Lifestyle

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.

Gesturing toward an oil painting rich with painterly light, French maritime historian Daniel Charles declares, “Monet was an observant sailor, and the boat that we see here would have been the first he had seen that was rigged the new way. A painting such as this is not only art, it is a textbook.”

The wind was howling, the tall, young trees outside the motel window roared as they whipped from side to side, and the sturdy building shook nervously.

On May 8, 2013, Gerry Hughes, a Scottish schoolteacher who has been deaf since birth, sailed his Beneteau 42s7, Quest III, into Troon, Scotland, becoming the first deaf skipper to circumnavigate the globe singlehanded.

When a team of UK-based scientists learned that the population of the Earth’s marine phytoplankton had declined 40 percent since 1950, they set out to find the cause. Phytoplankton is the ocean’s primary producer, and a decrease in its population could mean trouble for oxygen production, food chain supply and climate regulation.