Sail Magazine

by Kimball Livingston

All on assignment, Kimball Livingston has sailed the oceans blue. And he's been to Fink, Texas, too.

Solos

by Kimball Livingston, Posted September 12, 2008

Thirty years after the first Singlehanded Transpacific Race, there’s a grassroots, run-what-you-brung, let’s-celebrate-life spirit still thriving in West Coast shorthanded sailing. You won’t find any French celebrity sailors with million-euro budgets. Nobody’s out to beat the world; they’re out to beat their friends. But if you’re thinking pushover, you haven’t met those friends. Let’s pick just

Cut Your Losses

by Kimball Livingston, Posted August 27, 2008

Keep after that guy in front of youFor too many sailors, the upwind leg is a chance to get buried by failing to attack or by failing to defend. Think about this one:A boat well to weather of you (and slightly back on your hip) experiences a favorable windshift. What do you do? Howie Hamlin, world champion in the 505 dinghy, 18-foot skiff, and, as of 2006, the

Foulies Free

by Kimball Livingston, Posted August 22, 2008

Racing or cruising, Mexico's Bahía de Banderas is drawing in more and more of the West Coast actionBahía de Banderas is a foulies-free environment. That's almost enough to know, and I walked off the plane without a plan. If I had a plan, something could go wrong. But I was on pilgrimage, sure enough. This sunny bight on mainland Mexico is emerging as the

A Sense of the Journey

by Kimball Livingston, Posted August 11, 2008

There’s always an anchorage around the bend when you’re cruising the rivers and sloughs of California’s Central ValleyMuch of our world has lost a proper sense of the journey, but not the world of sail. A friend of mine once told me how he sailed his two boys 80 miles up the Sacramento River from San Francisco. “We went when the boys were 14 and 12,” he said. “Along the way we

A Series of Fortunate Events

by Kimball Livingston, Posted August 7, 2008

Riding a mild breeze along Turkey’s rugged Mediterranean coast, a charter sailor doesn’t have to be a poet to wander freely as a cloudFortunately, the people in the French charterboat had so much trouble anchoring that they gave up and went away. Unfortunate for them, I suppose, but we set our hook, swam a line to shore, and settled into what I regarded as the kingpin spot

Wine Country Cruising

by Kimball Livingston, Posted August 6, 2008

Come harvest time, the California sea breeze blows toward Napa ValleySome things are worth doing because they’re a big deal, others because they are not. Take my trip up the Napa River, nosing into the richest wine-growing region in California. No big deal, but I’d never explored the Napa Valley by boat. ’Nuff said.The city of Vallejo, a former Navy town that now has a

Regular Winners Keep on Keeping on

by Kimball Livingston, Posted June 23, 2008

The 98-foot, cant-keel maxi, Speedboat, led the way to Bermuda, and that was built to be a line-honors contender, so there you go. But the 2008 Newport Bermuda Race had episodes of the slows, and that opened the door to time allowance wins by smaller boats. Here is the lineup of the high-end glory boats with Speedboat in the place of honor.And

Rocket 22

by Kimball Livingston, Posted April 3, 2007

(Click here for PDF version)This is not another sportboat designed to do nothing but scream downwind. The Rocket 22 is an update of the Gary Mull–designed Pocket Rocket that has commanded a loyal following in the Pacific Northwest since the 1980s. Don Martin’s design brief was to use cutting-edge materials and insight to turn

The Lakes Effect

by Kimball Livingston, Posted December 20, 2006

Once you’re out of sight of land for a while, you understand why they speak of “offshore sailing” in the Great Lakes.Once you’ve been through a few sail changes, you might think of the prevailing wind as “variable.”And once you’ve gone the length of Lake Michigan, you will be, in a small way, a veteran of sailing in the heart of America. I say “in a small way” because there is a lot of

Kernan 69

by Kimball Livingston, Posted October 5, 2006

On the West Coast the heyday of the 70-foot sleds is remembered fondly, with good reason. Thanks to their light weight, those old sleds were not hard to manage, they were medium-tech so cost per foot wasn’t sky high, and you could race one with nothing more than a bunch of good sailors; forget the posse of full-time gunslingers. But the sled craze peaked in the early 1990s and later the West