About this guide

Duff Core Blend started in the autumn of 2014 as a single long-form piece about a 12-night Baltic sailing that Elena Vasiliev took on a whim after a conference in Helsinki. The piece ran to 8,000 words and covered everything from the overnight crossing to Tallinn to the peculiar social geometry of a ship's dining room. A few hundred people read it. Then a few thousand. By the following spring, readers were sending in their own voyage logs, asking for port recommendations, and requesting a breakdown of the Norwegian Hurtigruten coastal route. The site grew from there, one route at a time.