AFTER 20 MONTHS IN CAPTIVITY a South African sailing couple, Bruno Pelizzari and Debbie Calitz, who were taken hostage by Somali pirates off the coast of Tanzania, have finally been freed. It's unclear how this happened, but according to the most detailed report I've seen, it seems the Italian and South African governments (Pelizzari holds...
JUST RETURNED YESTERDAY from delivering the Akilaria Class 40 Amhas back from the Onion Patch with Brian Harris (that's him up top), who runs the boat for her owner, MacKenzie Davis. Brian and MacKenzie finished third over the line in the Doublehanded Division in the recently concluded record-breaking Newport-Bermuda Race and corrected out to 6th...
NO DOUBT YOU'RE WONDERING what happened with my cousin Nick Kats, who was planning to transit the Northwest Passage from Ireland to Oregon this summer aboard his steel ketch Teddy. In the end he decided to punt and cruise to the east coast of Greenland instead. He and his young crew (pictured up top) took...
EVER SINCE THEY WERE INTRODUCED in Europe almost two years ago, Scott Alexander at Selden Mast has been urging me to install a Selden reversible winch on Lunacy. Only problem was he couldn't get me a winch. Well... they finally started shipping these puppies across the Pond this past spring, and now at long last...
THIS YEAR'S BERMUDA RACE, which starts today out of Newport, is looking to be a fast one. That wind chart for this afternoon you see up top is representative of the predicted conditions--moderate to strong northeasterlies right on the beam--from now until Sunday. Already the pundits are speculating that the fastest boats may finish in...
THOUGH IT DABBLED BRIEFLY with more performance-oriented racing designs during the 1980s, the well-known Swedish builder Hallberg-Rassy has traditionally focused on creating moderately proportioned cruising boats with understated modern styling. The HR42E, so designated in honor of its designer, Olle Enderlein, predates its immediate successor, the HR42F (designed by German Frers), and was built from...
NO DOUBT YOU'RE ALL WONDERING what happened with those SAIL Magazine MOB tests I mentioned a couple of posts ago. You can skip to the end of this post if all you want is to find out what's happening with the comic's masthead (no, we didn't actually lose any staff members during the tests). But...
SCORE ONE FOR THE SAILBOATS! This happened Monday morning, when a 37-foot boat busted loose from its mooring in Winthrop and blew down on Logan airport in East Boston. It landed on the rocks at the end of an active runway and mashed up Logan arrivals for half the day.
HAVING REMARKED in my last post on how my first outing this season was free of mishaps, I suppose it was inevitable something would go wrong the second time I got afloat. Fortunately, I was floating on someone else's boat. My good friend Phil Cavanaugh (fellow SEMOSA founder and officially certified Better Person) enlisted me...
