About Us

Tony and Karen Muldoon have been sailing and writing together for nearly 30 years.

Tony’s first serious adventures afloat were in the South Jersey Ocean Racing Series in the mid-1970s. It coincided with his professional gravitation towards environmental and maritime reporting . Like many journalists, he developed the itch to do something instead of just writing about it.

When Tony and Karen got together back in the mid 1980s, he convinced her to try a sailing charter in Long Island Sound.  After a wild first day that left her asking herself “he thinks this is fun??” and swearing this would be the first and last time on a boat, they had a perfect sail from Port Jefferson, New York to Clinton, Connecticut.  Karen was hooked too.

They bought their 30-foot sloop, Fiontar, in 1987 and sailed to Bermuda the next year. From then until the fall of 2012 when they sold her, Tony and Karen cruised the Atlantic coast from Massachusetts to Virginia.

During that time, Tony wrote about cruising, boat maintenance and observations on the sailing lifestyle for a variety of magazines including Cruising World, Sail, Good Old Boat, Professional Mariner, Ocean Navigator, Chesapeake Bay Magazine, Spinsheet etc.  He wrote a series of stories about classic shipwrecks  for Professional Mariner and did reviews for American Yacht Review.  His comparison of Long Island Sound and the Chesapeake in Cruising World stirred up a lot of discussion several years ago.

Karen developed into a full fledged sailing partner who shared in the work of maintaining Fiontar, never losing her cool when things went to hell, as they sometimes do, writing her own sailing stories and photographing their adventures – and misadventures.

They are both award-winning journalists who have worked on the staffs of several daily newspapers and frequently collaborated on a broad range of stories. 

In May, 2013, their first novel, Becoming Finnigan, was published. It is an epic story about life and love in the 20^th century, about the choices we make, the impact of events on people  and the impact of people on each other’s lives.  Although it didn’t involve sailing, they have three other novels in various stages of completion that do involve boats.