THIS IS ONE BOAT that really jumped out at me when I was cruising the docks at the Strictly Sail portion of the Miami International Boat Show after doing my bit judging the NMMA Innovation Awards. I first spotted it bow on (see photo up top) and immediately noticed its narrow hulls, high bridgedeck clearance,...
THE FIRST TIME I almost lost it on a boat was during my first job with a boat magazine more than 25 years ago. Soon after I was hired, I was sent out to test a Grand Banks trawler on Block Island Sound, and on the run back from Block Island to Mystic, Connecticut, I...
Both the cats I tested after the Annapolis show this year are super-sized production boats designed mostly to serve in the charter trade. The Leopard 58, a.k.a. the Moorings 5800, is the more extreme example of this species, fully three stories tall, topped with an enormous covered flybridge on which it is possible to entertain...
YOU HEAR LOTS OF COMPLAINTS these days about how there aren't enough young people coming into, and staying involved in, the sport of sailing. Modern sailors, with much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments, love to debate the reasons for this. Many heap blame upon the venerable Optimist, the default training dinghy for the...
I INFLICTED BOTH FORMS of sailing on the family over the long weekend, with rather mixed results. First, on Saturday, we attempted to campaign our 15-foot Drascombe Dabber Mimi in the Round Island Regatta (RIR) in Portsmouth. The photo up top (snapped by a friend on shore with a phone) shows us in our moment...
ALTHOUGH THIS IS ONE OF MY FAVORITE SPOTS on the coast, I haven't been here in almost 10 years. All that time I have been dreaming of coming back. On the chart it doesn't look like anything special--just another tiny uninhabited islet in the small archipelago that stretches around the southern end of Vinalhaven Island...
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...
UNLIKE LAST YEAR, Lunacy's first sail of the season with family aboard involved no humiliations or mishaps. We enjoyed a most excellent daysail in sub-10-knot winds (courtesy of the fabulous screecher, now in its second season) and sailed north off the mooring at Portland Yacht Services up to Chandler Cove, where we enjoyed lunch aboard...
Beautiful photos these. Taken by a man, John Guider, who is currently rowing and sailing his way, in stages, through a circumnavigation of eastern North America aboard a 14-foot Expedition Skerry from Chesapeake Light Craft that he built himself. Right now he's in the South Carolina sea islands, a little north of Beaufort. By July...
Trybooking.com arrives in Port Fairy carrying survivors from Inception It's been an awful month for racing sailors in California. First came the well-publicized loss of Low Speed Chase in the Farallones Race off San Francisco, which resulted in five fatalities and an unprecedented Coast Guard ban on further offshore races in the area. Now this...
