Sail Magazine

by Kimball Livingston

All on assignment, Kimball Livingston has sailed the oceans blue. And he's been to Fink, Texas, too.

Navigating the Future

by Kimball Livingston, Posted September 7, 2011

Years ago, Stan Honey described how he could transform sailing on television by making racing tactics easier to “see” and understand—if he had the budget. It would be, as they say in the NFL, a “difference-maker,” just like the technology Honey’s company Sportvision created to electronically paint a yellow first-down line on a football fan’s television screen. Now the man

The (Long) Point Is—

by Kimball Livingston, Posted August 10, 2011

Why let a sailboat race stand in the way of a party? This question has been asked many times, sometimes seriously, other times at an exaggerated angle of heel. But I assure you that the question has never been answered more boldly than at Long Point Race Week, which is hosted by the Balboa and Newport Harbor yacht clubs. For three days in August (26-28th) many of the best sailors in Southern

AC World Series: High Stakes Game in Cascais

by Kimball Livingston, Posted August 1, 2011

Beyond aerodynamic efficiency, wings bring one special, not so obvious quality to multihull sailing — flotation. The forward element and each of three flaps in the aft element on an AC 45 are airtight and buoyant. As long as the wing stays in place, the boat will not turn turtle.I'm figuring the rest of America's Cup 34 floats, too, but that's not for lack of doomsayers on the

Luck in the Pacific

by Kimball Livingston, Posted July 28, 2011

Guy Wilding has been out for a paddle in his 18-foot kayak every day for months, since moving to Honolulu from Sydney, Australia. July 20 seemed like any other day under the blue skies of the tradewinds until, as luck would have it, his paddle broke and he was dumped into the drink. This wasn't good, but Wilding swam to the kayak and grabbed on. He tried to get in - to "rescue," in kayak-speak -

AC45 Road Test

by Kimball Livingston, Posted July 6, 2011

The joke was on me. I dosed myself with ibuprofen both the night before and the morning of, but my ride on AC45 #4 was the smoothest fast sail I have ever had. Upwind at 16 knots, downwind at 29—downwind meaning that we would arrive downwind of our starting point, but because the apparent wind was so far forward, I couldn't exactly feel the breeze on the back of my neckIn

Redefining "Dolly Ride"

by Kimball Livingston, Posted June 17, 2011

I have to tell it to you backwards. It looked like this . . .But it went like this . . . 5) I’m hanging onto a strap on AC45 #4, the Oracle Racing cat skippered by Jimmy (“Everyone’s wearing helmets for a reason”) Spithill, and we’re making tracks toward a destination on San Francisco Bay that will soon be downwind

Get Out of Jail Free

by Kimball Livingston, Posted June 16, 2011

Originally published March 2009The last time Ragtime tied up at my local marina, I wandered down to the dock, admired the varnish, and grinned at the dinky cabin. But most of all I admired the audacity of those long, skinny, hard-chined lines drawn by New Zealander John Spencer a few years before the boat, as Infidel, was denied entry to the 1967

Bargain Performance

by Kimball Livingston, Posted June 13, 2011

Bill Schock, the founder of California-based W.D. Schock Corp., got a lot of things right in his time, not the least of which when he turned to his son Tom back in 1976 and said, “It’s a great little boat. Let’s build it.” In this way the Santana 20 was born with, as Tom recalls it, “no demographic studies, no market research, nothing. We didn’t know who we’d sell it to.”Thirty-five years

15 AC Teams and an Umpiring Redux

by Kimball Livingston, Posted April 5, 2011

It had to start somewhere, or you could say it had to end somewhere—those long nights in “the room,” the protest room, haggling over the fine points with never enough evidence to establish the facts and you know that much is true because if you had the facts the hearing would be over in a minute.On-the-water umpiring revolutionized the high-end game, and that’s what got

A Perfect 45?

by Kimball Livingston, Posted March 23, 2011

Adopting wing-sailed catamarans, inventing a new tour called the America’s Cup World Series, launching a 45-foot one-design class as a training fleet: none of this could ever have been free of controversy. The 45s went from concept—a trainer for AC sailors and race committee alike—to reality in five months, with the first “batch” of four promised for delivery to challenging teams by April 1.