Indholdsfortegnelse for June/July 2025 i SAIL

One of the greatest assets a crewmate can possess is the ability to project calm in any conditions—and so, when we’re sailing our 52-foot Amel and get into some rough seas or spend an anchor watch spinning in gnarly weather, it’s always reassuring to turn to Marco. A master of chill, he’s our boat cat, and as long as he isn’t bothered, my partner Chris and I figure we’ll be just fine. And we aren’t alone. Maritime history is rich with stories of shipboard cats, and sailing has made contemporary social media stars out of many nautical kitties. Our feline companions possess a unique set of qualities that makes them well suited to a life afloat, which can all be explained by brain science. Your cat is a gimbal. A…

It’s a late summer afternoon, quiet and bordering on evening as the sun drifts towards the horizon. The breeze built up over the day but has settled down to just a whisper across my ear as I turn my head. Small waves slap at the hulls of the moored fleet, but never manage to do more than top the boot stripes. There’s a choice to made, and really only one right decision. These gorgeous evenings are fleeting. Without any exchange of words, my wife and I agree to go for that harbor burn. A short row in the dinghy and Ben-Varrey is greeting us with shimmering topsides and an eager dance about her mooring. I slide the companionway hatch open and let the warm air escape the cabin. There’s no…

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I like a boat that’s for someone. The design trend for so many years has been a regression towards the mean, closer and closer to this perfectly optimized build for the hypothetical typical sailor with more and more swappable, customizable features to make the same boat well suited for everyone. Sometimes it works, sometimes better than others, but I rarely fall in love with a boat that’s trying to do it all for everyone. The soul gets lost along the way. Enter the Pegasus 50. Even a cursory look through the boat is enough to see that there’s something a little different in its DNA. This build is simultaneously designed on salty classic ideals and creative innovation, making for arresting lines,…

 “In Summer, the song sings itself.” —William Carlos Williams The idea is to use your boat in the summer instead of working on her. All the time and money invested in the fall, winter, and spring should position you for success in attaining this goal. Boats are needy though, and you still must dedicate one day a week (or hire someone to spend one day a week) to attend to the routine care of your boat. For many summers, my wife, Alex, and I worked at our jobs Monday to Friday and then sailed our boat, a 36-foot Morris Justine, on the weekend. We usually managed to schedule in a late summer cruise for a few weeks of vacation as well. Our pattern of boat use was typical of how…

Letters Peterson Memories I read with great interest Wendy Mitman Clarke’s article about cruising/racing on her Peterson 34 (“The Case for Racing,” January/February 2025). I owned, sailed, and raced a beautiful Peterson 34, Th o r a, on Long Island Sound for 30 years. She was meticulously looked after every day I owned her. I donated Th o r a to the Merchant Marine Academy approximately 10 years ago before moving to Bermuda. I think but am not certain she is currently somewhere in Maine. My Peterson 34 gave my family and friends 30 years of great sailing and endless amounts of excitement and fun and a lifetime of sailing racing memories. Truly a very special boat. —Ted Weisberg, Warwick, Bermuda Fair Winds Thanks for “Eight Bells: Don Casey” (May…

I love a great dinghy dock when we’re cruising. But gorgeous and pristine spots often don’t have that luxury. Nor do the remote beaches where we gather for a bonfire. I wouldn’t count on those perfect snorkeling sites having any sort of tie-up either. Tanner, our 7-foot, 6-inch Puffin dinghy, is like a member of the family, and we wouldn’t want her drifting away from all the fun. We need a great anchor. And we’ve counted on our Mantus Dinghy Anchor for the last few years, from the rocky coasts of Maine to the sands of the Caribbean. It’s always held strong and never dragged, even as the wave action moves away from being friendly. The concept isn’t anything magical, just logical. Mantus Marine took the same great design as…

It isn’t very often that you can have Newport Harbor all to yourself. However, when it’s below freezing, blowing 12-15 knots, and mid-December, it can happen. Maybe this doesn’t sound too enticing? How about if we add a beautifully balanced new boat into the mix? I couldn’t resist. An extra layer or two made for an invigorating day on the water with the new J/7 from J/Boats. Hull No. 1 had just splashed at Sail Newport, and we had the opportunity to be first outsiders onboard. When you’re at the ground level, you really get to experience how the builder thinks; I’m impressed with the J/Boats approach. Not only for what this boat represents in their evolutionary process, but for the continuous improvement mentality within each build. It all starts…

