Not long ago, I was visiting my old hometown and, by chance, I found myself near the bay where I had learned to sail so many years ago. On a whim, I drove down to see what remained of the waters where

A friend of mine, a yachtsman of the motorboat persuasion, told me he was going ahead with his summer cruise even though the fuel bill would exceed $7,000. The same cruise last year would have cost hi

I was concentrating more on the remarkable aubergine hue of the wine in my glass, a muscular Chilean blend of carmenere, cabernet and merlot, than on the NBC news program on the tube. It was the

Trust me on this one. I know bloodcurdling screams. As a kid, I used to go to the Saturday horror matinees, and no scream in the world matches the sound of several dozen 8-year-old girls when the scre

New ESCAPE 75. First customer is TNZ.” That was the headline above two photos that appeared on a Facebook page last fall. One of the pictures was of the just-launched 75-foot Team New Zealand Ameri

 Had we heeded the forecaster’s gloomy wind warnings, we would not have started the race, but 20 sailboats slipped over the line at 18:30 and inched up the 21-mile course. An hour—and two tedious miles—later, a red sun set leaving a starless sky. Two hours and barely four miles in, the fog came down like a black velour lining a coffin. Wet. Dark. Deadly.

As often happens for my musings in this column, three things converged like a perfect storm to make me start thinking. First, being a car nut as well as a boataholic, I visited a friend who is in the

 

The future of the sport of sailing might depend on the hierarchy on your boat.  From something akin to a dictatorship to something much closer to a democracy, there are four ways that crews tend

It was a non sequitur for the ages. “The ship was an unsinkable ship.” The statement was made after the ship sank. The ship is Bayesian, a 184-foot-long sailboat that now rests under 160 feet o

This being the New Boat issue, and since I’ve owned more new boats than the U.S. Navy, I have (he said modestly) a wealth of wisdom to share. I’m here to offer the Caswellian Boat Survey Tips, wh

When the book I’m reading bogs down to a boring grind, or takes a ridiculous turn, or irritates me by revealing the author’s ignorance of a well known fact, I turn to my old friend Jack Aubrey. J

No one is more passionate about their version of sailing than a multihull sailor. It is as if they know something that the rest of us are missing. One avid friend has introduced hundreds of guests to

For the better part of the hour before our start in the Chicago Mackinac race, we maneuvered around the starting area with a 200-pound weight at the top of the mast. That weight was a young bow man w

It was a Christmas morning decades ago, and I leapt down the stairs to see what was under the tree. But it wasn’t the usual mishmash of large and small packages, bearing the mix of new shirts, belts

It’s easy for most kids to learn how to sail. They just go to sailing school. Their parents enroll them in one of the numerous youth sailing programs available across the country. They learn fast an

If you consider the rising costs and barriers to insuring a sailboat, you might think the actuaries see dangers that we sailors can’t see.  But is there any reason to be concerned? One state�

Nathanael Herreshoff’s crowning achievement was Reliance, a sailboat of awe-inspiring size and power. Yet his influence on sailing flows to this day from a simple boat less than one-fifth the length