While Lunacy was hauled out last June to have her new engine installed, I became aware of some other problems. The most perturbing ones concerned her rudder skeg, which is a rather high-aspect alum inum structure that is welded on to the main structure of her aluminum hull. Problem number one was that somehow, during...
This story begins in a dead flat calm somewhere between Bermuda and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, late last spring. Said dead calm is pictured here in all its glory. In all my years of wandering about the watery parts of our world, I swear I have never ever seen a stretch of open ocean quite as...
In its own way this may have been the most important in-the-water exhibit at this year's Annapolis show. No salesmen, ho hype---just a team of riggers changing out the standing rig on a 30-year-old Westsail 32. What was significant was the material they were using. No wire, no toggles, no turnbuckles. Instead all the...
There are worse fates to be endured in this workaday life than getting to sail a new J/Boat with Al Johnstone on a gorgeous fall day on Narragansett Bay. Conditions were just about perfect: bright sunshine with a brisk southwesterly blowing 15-18 knots and looking to get brisker. Al, who designed our ride, the...
Having already altered the America's Cup racing rules to permit the use of "stored-power" on competing vessels, Ernesto "the Alinghi" Bertarelli is now hard at work trying to figure out what sort of stored-power system will best help him retain the Cup. Our spies in Europe tell us he has recently tested a radical new...
Most would agree that British-born W.I.B. "Gentleman Bill" Crealock was one of the most influential cruising sailboat designers of the 20th century. Some might even say he was the most influential. Back in the early 1970s he massaged an obsolete Eric Atkins design to help create the Westsail 32, the iconic traditional fiberglass sailboat...
Speaking of Volvo Open 70s, another thing I got to see at the Newport show was the inside of one. I went down to Boston in May when the whole Volvo Ocean Race fleet was in town, and even though I had press credentials... even though I was crewing on a race marshal's...
This is another neat new item that caught my attention at the Newport show back in September. At first I laughed out loud when I saw it, as it seemed so over the top. A carbon-fiber RIB dinghy with a teak deck! Talk about overkill. But then I inspected the craft in detail and...
This book is an excellent example of why I decided to include a section on the literature of sailing (Lit Bits, get it?) here on WaveTrain. One of the big reasons I got interested in sailing when I was young, besides having been exposed to boats in general at an early age, was that I...
My current floating home of choice is a one-off aluminum cutter I purchased in the summer of 2006 from an active cruising couple, Bob and Carol Petterson, who commissioned the boat’s construction and launched her in 1985 . They cruised her extensively on the U.S. East Coast and in the Bahamas and also completed a...
