Feb. 17/2023: Leave it to the most experienced performance sailors to come up with the most interesting boats when they get older and want to go cruising. Exhibit A in today’s brief is Oddity (see image up top), a custom plywood/epoxy 32-foot gaff-rigged barge of a thing masterminded by ex-round-the-world solo racer Pete Goss. A...
Dec. 18/2020: James Wharram, who first came to notice back in the 1950s after sailing a crude homemade catamaran across the Atlantic from England to Trinidad with two occasionally (and famously) unclad women, has cut a unique trail through the firmament of modern yacht design. He has always planted his flag far outside the boundaries...
Nov. 19/2020: Hokey smokes! Can this be a coincidence? That the first aligning in 20 years of the planets Saturn and Jupiter, the two biggest in our solar system, and their closest conjunction since the year 1623, will occur next month, just as the two biggest races in sailing, the Vendée Globe and the America’s...
This was a rumor that may have started on a Dick Carter fanboy thread on Sailing Anarchy a few years back: that Carter, one of the leading designers during the IOR era back in the 1970s, had sadly passed away. Even people active in the thread who’d once been close to Carter--like Bob Perry and...
It’s hard to believe, but there just might be enough of these atrocities now that they qualify as a boat type unto themselves. They’re not really motor-sailers, which have displacement hulls and are rather slow under power. Instead I’ve come to refer to them as power-sailers: powerboats with big outboard engines and planing hulls that...
‘Tis the season to hand out boat awards in the sailing industry. We’ve already seen SAIL’s Best Boats picks and are eagerly awaiting the opinionations of Cruising World and Sailing World re their Boats of the Year. But these competitions are for the most part restricted to common production boats, and the truly interesting (i.e.,...
Just heard recently from Jay Paris, N.A., who has been SAIL magazine's technical advisor since before time began. He sent drawings and details of an intriguing upscaled version of the 32-foot centerboard yawl he designed and built for himself. (For details on that boat be sure to check this post here.) He calls this new design...
This is something I ask myself quite often: can a modern truly cutting-edge high-performance racing sailboat also be a cruising boat? In certain ways, of course, the old ideal of the true cruiser-racer, per the glory days of the Cruising Club of America rating rule and boats such as Carleton Mitchell's famous yawl Finisterre, evaporated...
And now for something completely different. Steve Jobs' 256-foot superyacht Venus, built by Feadship and completed in 2012, a year after his death, has been out and about this season and was most recently drone-videoed as it squeezed through the Simpson Bay drawbridge in St. Maarten. According to the Insider's St. Maarten Island Guide, the...
Our most recent ruminations on this topic focused on some of the popular dedicated cruising-sailboat designs that dominated mass-production boatbuilding as the industry started growing and maturing through the 1970s. It is important to remember, however, that even as fiberglass production techniques were thrusting sailboats into the heart of the 20th-century consumer economy, some cruising...
