It seems hard to imagine now, but for about 50 years most auxiliary sailboat engines were gasoline-powered. By the mid-20th century the majority of these (in North America, at least) came from just one source, the Universal Motor Company. From 1947 to 1985 Universal’s famous Atomic-4 engine (aka the Atomic Bomb) was installed in over...

Project Proboscis is lurching ahead. On Wednesday afternoon I met with Brian Harris, Jeff Stack, and Will Rooks at Maine Yacht Center and we spent a good hour noodling over the design of Lunacy's new bowsprit. After much debate with myself and some consultation with others (including Scott Alexander at Selden Mast and Doug Pope...

Ah, mortality. It says something of the sort of man he was that I first learned of the recent demise of my old cruising acquaintance Poppa Neutrino while reading the Wall Street Journal this morning. You'll recall I blogged about him in November, when his attempt to circumnavigate the world on a raft made of...

I'm surprised this doesn't happen all the time. I've never been aloft underway on a yacht, much less on a square-rigger. But I've watched square-rigger crews swarm aloft in harbor and, even with the ship firmly tied to a dock, my testicles have instantly shriveled at the thought of climbing out to the end of...

Folks messing around on boats anywhere from the northern Bahamas to Cape Hatteras need to know their GPS receivers may or may not sometimes go crazy over the next month. This according to a rather cryptic FAA advisory warning pilots of military GPS tests being conducted between January 20 and February 22.

Blisters have been the bane of many a boatowner. There are literally hundreds of causes, many of which have to do with the quality of a fiberglass boat’s construction. The primary cause is the presence of water-soluble molecules in a laminate. These impurities come from innumerable sources, including glycols in improperly cured resin, any dust,...

Some spectacular videos of the awful flooding in Brisbane, Australia, have been posted online in the last week. It's one thing to hear or read about these sorts of catastrophes in the news, but when you watch home videos of what's going on you get a much more personal view of things. As a cruising...

It staggers me to think that in just a few short years my old fiberglass yawl Crazy Horse (built in 1964) will be half a century old. She's been fortunate in that she's had owners who have continually maintained and upgraded her. When I owned her, back when she was merely 30 years old, I...

I ARRIVED IN THE AZORES aboard Crazy Horse, my Alberg 35 yawl, in late August of 1995 already feeling kind of nervous about the hurricane situation. Earlier that summer I was caught in a tropical storm named Chantal while en route to Bermuda, and since then several other North Atlantic storms had chewed their way...

This stylish little pocket yacht is both the first and smallest boat ever produced by Sabre Yachts, a quality production boatbuilder based in southern Maine. Designed by the company’s founder, Roger Hewson, and introduced in 1971, the Sabre 28 was the only boat produced by Sabre until 1977. Production did not cease until 1986, by...