Home / Columns & Blogs
 
2015 April 1
The politics of international amateur athletic competition are so inscrutable and Byzantine they make professional sports look wholesome in comparison. Professional sports are driven by the simple and pure imperative of an entertainment business–to make money. International amateur sports are driven by a mysterious something else. Whatever it is, it's not pure or simple, judging from the bizarre decisions issued by the ruling authorities. 
2015 March 1

I don’t need fancy statistics to tell me that, using my group of friends from the 1960s as an example, kids who have fun sailing stay in sailing. We learned self-reliance, decision making and skills that have served us for a lifetime. It was fun.

 As a kid, I had a conversation with my mother almost every weekend after I departed in the morning, not to return until dinner time.  
2015 March 1

Some sailors still cruise the old-fashioned way, of course, on their own boats, making long passages, sojourning for as long as the spirit moves them in those waters of sailors’ dreams.

If there is a more wonderful invention for sailors than bareboat chartering, I haven't heard of it.  When I experienced it the first time, it seemed too good to be true. 
2015 February 1
Three stout but dignified denizens of Navigator Heaven were gathered at a local pub for their afternoon pint. “What do you make of that sailing vessel fetching up on Cargados Carajos Shoals near Mauritius?” Captain James Cook, the legendary 18th-century explorer and cartographer, asked his mates.
2014 December 1
I’m writing this on the “today” mentioned in the above excerpt from the NOAA marine forecast, which is October 31, 2014. That is the deadline for this column, and I had better get going, but I am being distracted by the view through my office window, a scene rendered in pewter of a street shrouded in metallic gray with a sturdy maple tree bending in the burgeoning gale as its last few leaves become unmoored to join the horizontal flight of passing snowflakes. 

Perry on Design

Advertisement
Advertisement