About

Skipper Steve and Admiral Dorothy are adventuring aboard “Adagio”, their 52-ft blue water catamaran. Built by Allan Legge Boatbuilders of Opua, NZ, her design team is comprised of: Morrelli & Melvin Design & Engineering (Newport Beach, CA), Carl Schumacher, N.A (Alameda, CA), and Hughes Group Architects (Sterling, VA).

Adagio was launched July, 2000 Opua, New Zealand. Since then she has enjoyed about 30,000nm of South Pacific and Pacific Northwest cruising. In 2004 Adagio crossed the Pacific the “wrong way”, from Tasmania to New Zealand to Tahiti to Hawaii to Alaska. She is currently cruising Alaska and British Columbia, south to San Francisco for the winter, and then will be sailing back into the South Pacific in 2009.

Our main goal for the Adagio Journal site is to offer info for other yachties. We have received many requests to send information about our experiences and the Adagio project. E.g., how does your fuel system work? Does that boom furler really work? So we are making an effort to put as much of that sort of info on the site as time permits.

Here are a few tips for new visitors on navigating the Adagio Journal site, organized the same as the top menu bar.

The Blog section [where you are now] is about sharing adventures: the purpose of is simply to pass on some of the fun we are privileged to enjoy each week of the cruising life. Passersby sometimes ask “what do you do all day?”. We say that we both have full-time jobs – we have to get up every morning to go to the “office” to work on choosing our next adventure! We use the Categories to organize dispatches and cruising reports — you’ll note the top level organization is by year, such as “2005 Cruises” — in the right sidebar “Category List”.

The Photo Galleries are organized primarily by year — beginning with Year 2000. But there are a variety of ways to navigate the photo galleries: Photos By Date, Photos By Keyword, and on the galleries home page, Photo Timeline, and “Around the World” which is a map-based index of the galleries.

The Design section: visitors tell us that the site has been very helpful to them as they prepare a vessel for cruising, undertake a new custom boat, or perhaps are just shopping for a suitable vessel. This is the first place to look for that sort of info — you’ll find documentation of the process of creating Adagio — from our original Requirements, to Specifications, and details of the design.

The Build section: you can examine photos from the 3.5 year construction phase in Opua, NZ.

The Resources section is where we attempt to organize links to useful Internet resources and people. As we add reports to our cruising logs, hopefully you will find useful insights there as well.

The Technical menu is the place where you’ll find the nerdy stuff such as communications, lightning protection, marine grounding, tools, rigging, weather/routing, electronic charting and anchoring theory.

The Archives menu offers a way to hop around the site content: by date, or by category.

Of course, you can search the site using the right side “search box”, right under the “Archives” menu.