Letters

What Happened TeamVestas Wind? Editor’s Note: John Fulweiler’s “Boating Barrister column titled ‘What Happened Team Vestas Wind?’ garnered a great deal of response last month and the grounding of the Volvo Ocean Race team is still a subject of much discussion. From Cruising Log of the Murrelet The saying that there are two kinds of sailors, those who have run aground and those who will run aground, is comforting to those recently grounded. But grounding rarely involves…

Letters to WindCheck September 2014

The “Eastern Shore” can sometimes seem like another country with its small towns and agrarian history

Light on a clipper In the article “Tall Ships on Canvas” [July 2013], author J. Russell Jinishian mentions that the clipper St. Mary ran into a British ship, Magellan. The Magellan belonged to Hemenway Browne of Boston (now Wessel, Duval & Co.) and was built in 1873 at the East Boston Shipyards. It was great to see the painting of the St. Mary and know the ship that was involved in the collision. We have been looking for…

Charting a New Course: A Response to NOAA Discontinuing Lithograph Charts A lot is being written about the “crisis” over NOAA ceasing lithograph nautical chart production. This decision was as inevitable as the decline of the horse and buggy as a primary form of transportation. It’s simply a story of obsolete technology. The reality is, most of the NOAA charts sold over the past 10 years have been Print-on-Demand (POD) charts. Starting in 2000, NOAA partnered with…

We knew that Bill Sandberg’s Sound Off! column in our September issue, entitled “Why Kids Don’t Want to Sail,” would strike a chord with our readership. Below are responses that reflect people’s opinions on Bill’s insight into this oft-discussed topic.