Updates on what’s going on in the sport of sailing generally (most usually, but not always, relating to cruising under sail) and in the sailing industry, plus news nuggets and personal views on all manner of nautical subjects.
April 12/2026: It’s a good thing I decided to attend this year’s PAYS Yachting Festival in Dominica (March 21-27), otherwise no one might have noticed it was the festival’s 10th anniversary. As it was, I almost didn’t notice myself. Originally labeled as Yachtie Appreciation Week, the week-long event was conceived by Hank Schmitt, an old...
April 4/2026: A part of me thought this would never happen. When I first met Francis “Nim” Marsh III in Puerto de Santa Maria, Spain, during Jimmy Cornell’s America 500 rally in 1992, I was amazed when I found out he was 20 years older than me. For if anything, he seemed younger. And as...
Feb. 7/2026: I found Kiana Weltzien (see photo up top) online a couple of years back and was immediately intrigued. It’s not every day you see a young woman sailing around solo on a super-primitive Wharram catamaran, and I certainly wasn’t the only one who noticed. Kiana’s YouTube sailing channel has over 50K subscibers, and...
Jan. 26/2026: EDITOR’S NOTE—This is, I believe, the first time we’ve had a guest post on WaveTrain written by someone other than me. The author of this post, Dylan Flack, got in touch with me shortly after he and four others abandoned the catamaran Magic Bus via Coast Guard helicopter almost 300 miles off the...
June 11/2025: I first met Zdenka and her husband Jack in an entirely conventional shorebound way, through my cousin Charlotte, who is an old childhood friend of Jack’s. This at a lunch Charlotte hosted in her home in Portland, Maine, soon after Jack and Zdenka finished sailing around the world on Kite, their Valiant 42....
May 20/2025: Early assessments of the apparently botched departure of the Mexican Navy tall-ship Cuauhtémoc from a Manhattan pier, leading to a fateful collision with the Brooklyn Bridge this past Saturday evening, had it as just a dope-slap nav problem. As in: those dopes should have waited until the tide and current were in their...
May 17/2025: NO! The near simultaneous accidental deaths of accused fraudsters and tech moguls Mike Lynch and Stephen Chamberlain—in disparate locations, of disparate causes—was NOT the product of an evil corporate revenge plot. It was purely coincidence. We established as much in my previous post on the sudden sinking of Lynch’s superyacht Bayesian while at...
April 3/2025: Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks? Through all of my career as a sailor and journalist, I have believed, wrongly it turns out, that Naomi James was the first woman to sail around the world singlehanded. I have a feeling I am not the only one. It is true...
Feb. 2/2025: It is, as Steve Callahan himself once remarked to me, a story that will not die. That being the story of his 76-day solo survival drift across the North Atlantic in a liferaft, back in 1982, after his 21-foot sloop Napoleon Solo was sunk in a collision (presumably with a whale) some distance...
Dec. 16/2024: If there’s one thing I’ve learned about Jimmy Cornell over the years, it is that he keeps moving forward. So I wasn’t too surprised when I received an e-mail from him last week, announcing that he is organizing yet another high-profile worldwide cruising rally. Here’s the full text of the press release he...
