It was hazy, hot and the air was still and the seas were calm; certainly not the conditions we were expecting as we motored down the narrow channel toward the northern city of St. Petersburg on the eastern edge of the Baltic that so many of us had traveled so far to visit. But the uncharacteristically warm and sunny weather was only the first salvo of what proved to be a barrage of sensory overload that no reasonable expectations could live up to.

Dear Boat Doctor, There are some deep gouges in the bottom of my boat that I need to fill when I pull the boat out. I have used epoxy in the past, but it was a pain to thicken and to

 The shapes arrayed on the windward rail are rounded mounds. In the dark they look a bit like a row of igloos.The simile is apt. It’s a cold night. The 15-knot northeasterly wind is heavy with vapors rising from 48-degree water. The sailors are padded in layers of fleece or down under foul-weather suits and inflatable life vests, with boots on their feet, wool caps on their heads. Shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, they ride high above the choppy water as the heeling boat close-reaches toward a distant waypoint.

 Ten years ago we had an Excel-jockey crewmember; a numbers whiz-kid so proficient with a spreadsheet that he’s since left sailing for a high-powered banking gig.

 The J/24’s story reads like the script of a Disney movie. It’s 1975 and amateur boat designer Rod Johnstone is tinkering in the garage at the family’s Stonington, Connecticut, home. 

 Francis Lee was named in honor of a father’s boating lineage, but everyone knows her as Sliver. To the dockside crowd of sailors who reveled in the champagne-soaked launching, Sliver was celebrated as a hometown wonder designed and built in the Pacific Northwest. The wood composite 62-foot double-ender was designed by Bob Perry and built at Northwest School of Wooden Boat Building.

Reality television show producers could not have dreamed up a more cockamamie set of obstacles than what the 2015 Transpacific Yacht Race served its 60 entrants, racing from Los Angeles, California, t

 I suppose you could go so far as to call this 20-footer a motorsailer given that you could sit at the mini dinette and have enough visibility to see forward and enjoy the scenery while the autopilot does the driving. 

 This is a heavy boat, weighing 72,600 pounds, but with the long DWL and minimal overhangs, the D/L is only 140. The L/B is 3.55 making it on the narrow side of medium beam. Two keels are available, one drawing 9 feet 10 inches in a T-bulb configuration and the other drawing 8 feet 6 inches.

At first look I was inclined to think, “Oh God, please don’t make this fast.” But I knew that scow bows have a long and successful history so the chances were strong that this bow would work. It works on the many scow one-design classes and even the old, sedate, CCA rule had Hoot Mon, a scowlike yawl with a successful race record. 

 Folding a sail is a task that sailors do every day, on the dock or on the deck, and while it won’t make or break you as a sailor, knowing how to fold a sail correctly will make your sails last longer, make them easier to set and ingratiate you to the rest of the crew.

SAILING's editors round up some of the best new boats you'll see at boat shows this fall. Click through to see them all. 

July / August 2015 Table of Contents

Cruising catamarans were well established before Gunboat. Twin-hulled boats had become mainstream and very popular with charterers. As time went on, the two hulls, connected by a main cabin, expanded to the point that almost the entire rectangle was filled with accommodations. Cruising cats got heavier and heavier. Efficient daggerboards gave way to shoal, very low-aspect, stubby keels. With this evolution the hope of good speed to weather was dramatically reduced. In time the big cruising cat became an accommodation-focused platform that was a far cry from the performance-oriented cats that had initially caught the attention of sailors.

Fountaine Pajot was one of the first companies to build large cruising cats. Its designs have always been well crafted and very good looking. Barret Racoupeau designed the new flagship model, the Ipanema 58. In the ultra-competitive world of cruising cats it was only a matter of time before someone looked at the huge footprint and thought, “Hey! We can add a second story!” 

In Bavaria’s Open 40, Marc Lombard created an interesting design that blurs the line between cockpit and interior. The freeboard is high to allow for headroom in the hulls, and the hull ends are chopped off to maximize the DWL. I see square-cornered fixed ports in the hull sides. This seems to be a very popular styling feature of the new European models today. I think the look works well in this design.

Monohull one-design racing is as popular as ever, but it can be harder to find affordable one-design multihulls, especially trimarans. Corsair Marine aims to change that with its Pulse 600, a trailera

The crash may not have been heard by all the competitors as the two A-Class catamarans collided at the windward mark on the first day of racing, but by the time the boats hit the beach, every sailor in the fleet was ready to help repair the damage.It’s clear to even a casual observer that there’s something special about the people in the singlehanded A-Cat class. During a break in the action at the class’s North American Championship in Panama City, Florida, the St. Andrews Bay Yacht Club lawn was crowded with sailors helping patch up the boats damaged in the collision earlier in the day.