I haven't mentioned teen sailor Laura Dekker in quite some time, because, as I expected, her voyage--a standard westabout milk-run circumnavigation--has so far been largely uneventful. But now she's in the Indian Ocean. She left Darwin, Australia, headed west over a month ago and soon should be arriving at her destination. Only thing is... we...
{youtubejw width="500" height="350"}87xUt9oIfZI{/youtubejw} In case you had't noticed, the staff at the British sailing comic Yachting Monthly have been having some fun over the past year torturing a 40-foot Jeanneau Sun Fizz to death. The denouement, featured in this BBC news report, came earlier this month when they blew the boat up with propane gas.
If you're looking for a niche of the web with some current live-action sailing exotica, I recommend you start checking in at sailrocket.com. The VESTAS Sailrocket team is down on the "Speed Spot" in Wallis Bay, Namibia, with version two of their weird proa, looking to steal the outright world sailing speed record from the...
I ran into Don Street at the Annapolis show and he pressed on me a copy of his latest book, Street's Guide to The Cape Verde Islands, published by Seaworthy Publications. No, this isn't some updated retread of one of Don's many earlier cruising guides. It is an entirely new book, which struck me as...
It is certainly one of the biggest cliches in the literature of boating. What the Water Rat said to the Mole: "Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing--absolutely nothing--half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats." But here's a little tip. Any purportedly literate mariner who quotes that little snippet of Kenneth...
It’s time to think a bit more about how we can use numbers and math to evaluate different sailboats. I’ve already explained the two most popular performance parameters--the displacement/length and sail-area/displacement ratios. These numbers, which estimate a boat’s speed potential and available sailpower, are the ones most commonly used to quantify how a sailboat behaves....
Two-thirds of our planet's surface is covered with liquid water. This, of course, is good news for sailors. It means we have plenty of room in which to do our thing. Golfers and other dirt-dwellers, meanwhile, have considerably less square-footage in which to do theirs. But where did all our water come from? You may...
Thought I'd share with you some pix of a few things that raised my eyebrows while I was in Annapolis, starting with this hot catamaran, the Alibi 54 (built in Thailand), which in fact wasn't even in the show. Multihull maven Gregor Tarjan of Aeroyacht, who represents Alibi in the U.S., snuck me out to...
This year, for the first time, I got myself to the boat show here in Annapolis in the proper way--by boat. I only wish the entire passage down from Newport had been as a pleasant as what you see in the photo up top. Most of it instead was a mind-numbing motorsail dead to windward....
Canada's Transportation Safety Board has finally released its report on the loss of the school ship Concordia, the 188-foot square-rigger that capsized and sank off the coast of Brazil back in February of last year. I was more than a little surprised by its conclusions: a) there was no microburst, as was reported by the...
