Opinion

The autopilot on my 35ft sloop, Second Wind, had been both commissioned and sea-trialed. I had also completed all of the other upgrades I’d had planned in preparation for perhaps a year-long cruise through the Caribbean. Working with various local technicians, I’d added solar ...read more

I walked up to the bathroom and the couple was just getting out of their boat. The man appeared to be in surprisingly good shape. He was well tanned, trim and muscular, not exactly what you would expect for a guy in his 70s. He appeared to be moving without any stiffness. The ...read more

Let’s talk about performance sailing. Specifically, women’s involvement on the big boats. The idea of inclusive sailing at the highest level is not a recent phenomenon. In fact, in 1900 (yes, you read that right, 122 years ago) Hélène de Pourtalè was the first woman to ever ...read more

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, local racing had resumed with household crews only. My wife, though, while always up for a pleasure sail, was not up for this kind of thing, so, for the fifth time in what was any measure an unusual sailing season, I found myself singlehanding my ...read more

I suppose it isn’t merely a coincidence that I’ve made significant changes to the sailplans of the last three cruising boats I’ve owned. The first project was the biggest. My old Golden Hind 31, Sophie, had lots of charm and character, but her sloop rig was laughably small. ...read more

Gragkkkk! Schschs! These are NOT the sounds you want to hear as you trailer your boat to the launch ramp. I was about a mile away from the ramp at the time, and looking in the rearview mirror I immediately noticed Betty Jane, my 1982 Mystic 20 Catboat, was now riding a good deal ...read more

Like an ostrich on a bad day, I’m head-down in the lazarette of Nellie, my Beneteau First 42, dealing with the propane tank. My wife taps me on the shoulder, and I rise to see a pair of foiling catamarans accelerating onto their carbon-fiber wings. As the blood drains from my ...read more

There is something almost mystical and more than a little eerie about scuba diving in the deep ocean, hundreds of miles from land and a mile from the bottom. You are surrounded by blue, all shades of blue, vanishing into deep black as you look down. No fish, no coral, just ...read more

Pitch black in a narrow, unlit canal, my only two points of reference were a pair of red and green navigational buoys half a mile ahead. As I approached them, the water under the keel of my Bristol 40 yawl, Daydream, kept diminishing, now at 4ft, now at just 6in. Stuck! Twice I ...read more

For once the forecast had been correct: 20 knots southwest, with waves 4 to 6 ft. Around 0300, I rolled over in my bunk unable to sleep with the sound of the wind in the rigging and the occasional groan of the fenders against the hull. “Just sleep. There’s no way you’re ...read more

This past spring my family and I were at anchor aboard our 50ft steel-hulled cutter, Atea, off Bequia, a small island five miles south of St. Vincent in the Southern Antilles. Bequia’s large, protected bay is lined by a collection of beach bars, restaurants and hotels, and is a ...read more

Baking at the helm, watching a newly arrived bird eyeing me suspiciously—as if this was his ship, and I was the one who’d just flown in—I knew I was unraveling. For two days now we’d been becalmed, sails flogging on the open Atlantic, and in a snap moment, I saw—all too ...read more

There is an ocean-sailing science fiction novel I’ve been writing in my head now for some time. It posits a future in which the world’s climate has become so unsettled the sport of ocean sailing has been transformed. Sailing in the Vendée Globe has become so dangerous, due to ...read more

Sitting quietly at the bar of a local yacht club, I gaze out over a rambunctious Lake Michigan on a sunny but blustery spring afternoon. I am enjoying watching a small sloop approaching the marina and recognize it as belonging to one of our newest members. “Pretty little thing. ...read more

In spite of the fact I came to the sport of sailing alone and untutored, in a boat I acquired on my own, I never really aspired to become a solo sailor. It just sort of happened. All these years later, I still never explicitly plan to sail anywhere alone. I’m always happy to ...read more

When a winter norther blows through the Bahamas, the northeast trades can reach gale force as they funnel through the Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti. After waiting for a lull, though, we had a fabulous beam reach aboard our Liberty 458, Distant Drummer, from Santiago de ...read more

The first cruising couple I ever met who was sailing an aluminum boat told me an interesting story. They were French—of course. They’d been anchored a long time and had a lot of growth on their hull. When finally they decided to move on, they jumped in the water to scrape the ...read more

