For a while, as I watched things unfold yesterday, online and driving down the New Hampshire coast, I thought I might well be writing something here about how totally over-hyped this storm was. But now, one day after, listening to reports on NPR about all the damage done inland by flooding in Vermont and upstate...
Boat owners all up and down the Eastern seaboard are scratching their heads over this beautiful ball of wind and rain. When I first started obsessively ogling her early yesterday, the forecast was extremely grim. Her projected track had her grazing Cape Hatteras at Category 3 strength, passing east of New Jersey and Long Island...
One nice thing about this sailing journalism game is that we so-called journalists often get to tool around on hideously expensive boats we could never hope to own ourselves. For example, in the photo up top you see our hero steering the new custom 68-foot Stephens Waring sloop Isobel on Penobscot Bay last Friday afternoon....
Editor’s note: Quite the exciting Fastnet Race this week! The largest race fleet since 1979, two new course records (outright record to super tri Banque Populaire; monohull record to the VO70 Abu Dhabi), plus the maxi monohull Rambler 100 (ex-Speedboat), which was en route to a record, lost its keel and capsized right at Fastnet...
Operation Fetch and Test My New Sail (OFTMNS) officially began this past Sunday evening, when I hooked up with my old pal Loric Weymouth in Portland. He agreed at the last minute to join me as crew on Lunacy for an overnight sail to Rockland, taking the place of Scott Alexander, of Selden Mast, who...
Perfect O-shaped coils of rope look mighty nice when done up properly, and in many instances this is a perfectly appropriate way to make up and stow an idle line on a sailboat. But rope needs to be trained to do this well, and in some instances the training will inhibit the rope's ability to...
Some of you may be wondering what happened with that battery problem I was having. As I mentioned briefly, I was hoping the crazy readings I was getting from my battery monitor were the result of a bad connection or some corrosion somewhere. Back in the 1990s when I was cruising full time and living...
(From the September 1934 issue of The Atlantic Monthly) Tuesday, October 31, 1933 I sat on deck sewing as we went through Hell Gate, feeling very much the schooner house wife (Stephen called me 'Tugboat Annie'). We anchored off the New York Yacht Club at 26th Street, and Lucius came on board for lunch. He...