I just ducked out of Road Town, Tortola, after dropping off my girlfriend to catch a series of flights back to the States. It was late in the day, I was now singlehanded, and I wanted a quiet and cozy spot to tuck into for the evening. The trades set up a beautiful 4-mile reach south to Peter Island where there is a well-protected harbor on the north side of the island: Great Harbour. Easy decision. In a little over half an hour, I hardened up around Great Harbour Point and could see only a couple other boats anchored. A nice lift caught Ben-Varrey, my Luders 33, quickly followed by a header, then another lift. A series of puffs and lulls worked their way into that sequence too. I engaged…

Stan Honey was growing up in southern California when the Cal 40 stormed onto the racing scene. Conceived by racing sailor George Griffith and designed by Bill Lapworth in 1963, the breakthrough boat drawn to the Cruising Club of America (CCA) Rule had a fin keel, spade rudder, canoe hull, and flat bottom—all eye-opening characteristics among the round-bilge, full-keel boats of the time. With a displacement of 15,000 pounds, the OG SoCal sled was capable of surfing at 15 knots plus, unheard of in monohull keelboats. They were fast, radical, and fun, and Stan—who crewed for Griffith—raced the boats but also earned spending money for college delivering them back to LA from Hawaii after they’d blasted over in the Transpac. Of all the boats he’d sailed and would go on…

Hang around the docks long enough and you’ll see a lot of marine businesses come and go. When you find one that has stuck for decades through economic ups and downs there’s a sense of comfort and reassurance that comes with that relationship. So even though the builder of the O’Day 31 that I bought in 1985 from Coneys Marine is long gone, it’s gratifying to still be working with the family owned and operated outfit in Huntington, New York, on Long Island’s North Shore, that just celebrated its 50th anniversary. “Over the last 50 years, we’ve met thousands of people, many of whom are now lifelong customers,” says third-generation Austin Coneys, a sales and repair technician. “We strive to leave them with the notion that sailing is simple and…

It was the week before Memorial Day and the weather forecast looked perfect for a three-day sail in Valhalla, my 1977 Cape Dory 30 K, on Lake Erie from Lorain, Ohio, to the Lake Erie Islands and back. There was just one possible hitch—a predicted backdoor cold front. By its very name, the backdoor cold front should have given me pause, since something coming in through the backdoor can be associated with not being quite on the up and up. In weather terms, it refers to “a cold front moving south or southwest along the Atlantic seaboard and Great Lakes,” according to the National Weather Service glossary. “These are especially common during the spring months.” Because they arrive from the east, opposite of typical cold fronts, they’re coming in through…

Heavenly bodies soared out to greet us on our approach to Bermuda. First, an angelic tropicbird dazzled with her tail and her grace as we closed within a few hundred miles of the island. Later, at 30 miles out, Bermuda Radio boomed aboard from the dark of night like the Voice of God. The shockingly loud and clear VHF transmission rang with definitive authority, artfully balanced against a calm tone of welcome. It was the first outside voice we’d heard in a week. With our anchor down inside the perfect protection of St. George’s Harbor, the blissful calm after constant motion at sea helped reinforce our suspicion that we had died and floated into heaven. This was May of 2024, when my wife, Alex, and I sailed our 36-foot Morris…

Sailing is already expensive, and if you take the boat show salespeople at their word, it’s astronomical. Even if you could afford the new boat, between the electronics, watermakers, furling systems, electric winches, FLIR cameras, and vaporware sails you could add several lifetimes of selling plasma to your cruising kitty and still not get close to getting the things they say you need to cast off. Once you buy the boat and kit it out, it would take another 1.6 plasma selling lifetimes to sail to the exotic bucket list destinations you’ve been dreaming about. You’d need to cross oceans, which means rigging upgrades, system redundancy, insurance, training runs to gain offshore experience, months for transits—the list goes on. All the while you’re still dealing with some version of the…