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

Years ago, I was very much into landsailing as well as sailboat racing. Born and raised in California, I was surrounded by dry lakes so hard you could rollerskate on them (people did). On a weekend, y

I try to stay out of trouble writing this column. I avoid taking stands on issues that might cause gastric distress among readers. I never touch politics, the deadly third rail of discourse. I wr

Escapism is built into the human psyche, has genetic and evolutionary roots, and persists in story across the millennia. So the trend to sell everything and sail isn’t new, despite the mob of tan, n

The first time I anchored in one of Jost Van Dyke’s perfect natural harbors, our boat shared the anchorage with only one other, a small, privately owned sloop. When I returned to the British Virgin

My dad was an executive for Douglas Aircraft and we lived in Tucson, Arizona, when I was a kid. As a young man, my father had run away to sea, shipping out on tankers and working his way up to navigat