09/25/2026
Early nor’easter vibes. It’s not for everyone, but if this is your idea of a good time, it is a GOOD TIME on a well found vessel. Don’t worry, Lyra is safely on her mooring now, battened down and in the safest place she can be. Captains Green and Jack wish all affected the best of luck for in this blow - be safe everyone!
Just for fun: Would YOU sail with us in these conditions???
For the record - and for the living room sailors that know more than I do about my boat and my choice to sail it the way I do (who won’t read this anyway 😉). It may be interesting reading for the rest of you.
Lyra is a 1980 Reliance 44 ketch, custom built for a circumnavigation. She is massively overbuilt and did indeed circle the globe over an 11 year period under original ownership. The second owner sailed to Europe and back. I’ll be rolling 40k nautical miles later this week on the GPS that I installed a year into ownership (2009). That’s an average of 2,200 documented miles annually. While most of these miles have been day charters near Newport, I’ve been as far as the Bahamas on her.
I disassembled the rig last winter (2025-26), polished and inspected the hardware, and completely replaced the standing wire rigging.
Pertaining to the video, this was “fun” sailing. Not trying to be efficient, not trying to win races, not trying to be comfortable. Winds were 25, gusting 32kts. Sails were set so that on the high gusts it would look exactly like the video, a couple of reef rolls on my heavy weather Yankee jib and a reefed mizzen. The mainsail still had the sail cover on it. This left just enough power to punch through the chop when it wasn’t gusting. Tide was incoming against the wind, and at its strongest in the location of the videos - this was the steepest and most exciting part of the bay’s chop and therefore the place to take video. Chop was less than 2-ft. These are not even close to boat breaking and leak creating conditions for this boat. Note that waves are not coming close to washing over the foredeck, it’s basically just windy.
With an 11’6” beam, Lyra heels over a lot initially, and then stiffens up right about when the rail touches the water. This is because the narrow hull doesn’t have the buoyancy in the beam of the fat modern designs to give that initial stiffness. However, once the ballast weight kicks in, she’s very difficult to heel over further. When heeled over with the rail just off the water, her waterline is as long is it will ever be and is therefore at maximum hull speed. In short, the boat is literally designed to be sailed this way.
If you want to read up on my sailing resume, visit the website (onwatchsailing.com). For the purposes of this post, I will leave it at my safety record being intact and with a few miles under my belt.
🤙🏻
