Just before sunset, nine hundred nautical miles from shore, three sailors and a dog jump into in a four-person liferaft as waves crash around them. For four hours they bail water by the gallon, surrounded only by a vast and encroaching darkness.
John D. Macdonald, through his iconic character Travis McGee, observed that one thing never goes wrong on a boat. Instead, things go wrong in threes.
There are two reasons for leaving a scrap of genoa unfurled when you’re not sailing.
Sailing makes the news when there’s a disaster. The rest of the time, thousands of small boats traverse the oceans in safety, carrying hundreds of families with young children.
Sailing is often about the adventures you have and the people you meet, and this could not be truer for the participants of the 2014 DelMarVa Rally, which wrapped up on Saturday, June 14, in Annapolis, MD, with an awards ceremony and party for the cruisers.
One of the joys of cruising is that it enables us to visit extraordinary places, places we may not have even heard of were we not cruising: places like Selvagem Grande, the largest of Portugal’s Ilhas Selvagens, or Savage Islands: population two humans, one dog and 40,000 very noisy seabirds
On board any cruising boat, charts and guides are pivotal for route-planning. But have you ever thought about how those guides are created? We checked in with the co-authors of an ICW cruising guide to get the skinny on guide-writing and ICW cruising.
I’m not sure what madness made me decide to fix our generator myself. Maybe I was feeling especially talented that day. Or cheap. Or downright insane. Back on land, I would never try to penetrate the mysteries of our furnace—I didn’t even change the filters myself. But life aboard changes you.
Simplify your life on-board cooking experience with these clever tips from Bill Cullen
When most of us think about cruising in Sweden, we imagine a place that’s expensive and cold, with Volvos and Nordic beauties galore, and well-built boats with hefty price tags. The blondes are there, all right. So are the Volvos and the boats, but costly and chilly it is not.
On perhaps one of the most dramatic nights in recent Vendée Globe history, Kevin Escoffier sat in a life raft with little to do but
It was early March and freezing cold in Michigan. Snow lay in patches on the barren fields, and dark clouds hung just above the treetops.
When nearly 20 Friendship sloops set out for the starting line off Rockland, Maine, this past summer, they didn’t just start milling about in preparation
For sailors of a certain age, the entire concept of a mulithull is cutting edge. However, even a cursory glance at a harbor full of
The 24th running of the Corinthian Classic Regatta, held August 13 and 14, is a testament to the beauty of traditional and modern classic racing
This summer has been a great one for sailors everywhere, but in particular for the 87 sailors participating in the Tiwal Cup on France’s Gulf
“I’ll admit, it’s still hard to watch the boat leave the dock sometimes,” says former Volvo Ocean Race sailor Mark Towill. Since meeting during a
Dufour, long one of France’s most well-respected builders, has been producing sailboats in La Rochelle since the dawn of fiberglass boatbuilding. Having recently merged with
The 2023 Ocean Race intends to be one of the world’s first climate positive sporting events, offsetting more greenhouse gasses than are produced. The two-fold
Almost anywhere a sailor drops the hook someone else has been there before. We are hardly ever the first. That remote Maine harbor without a
