his own rules of engagement for night photography).

So we are exploring the Eastern seaboard of the United States. From New York to Newport, Rhode Island, is a quick daylight passage.

There is wonderful boat watching.

Our preference runs to commercial vessels. Most folks who earn their living from the sea want efficiency and safety above all else.

The passage up the coast is our first exposure to the new breed of super container ships. The vessel in the foreground is 1100 feet long. The torsional engineering on these hulls must be interesting.

We have recently begun shooting with the new Sony pro camera system. Most of the photos in this blog have been shot with the Sony A9 body and the 100/400 zoom or the 24/70 F2.8 zoom.

These new Sonys are wonderfully capable, allowing us to pull usable images from heavily backlit situations…

…as well as in near total darkness.

The sharpness of this gear is illustrated in the moon shot above. The 100-400 lens with a doubler was attached to the Sony 6500 cropped sensor body. The moon detail is as good as the best we have ever gotten from our Canon 600mm F4 prime lens (which weighs and costs four times as much).

The photo above is an extreme crop of the previous, that has been blown up 400 percent in Photoshop. And this was not a super day in terms of celestial photography.

We are in Newport for the week, catching up with friends. Then it’s off to Maine and perhaps a bit of Canada. There is no firm plan, we are just heading where the whim of the moment takes us.