FineEdge.com

FineEdge founders and authors Don Douglass and Réanne Hemingway-Douglass have sailed from 60° N to 56° S latitude—Alaska to Cape Horn—logging more than 150,000 miles of offshore cruising over the past 25 years. They consider the cruising grounds of Northwest and Alaska some of the finest in the world and an unending source of excitement and pleasure. They spend summers cruising on their diesel trawler, Baidarka.

Don Douglass began exploring Northwest waters in 1949 as a youth. He has sailed the Inside Passage on everything from a 26-foot pleasure craft and commercial fishing boats to a Coast Guard icebreaker. Don holds a BSEE degree from California State University, Pomona, and a Masters in Business Economics from Claremont Graduate University. He is the author of Exploring Vancouver Island's West Coast and, with his wife, Réanne, co-authored the acclaimed Exploring the Inside Passage to Alaska, Exploring the South Coast of British Columbia, Exploring the North Coast of British Columbia and Exploring the San Juan and Gulf Islands. Don holds honorary membership in the International Association of Cape Horners. He has written several skiing and mountainbiking guidebooks and, as a father of the sport, was elected to the Mountain Biking Hall of Fame.

Réanne Hemingway-Douglass holds a BA degree in French from Pomona College. She attended Claremont Graduate University and the University of Grenoble, France. Sailor, writer, cyclist and language teacher, Réanne's articles have appeared in numerous outdoor magazines. Her best-selling book, Cape Horn: One Man's Dream, One Woman's Nightmare, describes pitchpoling in the Great Southern Ocean and has been published in French and Italian. In the 1980s, Réanne led the first women's bicycling team to cross Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America. She is also the principal author of Mountain Biking the Eastern Sierra's Best 100 Trails. Her articles have appeared in numerous outdoor magazines, including Pacific Yachting and Cruising World.

The Douglasses have documented nearly 5,000 anchor sites between Seattle and Glacier Bay and their series of detailed cruising guidebooks are acclaimed for setting a new standard.

Karel Doruyter, of Victoria, British Columbia, is a registered marine surveyor and has been a sailboat enthusiast for more than 30 years. During his lifetime he has designed, constructed and maintained boats for himself as well as for others. He has sailed his own boats in the coastal waters of Western Canada, the USA, and Australia as well as offshore. At present Doruyter sails a cruising catamaran he designed and built. He is the author of Sailboat Buyer's Guide.

Curt Epperson is a practicing maritime lawyer and also an avid sailor. His passion for the sea is evident in both his professional and personal life. Curt saw a need to help boaters stay organized and informed about the many legal aspects of their boats. Hence he developed the Keeping Your Boat Legal book and accompanying binder. Although the legal profession can be intimidating, Curt wrote the Keeping Your Boat Legal book in a simple to read question and answer format to easily disseminate important information.

John Guzzwell, one of the world's great singlehanded sailors, was born in England and grew up in the Channel Islands where he spent most of his time on and around boats. John and his family were interned in Germany during World War II. Afterward, John learned the profession of boat joiner and then emigrated to British Columbia. At the age of 22, he began construction of Trekka, the boat in which he was to make his voyage around the world. John now makes his home in Seattle where he builds custom boats. He still sails, and recently completed the Singlehanded TransPac Race from San Francisco to Hawaii in Endangered Species, a half-scale model of a B.O.C. racing sailboat which he built himself. John is author of Trekka 'Round the World.

Iain learned to sail at the age of nine, on a tiny lake in the middle of the prairies. He now lives on the north coast of British Columbia, care-taking a radio transmitter site on an island near Prince Rupert. For seven summers, along with his partner Kristin Miller and a little dog called Skipper, he explored the coast in an old naval whaler named Nid.

Nid, in some ways, changed his life. She turned him from a weekend sailor into a traveller, from a newspaper editor into a writer. He quit his job and started writing books the year he bought her, and achieved his first real success the year that he sold her.

Iain's book, Sea Stories of the Inside Passage, is a collection of stories about his travels in Nid. Iain now writes novels for children. His first, The Wreckers, has been translated into six languages.

Captain Kevin Monahan is a Canadian Coast Guard officer with over 20 years experience navigating the British Columbia coast as a small vessel captain. Born in London England in 1951, Monahan-now a resident of Victoria, B.C.-emigrated to Vancouver and attended the University of British Columbia. His articles have appeared in various magazines including Pacific Yachting, Northwest Yachting, and the Fisherman's News as well as in West Coast Fisherman which published a series of his articles on electronic navigation.

Captain Monahan was a fisherman for 12 years, after which he worked on ferries and coastal transports, before joining Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans as a patrol vessel captain. Captain Monahan is now an officer with the Canadian Coast Guard, having served the last five years in the Office of Boating Safety, first as Chief Investigator and then as Pacific Region Superintendent. He has testified in court as an expert witness in the navigational uses of GPS and is the principal author of GPS Instant Navigation, 2nd Edition and Proven Cruising Routes, Volume 1-Seattle to Ketchikan, The Radar Book and Local Knowledge-A Skipper's Reference.

