Jan. 11/2023: Now comes news over the past weekend that Charley Morgan, one of the great pioneers of fiberglass boatbuilding and design, left this world on Saturday, bound for whatever comes next. He was 93, and reportedly passed just a few hours after his wife Maurine died. Sailors of a certain age will remember Morgan...
Oct. 12/2021: Here we have another sad tale of mortality. On the last day of last month, as I understand it, the well-known yacht designer Ted Brewer passed away peacefully at his home in British Columbia. Born in 1933 in Hamilton, Ontario, he certainly had a good long run on this planet, both as a human...
June 23/2021: I’ve always loved the feel and ambiance of a traditional plank-on-frame wooden boat, but I’ve never been too crazy about the idea of actually owning and maintaining one. So this was a very fine opportunity, getting to take someone else’s 41-foot Aage Nielsen sloop on a short jaunt down the New England coast....
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...
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...
The name Maurice Griffiths is not particularly well known in the United States, but in England he is most certainly an iconic figure. A dapper fellow with a goatee beard, he was born into modest circumstances at the turn of the 20th century, the second son of a traveling glove and underwear salesman who had...
