Welcome to avalanche’s web site. Let us give you a quick tour:

The pages of the site are across the top. To get our latest update, click on Blogs. The updates are filed chronologically. We will be emailing daily updates from avalanche as we voyage, and will have periodic updates while we are cruising. We will try to include photos, but this may only happen once we have arrived in a port with wifi.

The page Location is not completed yet. We hope to append our location to our blogs, but that has not been completely debugged.

The page avalanche will contain photos, drawings and descriptions of our boat.

The page login is a tool for us to edit the site, add pictures, etc. As a guest to the site, you do not need to use it.

On the right side of the side you will find Categories. We have tried to describe what the category consist of. Many of the categories have photos displayed on the bottom. If you click on the first one, it will increase in size. If you click on the right side of any large photo, the next photo will be shown. Click on the left and the last photo will be shown. We have tried to caption all the photos.

Check out our Links, especially the link to Herb Hilgenberg’s web site and the US Coast Guard story on Herb. You will see why he is so important to us.

Our Weather Links are some of the tools we use to stay on top of the weather.

So please enjoy our site.

About us: We are Jake and Marnie Jacobsen, from Jamestown, RI, where we live and work and enjoy our sailboat avalanche in and around Narragansett Bay and Block Island Sound during the months from June to October. In November, after hurricane season is supposed to be over, we sail avalanche to the Caribbean to enjoy more fine weather during the winter. We’re old enough to be at the front of the pack of baby boomers, but have not yet retired, so Jake still heads into work at his jewelry manufacturing business most days. For that reason we are not able to stay with avalanche in the warm weather for the entire winter. Instead our vacations consist of a delivery south to Antigua via Bermuda in November with a changing group of 3 or 4 other experienced and mechanically capable sailor friends ; a month or 6 weeks from about Christmas to February; another 2-3 weeks in March; and a congenial delivery again with mechanically competent sailing friends back to Jamestown prior to June 1^st.

From June to October we keep avalanche on a mooring at the local marina, situated across the street from our condo, so when we’re not on board we can check on avalanche by looking out the window. After we deliver her south while we’re in Jamestown and avalanche is in Antigua, she is “Med-moored” (backed into a dock, anchored at the bow, and tied to the dock at the stern) at the Catamaran Marina in Falmouth Harbour, where she is looked after with loving care by a crew of Antiguans and Dominicans. But by far the most fun is living aboard on vacation in the Caribbean when we sail to other islands, anchor and relax and enjoy!

It was Jake’s idea to buy this boat. We had both begun our sailing careers as racers. Jake was introduced to racing in Lightnings on Green Bay, Wisconsin by his neighbor. My Dad got me started racing inland scows on Lake Geneva, Wisconsin as a preteen. In fact, we met at Carleton College as a result of a shared interest in sailing. During our many moves over our 38 years of marriage we have raced a Shields at the Newport Navy Yacht Club; C-Larks at the Adak Navy Yacht Club in the Aleutian Islands; a San Juan 24 and Laser in Narragansett Bay, a J-24 in Lake George, NY, and a J-37on Lake Champlain, NY and on Narragansett Bay, RI. Finally it got so recruiting a crew of 12 to race the J-37 was just too much, so we sold the boat. But Jake wasn’t done. He dreamed of cruising, so he read every ad in every sailing magazine until eventually he discovered a boat that had all the amenities he required: a cockpit large enough to comfortably seat 8; a large aft deck for swimming, landing a dinghy and catching fish; 5 berths aft of the mast for comfortable sleeping offshore without using the salon; and dinghy davits.

We bought the boat in Florida in August 1998, at which point I was pretty sure I didn’t want to sail out of sight of land. However, I knew I had to start sometime, so I gamely joined the crew to sail 1100 miles home to Narragansett Bay, R.I. Fortunately the guys all knew I was hesitant, so they managed a super offshore trip, letting me take on responsibilities as I gained confidence. It worked and I was hooked. Now, 9 years and 30,000+ miles later, it has become our all consuming interest!

Our boat’s name, avalanche, came from the constant bombardment of stuff in our lives. Never is there just one thing, whether big, little, bad, good or time-consuming. It is always an avalanche! For example there was the year that we ordered a new car in November for delivery when it came off the assembly line. We also won a raffle for a sailing charter in the Virgin Islands. And we sold a summer camp at Lake George and bought one on Lake Champlain. Well, as you might have guessed, the car arrived, the charter was booked and the house closed—all within 2 weeks in April…..avalanche. That’s also the reason we don’t capitalize the name of our boat (the third we’ve owned with that name). It isn’t simply a boat, it’s our life—an avalanche!

This web site has come to life because of a daily journal we have emailed to family and friends at home as we have sailed back and forth to the Caribbean. That email went to our family and the family of crew members, then on to a list of friends. But inevitably there were glitches: one year the computer simply quit; one year all the rejected addresses were returned to us every time we tried to send an email; some days I couldn’t send an entry because the weather was treacherous and the computer and chart table were in use for navigation and weather information. Additionally we lost correspondents as people changed email addresses. We hope this web site will be a happy solution. Please let us know if you think so!