When the coronavirus started taking over the dry-land world, I started planning my escape. It would be on sailboat, of course.     The First Mate and I would depart these troubled sho

I never could get the hang of birdwatching, which is all about seeing and identifying avians and making copious notes about the sightings in something called a life list. I did once manage to rec

I came across an old photograph the other day and was carried away by a wave of nostalgia. It was a photo of a person engaged in spinnaker flying. I don’t mean flying a spinnaker, as in settin

I remember my distress when I was introduced to Old Devil Hull Speed. I was just getting into offshore racing, working at being a semi-competent bowman, and I was gung-ho for speed. I read every

Folks who enter the rustic confines of our family’s beach cottage are greeted by a small display of sailing heirlooms including a color photograph of me at a barely-adult age along with two older, m

Why do people climb a dangerous mountain? That’s easy. We know the answer because George Mallory gave it to us in three words in 1923, one year before his life ended on Mount Everest. Why do peopl

I read car magazines with interest and envy.  Interest because, as a semi-reformed sports car buff, my clutch-foot still twitches when I read about high-performance automobiles.  Envy

Among the hundreds of thousands of words I’ve written in pursuit of my calling as an ink-stained wretch, I can’t think of any combination of them that has achieved the status of a deathless phrase

Back at the dock after Saturday afternoon racing, the boat was shipshape, the genoa folded and in its turtle bag, two spinnakers repacked, the mainsail neatly flaked and under its cover and the crew r

I hope I’m not too agitated to write my usual dignified publisher’s column, but I have to admit to being in an awestruck state of amazement and bedazzlement. I just read a news release about

On any given day in 2019, the average person in a supermarket checkout line knows more about the weather than I did when I set off on my first cruise in my first cruising-racing sailboat. Americans a

 A friend, poking gentle fun, once told me that my august position at the top of the masthead as publisher just means that I get to drive the magazine bus. If that’s true, then I’ve been going on frequent busman’s holidays. I read magazines obsessively. Maybe that should be called an ink-stained wretch’s holiday.  I consume magazines with omnivorous taste, on subjects ranging from cars to cooking, but, naturally, sailing magazines get priority. I read every one I can get my hands on, good and bad, domestic and foreign.
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I had to check the proofs of this page extra carefully, lest some snarky editor garnish this column with the headline, “Ancient mariner goes back to school.” It’s true, I did go back to school,ScheduleSchedule

A real estate ad I saw recently boasted of properties with a “pond view.”  No kidding. No matter that the pond was a storm water retention basin that was required by the building code

Decluttering isn’t the first trend I failed to exploit for financial gain. In one unfortunate example, I missed the bitcoin investment boom out of some quaint and no doubt age-related mistrust of m

We were full of ourselves, bold seafarers reveling in boisterous sailing conditions, bursting with exuberance, on the verge of exchanging high fives every time a wave broke over the bow. We were sail

One of the 18 people who paid the $10,000 entry fee, documented meeting the requirement of having sailed 8,000 ocean miles and signed up for the 50th anniversary Golden Globe Race had climbed Mount Ev

This will seem strange, coming from the publisher of a magazine whose trademark is pixel-perfect digital photographs reproduced in vivid color, but there are times when grainy black-and-white film pho