Whether you’re looking for insights into the best cruising grounds of the East Coast, West Coast, Caribbean or Great Lakes, or the latest in tips and techniques for doing everything aboard from set the anchor to fix your engine, recover a man-overboard victim or trim your sails, our editors and contributors have the answers.
There’s a time to go cruising and a time to stop. As Chris DiCroce found, you don’t always get to choose those timesAlbert Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, ...read more
When a former winner of the Whitbread Round the World Race invites you to sail the Northwest Passage, there is only one sensible answer. No.More adventurous types might disagree, but they weren’t the ones facing frostbite of the lungs or the possibility of having the yacht’s hull ...read more
After crossing the Atlantic in 2011 and spending two leisurely years crossing the Med, I found a homeport for my Crealock 34, Panope, in Cyprus. In 2000, we had completed a villa in Tala and the little pleasure/fishing port in Latsi was a scenic 40-minute drive away.The ...read more
After a season of club racing, the Skipper (aka Kevin McHugh) and I were on the hunt for a faster boat—who isn’t? The Hudson at Kingston, New York, is a tricky spot to race: sheltered by hills on each side, it is narrow, fluky and tideswept. Watching the winners from the back of ...read more
Stumbling upon art while out sailing is an unexpected pleasure. Finding colorful glass balls that have washed across from Japanese fishing fleets is certainly magical. But it’s the purposeful art left for the enjoyment of others that most moves me.One example was a deer made ...read more
New York native Ayme Sinclair didn’t grow up sailing but she’d always loved the water, so when a friend offered to take her out on a Sonar, she didn’t have to think twice about agreeing. She was instantly hooked and sailed on every boat she could get on, eventually finding a ...read more
I learned to sail on the Maine coast as a boy, and one of the things my elders taught me was to respect fishing gear. If you got caught up with a lobster pot, you did everything you could to get clear without cutting the pot warp. It represented a family’s livelihood and thus was ...read more
If you have a paranoid personality, anchoring out can be a validating experience. On the one hand, it seems rather simple. You amble up to the bow of your boat, drop a lump of metal overboard, let out some rode and secure it somehow. Then you stroll back to your cockpit and ...read more
I know someone who spent two years, two months and two days staring at the water, living in a space 150ft square, and paying keen attention to the weather. This sounds like a happy circumnavigation, and in a sense, it was, because the person I’m referring to is Henry David ...read more
Like many, I often spend my sailing holidays far away from home, assuming that real adventure requires some kind of international flight. More and more, though, I’m learning that some of the best sailing vacations can be found right in my own backyard.In this spirit, I skipped my ...read more
The Panama Posse is back this month after a successful inaugural rally in 2017-2018. This year it includes visits to seven Central American countries—Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica and Panama.Over the course of the rally, organizers provide ...read more
If you are cruising, you need at least two anchors on board for the simple reason that you must have a backup. Imagine having to slip your anchor on a stormy night with other boats dragging down on yours, or having your rope rode severed by some unseen underwater obstacle, ...read more
Our first encounter with a big squall was sailing from San Diego to Ensenada, Mexico. We left at 0200 to ensure we’d get into Ensenada before our 1300 haulout time. The National Weather Service had forecast consistent 15-20 knot winds from the northwest, which was perfect for the ...read more
Whither the mast-mounted halyard winch?Just as all roads once led to Rome, many sailors now believe that all working lines should lead to the cockpit. The result, unfortunately, is often a pile of multi-colored spaghetti that is hard to manage and can actually make it harder to ...read more
Some of the greatest sailing voyages are those that are undertaken quietly, without publicity and for no reason other than that they are there to be accomplished. One such ended in June when Jerome Rand sailed his Westsail 32, Mighty Sparrow, into the New England port of ...read more
On my living room wall, I have a print by Canadian maritime artist John Stobart that I inherited from my father. Stobart specializes in the Age of Sail, and the print, “Decks Awash,” is of a square-rigged ship with a full press of sail, heeled over in a hell of a blow. It’s my ...read more
I have rarely had a cruise that wasn’t different from my expectations, and my Nova Scotia travels have borne that out. For my friend and shipmate, Steve White, and me, our 2017 trip to Cape Breton Island and the Bras d’Or Lake on One Timer, my Sabre 362, was a much anticipated ...read more
If you were in Gotland, a popular island vacation destination off the coast of Sweden, on the morning of July 3, your holiday might have been interrupted by a startling sight: a tiny island of trash approaching shore with people aboard. It was, in fact, a sailboat made from ...read more
In 2015, we cruised to Norway’s Lofoten Islands on our Nordic 40, Juanona, which we’d sailed transatlantic from Maine to England. Our 2016 plan was to cruise through the Netherlands to the Kiel Canal, sail into the Baltic as far as Stockholm, then cruise the western coast of ...read more
One of the first stories I ever edited for publication in a boat magazine, way back in 1986, was about the dangers and general inconvenience imposed on recreational boaters by the blending of alcohol with gasoline. As I recall I arranged to illustrate it with a sensational gothic ...read more
Donna Gallant always planned to live a life of adventure. In school, she told her roommate that she was going to marry a man with a boat so she could sail the world (and she did). Since then, she’s built up an impressive nautical resume, having sailed over 6,000 miles and lived ...read more
In the broad spectrum of human sailing endeavors, few confuse the uninitiated more than the desire to sail around the world in a small boat. By “small” I mean really small—like less than 20ft small—and in some cases much tinier than that, like the 5ft 41/2in Vera Hugh, which the ...read more
Is it a virtue to emerge safely from messes you should have avoided in the first place? Last summer’s sail to Bermuda from Maine gave me more than one chance to answer that question, most notably during the catastrophic failure of our forestay in the Sargasso Sea. My friend Derek ...read more
The winter of 2016-17 was one of the coldest on record in southern British Columbia. In June 2016 we had sailed across from Hawaii to Sitka in southeast Alaska aboard Distant Drummer, our Liberty 458. After enjoying a summer of leisurely cruising through the Inside Passage in ...read more