This week I’m celebrating an anniversary; it’s been eight years since I first walked through the doors of our little office in Salem, MA and joined the SAIL team. It’s been an adventure—occasionally an absolute nightmare, but more often a dream. Like any job, there are slow days and busy days. I’ve seen people come and go over the years, changes to our industry, ups and downs, good and bad.
As I’m sure any sailor will understand, I’ve racked up stories unfit for print, but here’s a little behind the scenes from a few of my favorite moments from over the years.
Genoa, 2023
When I was growing up in a youth sailing program, any time there was a thunderstorm, we stayed in to watch a movie. We saw Wind, Pirates of the Caribbean, Deep Water–-I haven’t seen enough love for this movie, go watch it if you haven’t—but more than anything, we watched Morning Light. It came out when I was in the 7th grade, and as a young person who’d never been on a boat bigger than a 420, I was amazed.
I saw Morning Light scores of times over the next 10 years as I moved through the program and eventually became the coach who was setting up the projector on those rainy afternoons. That is, of course, where I first heard of Mark Towill and Charlie Enright. Fast forward to 2014, and I was watching them compete in the Volvo Ocean Race. In 2018, during one of my very first work trips with SAIL, I had the chance to interview them at the Newport stopover. A few years later, I sailed with Charlie when the team was touring their new IMOCA around Newport ahead of the 2023 Ocean Race.
In some admittedly parasocial ways, I feel like I grew up with these two. They were my first introduction to the racing world outside of my little lakeside youth program; they were one of my first interviews with SAIL; and in 2023, I got to watch Mark Towill accept the protest committee’s decision that 11th Hour Racing Team would receive redress for the collision at the start of the final leg of The Ocean Race, finally winning a trophy that they’d been chasing for a decade.
I cried right there at the press conference. It was such a special moment for American offshore racing, to see them finally achieve a dream so long in the making. And for me, who’d been watching this journey unfold from the time I was a youth sailor until I was the managing editor at America’s favorite sailing magazine…well, it was pretty special for me too. Read the article here.
Maine, 2018
As mentioned I’ve loved sailing since I was a little girl, but there are a few shining moments where I really fell in love with it all over again. In 2018, I spent a short but memorable time on the ketch Angelique up in Maine. She was a romantic vision from yesteryear with her tanbark sails and lovely woodwork.
I was visiting for an annual event in the Maine windjammer fleet’s summer calendar: the Great Schooner Regatta. It was as low stakes as races come, since each boat had a full complement of paying guests wandering around the deck and nominally paying attention to the competition. The real benefit of the event is that it’s one of the few times that the whole fleet is in one place, and I had the same experience of hushed awe being surrounded by them as you get when stepping foot in a cathedral.
That evening, anchored in a secluded little cove, someone on one of the other tallships pulled out a fiddle. The sky was glowing orange with the last dregs of daylight, and as the music drifted over the water to me, I was struck by the thought that there was no more beautiful place in the entire world.
All these years later, Maine remains among my favorite cruising grounds, and I hear the distant echo of that fiddle at sundown. Read the article here.
La Trinite Sur Mer, 2022
There was no romance or grand revelation with this trip, just a very keen sense that among the dozens of amazing teams I’ve gotten to spend time with, this might be the coolest thing I would ever get to do.
I won’t bore you with retelling the whole story, but the important context is that La Trinite Sur Mew is a tiny town on the west coast of France that is inexplicably home to some of the biggest and highest tech racing boats in the world, including a small fleet of maxi trimarans. There is a more industrial side of town, but when I was dropped off at my hotel and told I had the afternoon off to get my bearings, I walked for three hours and saw many sheep, a few cats, one tractor in the distance, and no people.
I was there to visit Spindrift (formerly Banque Populaire V) before the start of their standby window for a Jules Verne Attempt. Despite varying success hopping the language barrier, the team was incredibly welcoming and kind to me as I scurried around and marveled at every inch of the boat.
Skipper Yann Guichard asked if I wanted to drive, and truth be told I was terrified, but if you’re offered the helm of the world’s largest offshore racing trimaran, you can’t say no. So I drove the trimaran.
Head out of the cockpit enclosure to see the instruments, the wind whipped my face so intensely that tears were streaming from my eyes directly back towards my hairline. It’s no wonder: We were making 30 knots in just 12 knots of breeze.
And though they didn’t have the right weather to attempt the Jules Verne record that year, sailing Spindrift remains one of the most breathtaking experiences I’ve ever had. Read the article here.
Annapolis-Newport, 2023
Many of you will remember a certain race in 2024 that ended pretty badly for me and my team, but the summer before we also dealt with a water ingress issue. It was my first time being offshore and in many ways laid the foundation for preparedness that we would rely on the next year.
The flooding took us hours to stop and by the time dawn broke, we were soaked, sick, and exhausted. There was talk of turning back. We’d seen countless other boats head for shore on the AIS. But instead we hove-to, got some rest and kept at it.
It is the ultimate cliche to say that the true prize was the friends we made along the way, but those early days on Alliance gave me something irreplaceable. For the first time, I had a regular team that I was a part of, not just visiting. The sailing’s great, but it’s the people that make our sport truly special, and I will always be grateful to my Alliance teammates for welcoming me into their program and teaching me so much.
My article closes with a prediction from one of them that it was all going to seem easy after that experience. And while that was, uh, not exactly true, it was an important exercise in teamwork and grit, which incidentally did make the rest easier. Read the article here.
February 2026
