The Moorings 4800 rides at anchor.Susan Colby photo Sailing French Polynesia is the stuff dreams are made of. We had Laura, a marine biologist, who dreamed of exploring the sea life and coral gar

Let’s say you want a comfortable daysailer that represents modern design trends. This design by Satellite Yacht Design in the Netherlands and built by the Hennevanger family tries to tick off all th

There’s never been a better time to charter, with new bases popping up in both new locations and old favorites. Charter boats, whether monohulls or big cats, are getting more comfortable and easier

The new Hallberg-Rassy designed by German Frers falls into the “dream boat” category for most of us. Personally I dream of much smaller boats, but if I were to dream about a big boat, I think this

Features  Society Island escape A stress-free charter in one of the world’s most exotic locations was just the ticket for this happy group Sailing among the ruins A charter throu

Chartering is more popular than ever and charter companies have gotten creative about how to get people on boats easily. Crewed charters have always been offered, but companies now offer middle-of the-road options for sailors who lack the confidence for a full-on bareboat experience. Flotillas organized by schools and charter companies provide the comfort of sailing in a group with help at the ready should it be needed. Some companies, like Cruise Abaco, offer a hybrid solution where a captain sails with the boat during the day then is whisked away in a dinghy once the boat is at anchor for charterers to enjoy the evening.

I recently bought a Passport 47, and it’s in really good shape but a bit of the running rigging is tired. I need to replace the mainsheet and I have questions on the running backstays. First off, what type of line should I use for the mainsheet? It is just regular double braid now and the guy at the chandlery suggested Dyneema, so I am not sure what to use. Second, the boat has running backstays, do I need to use those all the time? They are made of wire and hard to handle, they tend to rub on my nice new mainsail too. Can you shed some light on this?

I was sprawled in our cockpit in a quiet cove among the Greek Islands one evening, gazing at the brilliant stars dotting the black sky. Suddenly I wondered if a Greek sailor, perhaps on the verge

In gale-force conditions, Team Sun Hung Kai/Scallywag crewmember John Fisher fell overboard in the Southern Ocean approximately 1,400 miles west of Cape Horn on Day 9 of the 7,600-mile Leg 7 from Auckland, New Zealand, to Itajaí, Brazil. According to race officials, the Scallywag crew immediately turned the boat around and began to sail upwind in a search pattern coordinated by the Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre. After a 10-hour search, the team was  unable to locate Fisher and with conditions worsening and daylight fading, they stopped the search and turned back downwind toward safe harbor on the Chilean coast, the nearest safe landfall approximately 1,200 nautical miles away.

My friend Mark Mills designed the new IC37 by Melges and it has been chosen as the boat for the next Canada’s Cup. That’s a good way to focus a lot of attention on a new race boat. Mark seems to be having his way with race boats these days. He’s been quite successful over a wide size range. His designs are very fast and very good looking. At 37 feet LOA, this is a boat most of us can relate to racing on. When I was in high school I raced on a Buchan 37 but it would be a bit difficult to draw a continuous line from that boat to this Mill’s design.

Here is a new model for the Sun Odyssey line by Jeanneau. By now the look should be familiar to you. There are minimal overhangs, high freeboard, flat sheer, a chine aft and an artfully contoured, sleek, low-windage deck.  But there is one significant departure, the side decks extend aft to the transom so you can easily walk from stem to stern.

As it often happens these days, the news came through Facebook. The striking hull of a maxi yacht, massive yet graceful, laying on top of the salvage barge, looking very sad with all the deck gear stripped, hatches torn apart, stanchions and pulpits bent, yet looking hauntingly beautiful even in this distressed state. 

Astus Boats out of France has a niche market. It has been very successful building a series of small, collapsible, very lightweight trimarans. These are the kinds of boats you could easily tow behind a small car like my Subaru. 

Kevin Dibley, the designer of the new Kraken 50, is an old mate of mine and always provides me with enough “meat” to the design to allow me to do an accurate review. For that I  am grateful. This new luxury cruising boat is built in China by Hansheng Yachts and is designed to combine comfort and performance. We hear that all the time but in this case, with Kevin as the designer, I think we can actually believe it.

As we age, we’re able to look back and see the little twists of fate that had massive reverberations in our lives. Mary Orme Ellis knows this better than most. When she was a 19-year-old college student in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, she started dating a young man with a sailboat, and her life was forever changed.

We live in a 9-to-5 world, our calendars, computers and appointment books jammed with scribbled must-dos and don’t-forgets, and we have very little time that isn’t scheduled. The very concept of “spare time” has disappeared from our vocabularies. Kids scurry from soccer practice to dance lessons without pause for either kid or parent.

A popular one-design dinghy class association recently announced that its rules committee had approved new class-legal digital compasses. I was curious to learn more about the breakthrough, wondering if the committee had finally given in to data. Cruisers and handicap racers find that data can simplify sailing: inexpensive computers tie routing to actual weather, a start can be precisely timed with clocks that account for speed and distance, and tactics can be determined based on actual fleet and global positioning. Instead, I learned that the committee had barely budged: Finally allowing its sailors to pick from two 20-year-old digital compass designs, in addition to the analog kind, but only “provided that the devices do not have the capacity for information other than heading.” 

It began with a dream of sailing bluewater. In 2008, Philip Kersten, owner of the 1978 Alden 44 sloop Tioga, assembled a rookie crew to sail from Nahant, Massachusetts, just north of Boston, to Bermud