Profiles

How US Sailing’s new Olympic Development Program will help improve America’s Olympic fortunes Seismic changes have been afoot at US Sailing since the conclusion of the 2012 London Olympics, where the American team suffered its first medal-ceremony shutout since Berlin in 1936. ...read more

Donna Lange is not just a grandmother of 11—she’s a musician, songwriter, registered nurse, delivery captain, the founder of OceansWatch North America and one of the few American female sailors to circumnavigate solo. In 2007, Donna sailed around the globe and stopped twice ...read more

When it comes to professional sailing, Peter Isler, 59, of San Diego, California, literally and metaphorically helped write the book. Isler’s sailing resume is pure pedigree: two America’s Cup wins as navigator (1987, 1988); Intercollegiate Sailor of the Year while at Yale ...read more

Many of sailing’s great names have won the Melges 32 World Championship, but until now these wins were always one-offs. Jason Carroll, 37, of New York City, grew up sailing on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake before matriculating at Harvard, where he sailed Larks and ...read more

The Farr 40 is easily one of the most competitive owner/driver one design classes afloat, placing a world championship title amongst the highest-level achievements that a well-polished sailing program can attain. These attributes, plus the boat’s high-performance temperament, ...read more

It’s 0900 on the dot, and Dawn Riley is starting the morning meeting. With military precision, she scrolls down an agenda she’s been working on for the past three hours. How’s that fiberglass repair? What’s up with the shipment of boats to Abu Dhabi? She scribbles a diagram on ...read more

A thin Spanish breeze skitters over the northwestern Mediterranean as evening slowly fades into night’s cooler comforts. Ashore in beautiful Barcelona, the evening’s bustle is reflected in the myriad lights that are sparking to life, but aboard the IMOCA 60 Hugo Boss, U.S. ...read more

A 2011 graduate of Old Dominion University, Wisconsin native Stephanie Roble has leveraged a stint with the Chicago Match Racing Center to become the third-ranked women’s match racer in the world. She also recently turned pro, sailing aboard boats like the Melges 20 and J/70. In ...read more

Veteran offshore racer Joe Harris and co-skipper Patrick O’Connor took first overall in the fourth annual Atlantic Cup, a doublehanded offshore/inshore series from Charleston, SC, to Newport, RI, aboard Harris’s Class 40 GryphonSolo2. A three-week Class 40 regatta held in May, ...read more

As Newport, Rhode Island’s Ida Lewis Yacht Club prepares to celebrate the 10th anniversary of its signature late-summer distance race, it also takes time to remember its namesake—the real life Ida Lewis. Once hailed as the “bravest woman in America,” Lewis tended the Lime Rock ...read more

Boatbuilder Chris Hood is doing a fine job carrying on the family legacy In 1967 The New Yorker published a now-famous profile of the late sailmaker and America’s Cup skipper Ted Hood. The story noted how, even as a boy, Hood had an aptitude for recognizing yachts at a great ...read more

This past summer U.S. shorthanded veteran Jonathan Green won both his class and IRC overall in the fabled OSTAR race, from Plymouth, England to Newport, Rhode Island, aboard his Beneteau Oceanis 351 Jeroboam, beating a varied fleet that included a high-octane Open 60 in the ...read more

When two people decide to navigate life together as a married couple, it takes work to keep the relationship afloat. But Emma Creighton and Dan Dytch, who are engaged to be married in August 2014, already have the teamwork thing down, having navigated and raced extensively ...read more

It’s been said before, but it bears repeating: one of the great things about sailboat racing is the fact that there’s a place in the sport for competitors of all ages.  Take, for example, the case of retired sailmaker and veteran sailor Norm Cressy, who at the tender age of 75 ...read more

On board a racing sailboat, it’s the little things that build crew loyalty “When I joined the crew back in 1992, the running joke was that it was so tight-knit, someone had to die before you could get on board,” tactician Peter Galipault tells me, and I laugh, because as a newer ...read more

Rich Wilson is a sucker for punishment. One solo round-the-world race isn’t enough for the New England sailor, who at the tender age of 62 has set his sights on the 2016-17 Vendee Globe—arguably the world’s toughest sailing event. Wilson, who will be 65 when the 28,000-mile race ...read more

This past June, the sailing community marked the passing of Ted Hood, a true innovator who played a central role in making the sport what it is today through his work in sailmaking and cruising hull and rig design. His Marblehead, Massachusetts, based company Hood Sailmakers, ...read more

Having grown up surrounded by America’s Cup history in Newport, Rhode Island, and with the veteran pro sailor Jerry Kirby as his father, Rome Kirby is no stranger to professional sailing. Nonetheless, at age 23 and the youngest sailor of Team ORACLE, Kirby considers himself ...read more

My love for boats began in 1960 when I was a high school freshman. A friend’s father had a small powerboat and we water skied in wet suits as early as May. Waterskiing became my summer joy of choice as a teenager. It wasn’t until some years later that my engineering career would ...read more

As Team Oracle showed this past October, conning an AC72 catamaran is not for the faint of heart. We recently caught up with Emirates Team New Zealand’s skipper Dean Barker—who at press time was still managing to successfully keep his boat upright under sail—to see what it’s ...read more