Sailboat Cruising

I met Captain Sarah Schelbert back in 2019 while on the boat trip from hell aboard a seaworthy but poorly run Triton 28 in the western Caribbean. I was trying to help the owner sail his boat back to Florida from the Rio Dulce, in Guatemala. Outbound from the river basin, we had ...read more

Many of us who are cruising sailors have been sailing mid-ocean or walking along a perfect beach in the middle of seemingly nowhere, only to be appalled at the amount of plastic trash we find. Few of us, however, have taken that disheartening reality and turned it into a ...read more

Having set ourselves the task of transforming our recently purchased Open 66 ex-Vendée Globe racer, NV, into a performance family cruiser, my partner, Timo, and I found ourselves (extremely) high and dry as cyclone season approached. The favorite cyclone strategy in Fiji is to ...read more

Whether they’re at the end of their collegiate career or after aging out of a summer sailing program, a lot of young sailors have a hard time finding a way to continue sailing as adults. Some of the barriers to sailing, including location, finances and time, can be hard to ...read more

“What’s the joke about heavy weather? You know it when you see it.” Figure 8 singlehander Randall Reeves drew laughs from the Cruising Club of America (CCA) sailors attending the forum “Heavy Weather Sailing: Bluewater Perspectives” as part of the CCA’s centennial celebration in ...read more

There’s so much going on in the news that you would be in good company if you didn’t realize the first major storm to hit the Caribbean was in full force. Hurricane Fiona is currently raging over the Turks and Caicos and is projected to make its way north in the coming three ...read more

In 1980, I owned a 26ft fiberglass ketch named Recycle, a full-keeled vessel with a 10 hp Honda outboard in a well behind the tiller. An inflatable dinghy would have been nice, but I could only afford an 8ft plywood pram. She had reinforced fiberglass seams, which made her ...read more

While many sailors are said to be superstitious, I never had any qualms about casting off lines on a Friday or hanging a large stalk of Jamaican bananas from the mizzen. Nor did I see any cause for concern heading out on “The Ides of March” for a quick daysail aboard my Dyer ...read more

It’s something all sailors dread—seeing the floorboards in the cabin sole afloat—and it’s what I saw on my way back from a sail across Biscayne Bay. Since I was on my own, I immediately let Betty Jane, my 1982 Mystic 20 Catboat, round up into the wind and went below to turn on ...read more

On September 5 at 6:30 pm EST, a few big names in sailing advocacy will join forces for a panel discussion titled "Sailing as a Force for Good" at Sail Newport. The discussion, which will be presented as a webinar for those who cannot attend in person, will feature speakers from ...read more

The Active Interest Marine Group has announced the appointment of Wendy Mitman Clarke as editor-in-chief of SAIL magazine. A lifelong sailor and marine-industry veteran, Clarke is an award-winning writer and editor whose marine writing career began when she left her position as ...read more

Mia and I sold Arcturus, a 1966 Allied Seabreeze yawl, circa 2015, around the same time we bought our Swan 48, Isbjørn, and got our offshore passage business up and running. We had sailed Arcturus from Annapolis to Sweden via Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Ireland, then spent the ...read more

One of the more seductive features of sailing, and of bluewater cruising in particular, is its intense sense of community. We are, I’ve always liked to think, a small tribe spread out over a very large territory. Our paths crisscross in seemingly miraculous ways wherever there ...read more

It was early March and freezing cold in Michigan. Snow lay in patches on the barren fields, and dark clouds hung just above the treetops. Ice skimmed the roadside puddles as we left Ann Arbor, bound for sunny Florida. I was driving a minivan and towing behind me a 16ft Wayfarer ...read more

When nearly 20 Friendship sloops set out for the starting line off Rockland, Maine, this past summer, they didn’t just start milling about in preparation for the gun. Instead, they gathered together beyond the breakwater so a Friendship Sloop Society member could scatter the ...read more

Almost anywhere a sailor drops the hook someone else has been there before. We are hardly ever the first. That remote Maine harbor without a soul in sight: there’s a lobster trap. The south coast of Newfoundland: the crumbling remains of a fisherman’s cabin lie hidden among the ...read more

When I began preparing Minx, my 1987 Pearson 39-2, for extended Caribbean cruising, I had to balance my champagne wish list against my beer budget. Every buck spent on the boat before leaving would be one less frosty can of Carib down in the islands. On the other hand, I had to ...read more

