Innehållsförteckning för August/September 2025 från SAIL

The brothers came to our hotel after dinner, the summer sun still shining bright above Victoria, British Columbia. They were men now, though I could see the echoes of the boys they were below the beard scruff and thicker muscles. My husband and I hadn’t seen Gavin and Rowan since we sailed with their family to the South Pacific 11 years before. The timing of the brothers’ unexpected visit felt serendipitous: I was leaving the next morning for another passage. On a much smaller boat and in much colder waters, I would sail 700 miles from Victoria to Ketchikan with two girlfriends as part of the Race to Alaska. Gavin and Rowan had seen my post on Facebook about the impending voyage and reached out to say they’d relocated from…

0 200, 65 miles southeast of Newport, Rhode Island, the Swan 53 Mezza Luna is power reaching, heading for the barn inbound from Bermuda. The southwest wind has been building since we punched through the Gulf Stream’s west wall. The wind and boatspeed indicators, mounted on either side of the main hatch and glowing like wolves’ eyes tonight, tell the story: wind at 20-25, boatspeed a steady 9.5, bumping up to 11.2 in the puffs. We are set up in our usual nighttime delivery configuration, a double-reefed main and 150 jib. We have been in and out of heavy fog for the past four hours, running on faith and radar. The Ambrose–Nantucket shipping lanes are less than an hour ahead. The windward running backstay is playing a deep base vibrato…

On a recent voyage from Tahiti to Hawaii, Ka’iulani Murphy was starting to get nervous. She was nearing the end of the 2,400-mile upwind journey and couldn’t get an accurate fix on the boat’s position—not because the chartplotter was broken, but because it had been cloudy for the past few days. It was mid-June in the middle of the North Pacific and her last chance to see the Southern Cross (Hānaiakamalama) upright on the horizon just after sunset. Murphy was the lead navigator for Hōkūle’a, a beloved 50-year-old traditional Polynesian sailing canoe that sparked a renaissance in wayfinding. This boat has no cockpit, no cabin, no compass, no GPS, no cell phone, not even a wristwatch aboard. What it does have is a 20-foot-wide rectangular deck stretched between two hulls,…

Boatbuilding is hard, dirty, technical, often tedious, unforgiving work. So, one could fairly pose the question to Matt and Jessica Johnson, who are four years into a DIY build of a 44-foot catamaran, if it wouldn’t have made more sense to just buy one and go sailing. It’s not like they are newbies to the cruising life. They’ve already owned two other boats, a 1989 Sabre 34 on which they did two transatlantics and sailed the East Coast, Bahamas, Cuba, and Central America, and a 1983 Trisalu 37, an aluminum monohull they spent two years gutting and completely refitting, then sailing to Portugal, Ireland, the Arctic Circle, and Norway. With tens of thousands of miles under their keels in some pretty distant waters, they have walked the walk. So why…

Share your experiences with other readers. Send your photos to sailmail@sailmagazine.com And don’t forget to sign up for our free eNewsletter, Under Sail, at sailmagazine.com/newsletter Letters Little Boat, Big Waves Adam Cove’s recounting of his singlehanded race to Alaska aboard a Marshall Sanderling 18-foot catboat was absolutely captivating (One Wild Cat, May 2025). A true sailor’s story, and I felt right with him the whole way. Having sailed some of those same waters myself, I could perhaps more easily identify with the huge tides and fickle winds he encountered. This is one of the best stories you have ever published, and preferable in my mind to the singlehanded ocean crossing tales where one day melts indistinguishably into the next for weeks on end. Kudos, Adam, for elevating the humble little…

NOAA’s National Weather Service has predicted another above-normal hurricane season in the Atlantic basin. At a news conference held in May in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, marking 20 years since Hurricane Katrina, National Weather Service Director Ken Graham said forecasters expect 13 to 19 named storms, with six to 10 of those becoming hurricanes and three to five becoming Category 3, 4, or 5 hurricanes with winds more than 111 mph. NWS is predicting a 60% probability for an above normal season, 30% near normal, and 10% below normal. Graham noted 70% confidence in the ranges. Contributing factors are higher than normal sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic, forecasts for weak wind shear, an active West African monsoon—where many Atlantic basin storms are born—and a neutral phase of ENSO, the collective…

“Please move forward,” came the order from Ruby, my precocious teenage matters—especially not in the race for boats of 26 feet and under that put on a show—while others are subjects of wondrous tales and imagination. driver, who trimmed her 8-foot inflatable for speed in pursuit of a swarm of dinghies flying downwind like a cloud of butterflies on a sparkling blue late summer day. It was a fitting scene for a wooden boat gathering that in 2027 will celebrate a golden anniversary in this Victorian seaport on the northeastern tip of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. On the weekend after Labor Day, more than 10,000 ticket holders flock to Point Hudson for three days to check out 200-plus craft built of biomass that range from kiddie paddle-wheelers to…

It was early November, I was single-handed and about 150 miles south of Bermuda, heading south. I had dealt with breeze hard on the nose for a few days, but between a slow shift and finally making enough eastward progress to turn south, I was off the breeze and enjoying a northeasterly. As I closed in on the U.S. Virgin Islands, the trades would fill in from the east and build. For now, it was light and on the stern quarter. The flat water made up my mind for me. I set my asymmetrical spinnaker and picked up another couple knots of speed. I went about reading, cooking, and enjoying the beautiful day. When the wind followed the prediction, I strolled up to the foredeck, doused the spinnaker, hoisted the…

When a boat is your full-time home, it’s not so easy to make the transition from cruiser to racer, especially once you start to hear all of your possessions aggressively shifting below. Unlike our Victory 21 Geronimo, which we spend our summers racing on Huntington Lake in California, we had only raced our Cheoy Lee 41 Avocet once before, and despite doing very well we hadn’t done it since. But the 31st Banderas Bay Regatta was special and an opportunity to get out on the water and have some fun with our friends, which is what sailing is all about, isn’t it? A nonprofit event organized by the Vallarta Yacht Club, the three-day Banderas Bay Regatta was created by cruisers for cruisers, attracting sailors of all kinds to enchanting Banderas…

Ted McElhinny and his wife, Stacey, were settling in one night eight years ago when he received an email on his phone. He read it and gasped. “Oh my God, I think this email is going to change our life,” he said. When Stacey read it, she agreed: “I think you’re right.” The email was an offer to sell Ted the boat of his dreams, a Shannon 38, one of 99 built between 1975 and 1984. It wasn’t just the make and model he had been looking for, it was a specific boat he had a long history with, one he thought was lost forever. He didn’t sleep much that night. He was in Maine within a few days, shaking hands with the seller to seal the deal. Bearing hull…

Five years ago, discussions started within Groupe Beneteau to commit to sustainable boatbuilding. This was a strategic investment, and they dedicated resources to continually improve their process, including an entire manufacturing plant in Cheviré. By the end of 2025, Beneteau will bring their efforts full circle and produce the first recycled composite sailboat hull. Manufacturing a recycled boat isn’t possible without recycled materials. While this may sound fundamental, it’s the reason there has been a wait for this moment. Technology does not exist to recycle common epoxy, polyester, or vinylester resins. So, Groupe Beneteau partnered with Arkema, which created a recyclable resin called Elium. They introduced it into a few builds; 2022 saw the first Elium boat built, a First 44 (that also featured electric propulsion). The following year, the…