Rallies

It was a spring afternoon and my sister Laura and I were chatting on the telephone, she in Michigan and I in Los Angeles. Days earlier, I’d accepted an invite from NAOS Yachts to tag along on a weekend getaway aboard a Lagoon catamaran to celebrate the manufacturer’s 40th ...read more

The call for all sailors to attend a special weather briefing felt ominous. Soulemate and more than 100 other boats and their crews were gathered at Bluewater Yachting Center in Hampton, Virginia, to start the Salty Dawg Sailing Association (SDSA) rally to the Caribbean and ...read more

Cruising sailors headed for the Bahamas may want to take note of a Seven Seas Cruising Association (SSCA) rally that culminates with the third annual Bahamas Gathering in Black Point in the Exumas in mid-March. It’s a chance for sailors to get together at one of the Exumas’ most ...read more

The sailing sisterhood was out in force on Labor Day weekend in Annapolis for the second Fleet 3 J/105 Women’s Regatta. Host Sailing Club of the Chesapeake welcomed 97 sailors ranging in age from college students to retirees, and experience running the gamut from college sailors ...read more

What do you do on a boat for days on end if you’re not constantly tweaking the sails to get an inch ahead of the boat next to you? For cruisers and powerboaters, it probably seems like a dumb question, but when I arrived in Sint Maarten for the Caribbean Multihull Challenge ...read more

Perseverance and an embrace of adventure have always been prerequisites for sailors who earn the Cruising Club of America’s Blue Water Medal, but like everything in these pandemic-influenced times, Ginger and Peter Niemann had to take both up a notch when they completed a second ...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

If there’s one thing cruising sailors are good at, it’s going with the flow. When weather, gear failure or some other difficulty shuts down one carefully planned course of action, an experienced cruiser never bats an eye. He or she just plots a new course and carries on ...read more

The Salty Dawgs made headlines last spring as they mustered a herculean effort to get cruisers home from the Caribbean amidst closed borders. Their expertise in organizing and disseminating information helped nearly 500 sailors get home safely. Now, for the second time in a year ...read more

It’s been a season full of disappointments for sailors as race after race have been cancelled, but some sailing centers are using their clean slates as a chance to reimagine what’s possible. The Spirit of Bermuda Charity Rally is one such event, announced as a collaboration ...read more

We’d been told to expect meteor showers on our first night out of Bermuda, so Sue and I were eyes-alert to the black sky when a green light, round like a traffic light, erupted from the sea 300 yards off our starboard bow. It arced toward us and Salamander’s foredeck and sails ...read more

Jimmy Cornell, father of the sailing rally, has turned to two hulls for his next epic voyage, the Elcano Challenge. Known for a string of monohulls all named Aventura, the founder of the Atlantic Rally for Cruisers (ARC) is planning to follow the route of the first-ever ...read more

Thirty-three years ago Jimmy Cornell launched a rally for boats crossing the Atlantic from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean. The pitch was safety in numbers and resonated with sailors who were seeking adventure but also looking for a bit of a safety net. It was a monohull ...read more

With all the rallies to choose from, there’s a perfect route for every sailor in every corner of the world. While all rallies take pride in creating community, providing logistical support and most of all making sailing safer for their participants, they each have their own ...read more

Never let it be said that the World Cruising Club (WCC) rests on its laurels. Always looking for fresh ways to add more spice to the world’s longest-running and most popular cruising rally—the first was held in 1986, and entries regularly exceed 200—the WCC this year added a ...read more

Whether you are in the planning stages for a southbound ICW cruise in 2018 or you are looking at a northbound trip this spring, it is important to know where the shallow spots are along the ICW. It is wise to mark your charts and familiarize yourself with these so that you are ...read more

After hurricane Irma bashed through Florida and the southeastern coast of Georgia and South Carolina, significant damage to infrastructure has been reported. Damage to marinas and other facilities is relatively easy to see and report. There are several resources to track the ...read more

While the World Cruising Club may be best known for the Atlantic Rally for Cruisers (the origin of “ARC”) formed by Jimmy Cornell in 1986, its rallies have long since transcended those destinations limited to an Atlantic crossing. Today the WCC hosts rallies spanning the globe, ...read more

Every year since 1986, a group of around 200 cruising boats has gathered in Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, ready to set forth across the Atlantic Ocean—their destination, the island of St. Lucia in the Caribbean’s beautiful Windward Isles. The Atlantic Rally for Cruisers ...read more

Photos courtesy of Simon Cohen; Alexis Courcoux; Jose Guijarro Back in 1992, when I was working at a British sailing magazine, I volunteered for some tough duty—covering the first International Festival of Sail in Brest, France. Someone had to do it, and as a wooden-boat owner, ...read more

A decade ago, here in the pages of SAIL, I wrote of my experiences with the inaugural Classic Boat Rally fleet as it sailed along the Intracoastal Waterway from Savannah, Georgia, to Charleston, South Carolina. It was a six-day cruise that led the boats through some of the ...read more

On the one hand, timing is said to be everything. On the other, anyone in real estate will tell you the thing that really matters is location, location, location. When it comes to passagemaking, though, it’s not one or the other, it’s both. Making a passage from, say, Bermuda ...read more

As far as fleets go, the collection of boats that greeted me as I motored into Hampton, Virginia, in late October was as varied as they come: sloops, cutters, catamarans, a trawler and even a trailer-sailer, all geared up and ready for an adventure. I had brought our Norlin 34, ...read more