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

I thought they would roar off into the sunset after “Miami Vice,” the TV show that showcased their macho glory, went off the air. That didn’t happen, but then I was sure the $4-per-gallon-

Full disclosure: A product endorsement is embedded in the following column. I affirm that no consideration was received for this, not even a free sample of the product or, sad to say, a paid advertisement in SAILING.

 He tells us in one of his sailing ditties that he’s the son of a son of a sailor. But he’s more than that—he’s a sailor himself. His latest sailboat graced the cover of the July/August issue of SAILING in a photograph of a turquoise-hulled 50-footer named Drifter carving a frothy white wake through turquoise Caribbean water. Yes, Jimmy Buffett is one of us. Schedule

I witnessed an enormous spinnaker acting like a parachute-type sea anchor built for a battleship being pulled through the water on a kite string by a sailboat driven by strong wind and big waves.

Jack tars in the Age of Sail were probably better athletes than today’s sailors. If they served before the mast, they had to be in order to survive scampering up the ratlines, crawling out on yards,

A white yachting hat sporting an anchor badge on the crown and faux admiral’s scrambled eggs on the visor, blue yachting blazer with polished brass buttons, pleated Breton red pants adorned wit

Batten down the hatches. Another sailing movie is setting sail.  At least I hope we have to secure the hatches in preparation for some stormy drama. The last sailing movie I saw induced a torpor

We lost a subscriber last summer. That’s not unusual. It’s part of the ebb and flow of the magazine business, gain some readers, lose some. Yet this loss was remarkable because of the stature of the subscriber. Let me tell you about Rudy Haase.

As a card-carrying member of the Mainstream Media (Ink-Stained Wretch Newspaper Division), I cringe whenever my brethren in national news organizations report on sailing. They never get it quite righ

Hurricane holes live in Caribbean legend as promises of survival in the hurricanes that scourge the islands. These scattered anchorages are invariably landlocked except for a skinny entrance channel and many are bordered by storm surge-absorbing mangrove.

To paraphrase a viral White House comment about health care, nobody knew that safety at sea could be so complicated. Some sailors think it can be simplified by applying rigid rules and rote procedure