Indholdsfortegnelse for January/February 2026 i SAIL

This autumn Portsmouth, New Hampshire, welcomed artists from far and wide to join the 25th annual Maritime Folk Festival, a celebration of sea songs and America’s sailing heritage. The event spanned two days and five venues across the city’s historic waterfront and invited the public in to listen as 14 musical acts performed. Also on offer were demonstrations of traditional crafts, including a comprehensive look into the function that shanties played on working ships. “It’s our small way of keeping the area’s maritime tradition alive,” says Harrison Woodman, a volunteer with the event. Singers traveled from several states away to perform and share in the sense of community that the festival engenders. “This is our first time here, but we’d love to keep coming back again,” says Dan Spurr of…

Standing atop the ruins of an old sugar mill on the north side of St. John, our boys, Porter (11) and Magnus (10), gazed out over beautiful Waterlemon Cay, Leinster Bay, and The Narrows, the latter of which separates the U.S. Virgin Islands from the British Virgin Islands. Behind them, I snapped a picture on my phone and then put my arm around my wife, Jill, to soak in the scene. It was our last day in the USVI and, though we looked forward to checking into the BVI at Soper’s Hole the following morning, it was bittersweet. We were eager to move on, but it was sad to say goodbye. This was our family’s second season swinging through the Virgin Islands, and each year we’d spent about two months…

It’s diffcult to make a sailing film. The conditions at sea are hard on cameras (and camera operators), there are a lot of technical things that filmmakers tend to get wrong while sailors nitpick, and the audience is relatively small for a commercial release. We’ve got a couple good ones and even more bad ones. There’s Wind, Adrift, Morning Light, Maiden, All is Lost, Deep Water, Mercy…I’ll let you decide which are which. My point is, there are few enough of them that I always take notice when something new comes out. Women & The Wind didn’t only catch my attention, though. Hundreds of thousands of people tuned in to watch on social media as Kiana Weltzien and her ragtag crew—consisting of a newbie sailor and a camerawoman—spent a month…

The Excess line of cruising catamarans launched in 2019 with a value proposition that was a little sketchy—the product didn’t match the brand promise. The vague attempt at providing a thrilling new experience was heaped onto a barely revamped Lagoon platform and frankly, I wasn’t buying it. But six years later, the line includes three from-scratch models that are making waves in the cruising multihull space. The latest to splash is the 43-foot Excess 13, which fulfilled all that once-promised thrill as we hauled the mail on a cold and windy test day. I joined Excess brand director Thibaut de Montvalon and product manager Herve Piveteau on a blustery outing on the Chesapeake. To say that the conditions were ideal would have been an understatement. The Bay’s flat waters combined…

Throw away your radar, GPS and cell phone. Disconnect the autopilot and toss your marine radio into the waves. Shut down everything powered by electricity. Hundreds of miles offshore, you’ll begin to imagine what it was like aboard a great wooden merchant ship in the 1800s. Picture this: You are 24 years old and captain of a 177-foot threemasted bark, a workhorse of the ocean, with a crew of 22 men including cook, carpenter, sailors and offcers. Pigs and chickens breed and get butchered in your hold. Your cargo of bird guano, a prized fertilizer from the Chincha Islands, has left a layer of noxious white dust across every surface. As you approach Cape Horn at the tip of South America, you notice water gushing through the timbers near the…

With just a flashlight and a stack of firewood we set out into the bay. The chop from the afternoon southwesterly had faded and the water’s surface danced with shoreside reflections. Maneuvering through the faint outlines of familiar boats led us to the edge of the mooring field. Ahead was only darkness. Waters that seemed endlessly known, ones I had covered hundreds of times in daylight, were now a bit of a mystery. I kept the wind on my right cheek, hoping that it would help me hold a steady course. Glancing back, the porch lights all began to look the same, but two streetlights stood out with their warmer glow—I’d keep that in mind for the way home. Our twelve-foot boat felt smaller than ever before. The distances also…

Doing It Yourself I thoroughly enjoyed reading Zuzana Prochazka’s article The A.I. Boogey Man (September, 2025). I happen to be a 73 year old retiree and not one who might be characterized as a “sailing enthusiast.” But my friend Jason is. Both of us coming from engineering backgrounds, we try to get together once a week to restore his 25-foot sailboat “dry-docked” in the backyard. We call our get-togethers “Rocket Science Boatworks.” (I worked 25 years at Caltech, he works for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.) Our days begin with coffee and muffns before delving into the latest project, hands-on, one-off, custom layout, modification and fabrication using our specialized “human” skills that we developed over our lifetimes. I am well aware and appreciative of the benefits of Computer Aided Design and…

There’s something about a raised deckhouse yacht that puts me in mind of late summer sailing. Temperatures are still clement enough during the day, but there’s a nip in the air at night, and you want to be tucked up inside for your morning coffee. Where better than behind a layer of insulating glass that still lets you survey the anchorage? With the recent launch of the new Heyman 42 Pocket Pilot House (PPH), deckhouse design has returned to its roots. From the comfortable motor-sailers and trawlers of the past, via the sleeker raised salons of Wauquiez, Amel, and Discovery, the Heyman puts the salon back at cockpit level. Hardly surprising, then, that its distinctive form stopped me in my tracks as I weaved through the Düsseldorf boat show last…

Advancements in weather modeling and satellite communication continue to make sailing across oceans faster and safer. Both computer-driven weather routing apps and human routing professionals can now easily deliver sophisticated weather intel to any boat anywhere on the planet. Because of this, most offshore sailors today don’t hope for good weather; they aim for it instead. Fantastic routing advice, coupled with snappy graphics, can lead a sailor to believe that crossing oceans is as simple as crossing the street. Unfortunately, modern technology does not provide a passage panacea. No weather router is going to be able to find you an easy ride eastbound across the North Atlantic in January. Understanding routing guidance advice—and knowing when to follow it and when to question it—will help a navigator make the most of…