After 45 days at sea, the sailing cargo ship KWAI has docked in San Francisco with 96 tons of recovered plastic, including ghost nets and derelict fishing gear from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Ocean Voyages Institute, a non-profit organization based in Sausalito, CA, uses ...read more

The days of multihulls being the weirdos of the sea are gone. Nothing illustrated this better than the 2021 Atlantic Rally for Cruisers (ARC), which departed Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (in Spain’s Canary Islands) in November and wrapped up in December on the island of St. Lucia ...read more

There is, of course, nothing new about bowsprits—sailing ships have been using them for centuries. That said, these days they are more popular than ever on cruising boats, thanks to advances in sails, sailhandling technology and boat design in general. With today’s furlers, an ...read more

After the long and tiring 2020 pandemic year, and after many talks about hypothetically sailing away, my partner, Vanessa, and I decided it was time to stop daydreaming and start planning. What makes us different from many cruising couples is the fact that we are under the age ...read more

Did you miss Part 1? It can be read here. Anchored off Liberty State Park, I awoke late in the day to a Manhattan skyline and Hudson River so still and crystalline that I decided the first order of business would be to row my ill-repaired inflatable kayak the three miles to the ...read more

They had sailed nearly 3,000 miles over the worst the Atlantic had to serve up, crossing from Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (in Spain’s Canary Islands) to St. Lucia in the Caribbean. All of them were weary but had the glow of accomplishment about them as they finished the 2021 ...read more

Don’t confuse helming a boat with steering a boat. Put it this way—you steer a boat when towing a waterskier or maneuvering around a marina in close quarters. Steering involves deliberate inputs on the wheel (or tiller) in order to move the rudder, which in turn makes the boat ...read more

After years of hard work, The Sailing Museum has now officially opened in Newport, Rhode Island. Located in Newport’s historic Armory Building, the museum offers an innovative multi-media experience for both cruisers and racers that includes the National Sailing Hall of Fame and ...read more

It’s not often that sailors get a chance to put their rescue and MOB training to the test, rarer still that they do as quickly as newbie California sailor Khosrow “Koz” Khosravani did recently. If and when an emergency situation ever arises, though, it pays to be prepared. This ...read more

The first thing you notice when you look at the sailplan for the Farr 65, Falken, which Mia and I recently added to the fleet here at 59-North, is the sheer number of headsails. Falken was built in 1999 as a racing boat to go around the world, and the crew would have carried the ...read more

Although big, multi-million-dollar projects like the Large Hadron Collider and the human genome project with their legions of PHD’s tend to grab headlines, there’s still a part of play for the “citizen scientists” of the world. Amateur birders have long contributed to an ...read more

Discovering Amistad and Mystic Seaport Museum have partnered to organize their third annual Juneteenth festival, featuring concerts, speakers and a reflection on the lasting legacy of racial injustice in America. Declared a National Holiday in 2021, Juneteenth celebrates the end ...read more

My first job ever on a boat was picking weevils out of bags of sugar in preparation for a 1,200-mile delivery from the South Pacific island of Tonga to Opua, New Zealand, aboard a 43ft catamaran. Up to that point in my life, the sum total of all my sailing experience had been a ...read more

This June, after over 25 years of research, planning and work, the completed replica of the Virginia will be launched from the Bath Freight Shed in Bath, Maine. This former railway station has been converted into a maritime hidden gem, featuring a small visitor center and ...read more

As long-term cruisers, my partner, Timo, and I are used to up-cycling our belongings into any new items we might need rather than looking for a store-bought solution. Making a crib for our son, Nemo, was no exception. A few weeks before I was due to give birth, Timo and I ran an ...read more

I was never supposed to take my boat through New York City. After getting sucked backward through the Cape Cod Canal on my way south from Maine, when the speed of the current exceeded the maximum speed of my little electric auxiliary, I wanted nothing to do with Hell Gate and ...read more

Even the dome of light glowing above the city behind us had disappeared as if swallowed in a gulp by Noah’s whale. The moon was absent. Not a star twinkled overhead. The night was so dark we could have been floating in a pot of black ink. The only artificial lights to be seen ...read more

Every year, countless parents find themselves navigating the do’s and don’ts of enrolling their children in a summer learn-to-sail program for the first time. While the prospect of getting your kid on the water is exciting, as a sailing camp program director, there are a lot of ...read more