Lifestyle

A stormy Bay of Biscay, equally lousy weather in the trades, a broken autopilot and damaged steering: none of this was enough to stop Austrian sailor Harald Sedlacek, who arrived at Palm Beach, Florida, on April 13 aboard…

Oldest, farthest, bravest: these are some of the superlatives describing the winners of 2013’s Cruising Club of America (CCA) Awards, presented at the New York Yacht Club in New York City, New York.

In a clash between the privatization and public access of waterfront property, Old Dominion Boat Club in Alexandria, Virginia, is battling the city’s attempt to acquire half an acre of its historic waterfront and turn it into a park.

The last time I went frostbiting it was February in Chicago, and it was freezing. Not far offshore, ice floes loomed and just inshore, a layer of frost covered the hardened beaches of Lake Michigan, which bordered the black ice on Lake Shore Drive.

This past weekend a protest flotilla traveled from Norwalk, Connecticut, to New York City, New York, and back to raise awareness of the “Arctic 30,” a group of Greenpeace activists currently imprisoned in Russia.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has announced that it will no longer print traditional paper nautical charts come mid-April of this year.

A sailor’s perspective of a mid-Atlantic drama

The 85-year-old staysail schooner Niña, a fabled 50-foot (LWL) ocean racer that once was the flagship of the New York Yacht Club, disappeared without a trace on the stormy Tasman Sea with its American owner, his wife and 17-year-old son, and four crewmembers.  

I was on a hunt. A hunt through 20 years of SAIL Magazine history for some of our best ads of yesteryear. The ultimate lesson I learned from this exercise is this: consumerism during the 70s and 80s relied heavily on nearly naked women, unflattering hairstyles and killer mustaches.

As I write this, I am aboard First Light, our Pacific Seacraft 31, in an anchorage at Isla San Francisco, in Mexico’s Sea of Cortez. As usual, ours is the smallest cruising boat in port.