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.
Oct. 21/2024: The opening photo here says it all for me. Thomas Tangvald’s youngest half-sister Virginia sitting in the same spot I sat in some time prior to her, researching the tragic Tangvald legacy. This from her film Les enfants du large (translating as Ghosts of the Sea in English), which premiered at a film...
Aug 28/2024: It certainly isn’t every day that a 183-foot superyacht sinks in a matter of minutes, while at anchor, with 12 crew and 10 guests aboard. So it’s entirely understandable that the very abrupt sinking of Bayesian, an enormous Perini Navi sloop, at around 4am on August 19 off Porticello, Sicily, resulting in the...
June 26/2024: My lowly connections in the sailing world had nothing to do with this experience. This was entirely due to my wife, a corporate M&A legal maven, who does a ton of work for Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund that is now title sponsor of the SailGP circus. She was handed some...
June 14/2024: I’m guessing not too many folks remember Bill Butler these days, but he had his 15 minutes of fame back in 1989, when he and his then-wife Simonne survived for 66 days drifting across the eastern Pacific Ocean in a liferaft. I met Bill a few years after that, in the summer of...
May 17/2024: So… it happened again. I go off on the good ship Lunacy for a month of the detached life afloat (more on that in a minute), and another important person in my sailing life crosses the bar. Thus… another tardy obit. Last time it was Patience Wales, my first boss at SAIL Magazine....
March 8/2024: I’ve been AWOL on the boat for the past month, with an antique laptop that can’t wrangle posts here anymore, so I’m afraid I’ve been neglecting this space. I’ll catch you up on my own adventures in just a bit, but first we need to discuss a couple of recent events that strike...
Oct. 5/2023: I wrote a tongue-in-cheek post about the orcas-messing-with-boats phenomenon back when the first incidents off Spain and Portugal were reported three years ago. It says something about the state of marine journalism, I suppose, that the most intelligent and interesting article I’ve read on the subject since then was recently published in the...
Sept. 2/2023: Neither of these guys were on death’s door, at least as far as I knew, so I was a bit surprised when they died within a day of each other this week. They were both sailors, but in very different ways. Bill Pinkney, of course, was the first black man, of any nationality...
June 5/2023: So… this involves a string of remarkable coincidences. Number one: my mother at age 15 went on a family trip to Ireland and the UK and was in England when Elizabeth was crowned queen in 1953. Number two: Twenty years later, in 1973, Prince Charles sailed into Portsmouth NH on HMS Minerva, on...
April 28/2023: It has finally happened! A woman has won a solo round-the-world sailing race. Non-stop no less. South African Kirsten Neuschäfer, age 39, drifted across the Golden Globe finish line yesterday evening in Les Sables D’Olonne, France, after spending 253 days alone at sea, and so has planted an important flag in the annals...
