May 13/2022: I used to live in Thomaston, Maine, literally just down the street from the Lyman Morse yard, but that was 20 years ago, so I was happy to have a chance to revisit the yard this past week. It was then, and is even more so now, the kind of place where you...
Oct. 12/2019: Just back from Phase One of my annual boat show dive in Nap Town. The most interesting new boat I saw there by far is the Eagle Class 53 (see image up top), a foiling (there’s that word again) all-carbon catamaran with a “hybrid” wing-sail rig. Coincidentally, I saw this very same boat...
Right! We’re getting closer to the interesting part of the run-up to the next America’s Cup, the part where people actually start sailing the boats they will race on. Team New Zealand stole a small march on the other four teams competing in this 36th edition of the event, when it launched the first full-size...
Here’s an interesting journalistic conundrum. I cover the Annapolis show for SAIL every year and judge boats for the magazine’s Best Boats competition. BUT I also have (or had, as the show just closed) a boat in this year’s show (as you can see in that photo up top) that is being considered in both...
Now that I’ve got the new boat on the Left Side of the Pond I’m starting to think seriously about how I’d like to change it. Of course, I’ve been thinking about making changes all along, even before I accepted delivery, but I do believe you should first spend some time sailing a boat the...
It’s over… at long last! My seventh transat done and dusted. This has been true for nearly a week now and still I’m waking up in a bed in a house every morning in a confused wobbly-footed fuzzy-headed daze feeling like I just stepped ashore. I must be getting old or something.
This was a hard one this. For one thing it was a bigger jump than I had sketched out in my head. For some reason I had fixated on 2000 as the rough mileage between Porto Santo and Bermuda (see last blog post), but in fact it is 2,400 and change, even via a great...
Talk about shiny new. (It’s a camera defect, actually, that makes the boat sparkle so.) This is us on Lunacy crossing the Bay of Biscay, en route from Treguier, France, to La Coruña, Spain, late last month. (I would have posted something about this earlier, but finding a reliable Wifi signal in La Coruña proved...
In fact I have been in Treguier here in France for a week now, grappling with the project of getting to know the new Lunacy while simultaneously studying printer’s proofs for the new book. The book now has been irretrievably committed to the press, and just yesterday Jean-Francois Eeman of Boreal Yachts joined me for...
I have been shy about mentioning this to people, for various reasons, but now it’s time to come clean. You’ll have noticed I am trying to sell Lunacy, my faithful Tanton 39 cutter of the last 10 years, and some have asked what comes next. The answer, of course, is another aluminum boat. Two of...
