For years, I’d been wanting to visit Grenada. There are many things that fascinated me about this island: its rugged, mountainous interior, its rainforests and waterfalls, and the fact that it’s less traveled than some other Caribbean sailing destinations. My photographer ...read more
It’s goodbye to the paper chart, at least those produced by NOAA. The agency’s Office of Coast Survey is soliciting comments on plans to completely phase out the production of paper charts and associated products within five years. Its tighter focus on ENCs (electronic ...read more
Our driver, Dracula, has a thick slack body, and his head leans heavily to the right. One eye wanders and looks only up and left. The other is covered with an opaque membrane. His ungainly body is covered with a loose, soiled shirt and pants. It is a hot day in March 2007, and ...read more
One of the neat things about sailing is the incredible variety of equipment that sailors use while doing it, whether crossing oceans or just out for a daysail—one of the many reasons why even after all these years SAIL magazine’s annual Pittman Innovation Awards remain as fresh ...read more
Last year, Alberto Duhau sailed Shaima, his Hylas 63, from Florida up to Nova Scotia and then to Greenland, Iceland and the Scottish islands, following the route established by Viking explorers a thousand years ago. It was a trip that took a lot of preparation but which, Alberto ...read more
It was the last week of May and the hurricane season was fast approaching. My wife, Carla, and I made plans to take our Lagoon 40, Ocean Fox, west from Grenada to the Dutch Caribbean islands of Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao—better known as the ABC Islands. The first leg from St. ...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
I have been a sailor my whole life and knew the moment I accepted a job in Zanzibar that I would need to find my way onto a sailboat and into the sailing community there. This led me to Google, where I started searching for anything sailing-related in the area. Once I made it ...read more
A boat is a set of tradeoffs, and a perfect boat doesn’t exist. That said, if you’re searching for a proven bluewater multihull that can be sailed shorthanded, has all the comforts of a luxury home and is wicked fast without beating up your wallet, you owe yourself a test sail ...read more
My heart still races when I think about that day. Nightmares haunted me for weeks afterward. The roar of big surf pounding on a reef tenses my entire body. My mind still sees the enormous waves next to me, and I imagine our boat broken to pieces on the surf-beaten coral. A lump ...read more
One of the first things I noticed when I started mucking about on sailboats big enough to be manned by more than one person is that it is much easier to crew than to skipper. Being one step removed from primary responsibility for the many things that can go wrong on a boat ...read more
This past fall at the Annapolis Sailboat show, we had a chance to catch up with Hanse’s Maxim Neumann, who kindly provided us a tour of the company’s new flagship, the Hanse 675. An impressive, well-built production yacht that boldly ventures into maxi-yacht territory, the ...read more
Presented by Vetus-Maxwell. Got a tip? Send it to sailmail@sailmagazine.com How heavy a hit? Squalls! We can’t miss seeing them coming, but it’s not always obvious if they have our name on them. The answer is to treat the thunderhead like a ship on a collision course. If the ...read more
Swiss photographer Loris von Siebenthal has been named winner of the Mirabaud Yacht Racing Image photo competition for 2019. Von Siebenthal bested no less than 133 other photographers from 29 countries submitting shots of everything from regular weekend regattas to junior ...read more
Once upon a time conquering your dream of sailing off into the sunset was enough, but these days it seems like you have to be popular on social media too. Balancing the stresses of sailing around the world while keeping a successful—not to mention financially lucrative—social ...read more
The chart showed 45ft of vertical clearance, and I knew the boat should be able to pass under the bridge. Still, there was that nagging voice in my head that wouldn’t let me be. “What if your air draft calculations were wrong?” it said. “And if you’re just a little too high the ...read more
My husband, Neil, and I had left Mexico in March on board Distant Drummer, our Liberty 458 sloop, with a plan to spend the rest of the year on a leisurely cruise down the west coast of Central America. It was in this way that, after enjoying the delights of El Salvador and ...read more
There is something exciting about the extended anticipation of making landfall in a faraway place for the first time: the imminent meeting of expectations and reality, the inevitable differences from the mental pictures you’ve shaped. Through our decade of offshore sailing, my ...read more
I arrived on the docks of Beaufort, North Carolina, in late April with two backpacks filled with new gear—everything I’d need for my first offshore passage. Though I’d been sailing for 16 years, graduating from dinghies to keelboats to a J/122, I’d spent my time racing and, in ...read more
One of the most wonderful childhood vacations I can remember was back in 1971 when my best friend invited me to his family’s summer home on Nantucket Island. For a 10-year-old kid, this was a thrilling trip for many reasons, not the least of which was the fact it was also my ...read more
Many cruising boats, especially smaller ones, don’t have a conventional oven. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t have all the baked foods you want, from bread to brownies to breakfast rolls to casseroles and even a roast chicken. All it takes is the right bit of gear and a ...read more
It all started with YouTube. Last year, when my wife, Marjorie, and I began planning to include the Exumas in our upcoming three-month cruise through the Bahamas, I searched the internet for information on what we might find there. As I was doing so I happened across a video of ...read more
Steve greeted my boyfriend, Phillip, and me as soon as we tied Plaintiff’s Rest, our 1985 Niagara 35, up to his dock on one of the Berry Islands in the Bahamas. He was tall, cheerful and clad in a hodge-podge of clothes one might wear to paint a house: oversized, grungy and old. ...read more
We had left San Diego in early November and spent a month sailing down the west coast of Baja California on board Distant Drummer, our Liberty 458 sloop. After a week in Cabo San Lucas, a brash and brassy town at the southern tip of the Baja Peninsula where we provisioned the ...read more
