The "cruising dream" can manifest itself in many strange and different ways. Say, for example, you're living in Arizona and are due to appear in court to face 16 counts of messing around sexually with an underage boy. Might be a good time to take a little road trip to Florida with the wife and...

Word has it that Dick Newick, one of the great pioneer multihull designers, passed away on Wednesday night. I met Newick a few years ago here in Portsmouth (he once maintained a home across the river in Kittery Point, Maine) and was struck by a fundamental boat-design axiom of his that he shared with me....

I stopped by Maine Yacht Center in Portland earlier this week for a quick visit with Rich Wilson aboard his new Open 60 Great American IV, ex-Mirabaud. Rich, you may recall, became only the second American ever to finish the Vendee Globe back in 2009, at age 58 no less, and is now preparing to...

I was out on the boat with my bride last week (hence the big void in the blog) and made a point of stopping in at Monhegan Island. We were last here eight years ago--aboard my Golden Hind 31 Sophie, with infant Lucy in tow--and I seem to recall spending several hours hiking some very...

Is this a harbinger of what's to come? First race yesterday of the Louis Vuitton finals to determine who will challenge Oracle for the America's Cup and the Italians are crippled straight off with a busted daggerboard. The Kiwis, meanwhile, stuff their bows, lose two guys overboard, yet still finish the race.

This isn't quite as cool as Dorade winning the Transpac, but it's close. A French Corinthian father-son crew, Pascal and Alexis Loison, sailing Night and Day, a 33-foot JPK 1010, beat out an enormous fleet of 336 boats to become the first doublehanded crew ever to win the Fastnet Race (on corrected time, of course)....

I spent Monday out on Lunacy again and revisited Wills Gut, or McMansion Cove, as I've come to think of it, for the first time in three years. Before the sun went down I installed the new "disc springs" on my Andersen winches, a seemingly easy job that turned out to be not so easy...

Here's a mind-bending illustration crafted by the U.S. Geological Survey designed to show how little water there really is on and in planet Earth relative to the orb in its entirety. I know it seems like there is water everywhere on this planet (particularly when you are floating around in the middle of an ocean...

Even in this age of push-button electronic navigation, it's not too hard to hit the bricks when cruising the Maine coast. The photo up top is of Archangel, a Hylas 70 on charter that hit some rocks in Penobscot Bay near Lasell Island on Wednesday. Reportedly, they were under sail at the time, sailing east...

First introduced in 1985, this trailerable trimaran quickly became a seminal boat in the world of multihull sailing. Designed by Ian Farrier, a Kiwi who emigrated to California (by way of Australia) with the specific goal of perfecting his concept of a production-built trimaran with folding amas, the F-27 is both an excellent high-performance coastal...