February 2, 2020 was a beautiful Sunday afternoon. The temperature was in the upper 60’s, the wind from the southwest at a steady 8 knots—an ideal day to take my Catalina 270, Pneuma, out for the first sail of the year in my home waters of north Alabama. After a few extra ...read more

Of all the superpowers today’s sailors wield thanks to modern electronics, being able to sail in fog with impunity is certainly one of the most useful. GPS navigation and electronic charts have been around long enough now that there is an entire generation of mariners who have ...read more

The wind shrieking through the rigging jolted me awake in the middle of the night. It sounded like the bimini was being ripped to shreds. I grabbed my iPad to check our position on the way to the cockpit and did a double-take: we were 25 yards from where we had dropped the hook ...read more

I am writing this a few days before Christmas in the awful Plague Year of 2020 and am marveling at the great Double Alignment. Can it be mere coincidence that the two largest planets in our solar system came into their closest conjunction since 1623 in the very same week that ...read more

In recent months, US Sailing, like many organizations, has been taking a closer look at diversity to ensure it’s doing the best job it can of introducing people from all backgrounds and ethnicities to the sport. As part of this effort, this past summer it organized an online ...read more

A reefed main and full poled-out Yankee pulled our 56ft, aluminum-hulled cutter, Seal, toward Antarctica. My husband, Hamish, and I were halfway across the Drake Passage, with four charter guests and our two young children onboard. We had 17 knots of apparent wind and 10ft seas ...read more

We left Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, at 1230 on a Friday. My husband, Hugh, my brother-in-law, Jim, and I were sailing overnight to Charleston. The early November weather was lovely and warm, with the forecast calling for light winds, mostly out of the south-southwest. We ...read more

The breeze kicks up. The boat digs in, and I tighten my grip on the mainsheet. It’s overcast but warm. The slate-blue water around me is patterned with whitecaps. Ahead, the low, tumbling hills of Old Mission Peninsula, a 17-mile long finger of land separating the east and west ...read more

One of the neatest things about sailing offshore is the other lifeforms we encounter. We smile when we see flying fish skimming over the surface of the sea. We cheer when dolphins leap and dance in our bow waves. We are duly reverent when mighty whales sound and spout, and ...read more

It was a calm, mid-Pacific morning, around 1000 on May 31, 2019, when the keel finally let go. The three crew of the New Zealand-registered Ran Tan II had known for 18 hours that the 50ft Elliott racing yacht had suffered a major keel failure and that it would soon fall off. ...read more

Five days before Christmas, I booked my ticket home. It was evening, at the end a long day in my marine repair shop, BoatRx. After being in Miami a month, it was already starting to feel like home. I reviewed my to-do lists, grateful to be returning to a steady routine as I ...read more

I cannot help but smile at the irony of this. Not so long ago I offered advice in this space (Waterlines, Nov/Dec 2019) on how to tactfully borrow empty moorings in areas where mooring fields have obliterated anchorages. Some of my online readers promptly complained that using ...read more

It was a dark night, utterly black. Any light was blanketed by the fog. My chartplotter was night-blinding me. I looked at the Navionics map on my phone, waited half a second for my eyes to adjust and then looked at the depthsounder. After that, I looked ahead to where Laura was ...read more

We are anchored in an inlet on Waya, one of the Yasawa islands west of Fiji, on my 48ft sloop Sangvind. My wife, Sylvia, my friend Jeroen and I have enjoyed a few drinks in the cockpit on this starry South Pacific night, playing guitar and singing songs. Just before going to ...read more

I well remember the first time I ever saw a flying sailboat. I was on Narragansett Bay several years ago, test-sailing one of those old-fashioned boats—the ones with hulls that float in the water 100 percent of the time—when we spotted a foiling Moth speeding out of Newport like ...read more

Most people have no idea what it’s like to be out on the ocean away from their comfortable lifestyle here in the United States. Back in the early 1970s, though, my wife, Kitty, and I spent four years circumnavigating the globe on our 30ft Allied Seawind ketch, Bebinka. Before ...read more

I sat on the bow of our pitching boat, 400 miles offshore in the Atlantic Ocean, looking up at the mess of carbon fiber and taffeta that was once a laminated headsail, thinking that this wasn’t part of the sailing dream brochure—nothing like this happened in the La Vagabonde or ...read more