Joe Russell grew up in the San Francisco Bay area where he attended Cal State Hayward. After being injured in a hydroplane accident, he took to sailing on the Bay, which, in 1968, led to a yacht delivery job to the Virgin Islands where he set up residence. While living in the Caribbean Joe sailed to most of the countries of Central and South America. Joe's articles on Central America have been featured in Cruising World magazine. Joe is author of Exploring the Marquesas Islands. Joe currently lives in Half Moon Bay, California with his wife and first mate, Mary. He is the father of four and a recent grandfather of twins.

Dee Saunders was born and raised in eastern Pennsylvania and attended East Stroudsburg State College. She moved to San Jose, California in the early 1960s and married. She later became a real estate agent and moved to Northern California. Soon after the move, the marriage dissolved.

Marshall Saunders lived on a sailboat with his wife and daughter in Honolulu, where he owned several dental laboratories. In the late 1970s, his marriage dissolved and he moved to Northern California where he changed professions and became a real estate broker. It was in northern California where Dee and Marshall ultimately met, married, and joined families.

Dee and Marshall opened a Real Estate brokerage in the small mountain community of Shingletown and lived there until retiring in their mid-forties to the cruising lifestyle. Marshall had been sailing all his life, but Dee was new to the adventures. Early in the relationship they did a lot of racing on various sailboats including the Hobie 18, Stelleto 27 and Olson 25. After retiring, they spent nine years living aboard their Tayana 52 and later after their accident, their Tatoosh 51 cruising the waters of British Columbia, Alaska, Mexico, Central and South America, the western Caribbean, the Bahamas and the South Pacific putting many miles of open-ocean cruising under their belt.

They currently reside on Whidbey Island and own a Newberry Port 52 sundeck trawler, on which they spend their summers cruising to Northern British Columbia and Alaska.

Len Sherman was the third crew member on the epic Northwest Passage voyage of the Dove III, one of the first west-to-east single-year passages on record. A commercial artist, Len captures in wonderful pen and ink drawings and journal entries, the beauty and solitude of the far north, as well as its courageous, adventurous people. His is the author of Arctic Odyssey.

Mladen Sutej was born in Zagreb, Croatia in 1945. He graduated from the School of Engineering and Shipbuilding in Zabreb with a degree in thermodynamics. Since 1975 has run his own business for the design of thermodynamic plants.

In 1983 Sutej undertook his first major ocean voyage, crossing the Atlantic solo from east to west on his 10-meter yacht, HIR 3. For the non-stop return trip from Miami to Rijeka, Croatia he was joined by two friends. In 1988-90, Sutej organized an expedition to Cape Horn, successfully rounding it before completeing his first circumnavigation of the world. In 1993 he founded the Croatian Offshore Yachting Club and started organizing a project called The Croatian Scientific and Sporting Arctic-Antarctic Expedition for which his boat, Croatian Tern, was built. The successful completion of this voyage around the world in the longitudinal direction is the subject of Sutej's book, The Arctic to the Antarctic. Sutej lives in Zabreb with his architect wife, Tatanya, and his daughter.

Born in Pau, France and raised in Santa Cruz, California, Bill has enjoyed surfing and snorkeling since he was a teenager. Having completed his Air Force commitment after a tour in Vietnam as an Aerial Reconnaissance Photographer, he graduated from San Francisco State University with a Bachelor or Arts degree in anthropology and a teaching credential.

Bill worked as a caretaker at the Calico Early Man Archeological Site under the tutelage of Ruth DeEtte Simpson. He also participated in several projects and field surveys conducted by the Paleontology and Geology Department of the Museum of Northern Arizona with William J. Breed as curator. In the early 1980s, Bill volunteered as a docent, then became a paid staff member, at the Ano Nuevo State Reserve in San Mateo County, California.

Bill's love of nature, archeology and geology, plus his skill as a photographer, brought excitement to the classroom where he taught social studies for more than 10 years. In 1984, he moved to Sacramento and is now hard at work on the Volume 4 of the Sacramento paddling guidebook, Up the Lake with A Paddle. Bill is married and has one son who loves fishing and baseball.

Anne and Laurence Yeadon-Jones are experienced offshore and inshore sailors who voyaged from Southampton, England in 1985 on their first adventure across the Atlantic Ocean. Over the last 17 years they have logged thousands of cruising hours charting, recording and photographing their travels, exclusively along the beautifully rugged coastline and islands of the Pacific Northwest. To date they have produced 4 colorful, information-packed Dreamspeaker Cruising Guides and see themselves as passionate ambassadors of the area’s unspoiled cruising waters, its coastal communities and local enterprises. Through their writing, charting and photography they endeavor to promote safe and enjoyable boating while profiling the uniqueness of coastal life. Anne and Laurence are also regular contributors to local and international boating magazines. They live in Vancouver’s West End and keep their 36-foot sailboat Dreamspeaker and faithful dinghy, Tink, close by.