Racing

By Tom Darling, Conversations with Classic Boats Photos by the author, Princeton 1975, and Hali Liu, Princeton 2025 Princeton University Sailing, which lays claim to being the oldest intercollegiate sailing team, has entered into an innovative collaboration to house its dinghy sailing activities at Anchor Yacht Club, a member owned and maintained club on the Delaware River.   The collaboration, or CoLo (“Co-Location”) as I call it, went into its second year in September 2022 with the…

Have you ever, in the dead of winter and a long way from sailing, looked back to a stretch in the prior racing season where it seemed you could do no wrong? This was midsummer 2022. The place was Nantucket, Harbor and Sound. The boat was a Nathanael Herreshoff design, the Nantucket Alerion, a boat we profiled in our second Conversations with Classic Boats podcast exactly two years ago. The story of the modern evolution of this…

By Greg Gilmartin I still remember one of the first sayings I learned when I tried out sailboat racing. “One hand for you, one hand for the boat!” Couple that with a legendary comedy bit where the punch line was God asking Noah, “How long can you tread water?” These sayings are still with me and through nearly fifty years of setting sails, running races, and watching some of the very best sailors, I still believe that…

By Ted Decyk Photos by Fran Grenon, Spectrum Photo This August brought the 93rd Atlantic Nationals to Niantic Bay Yacht Club in Niantic, CT. The Atlantic, a 30-foot Starling Burgess design primarily built by Cape Cod Shipbuilding in Wareham, MA, loves the wind, but as we know, the dog days of summer in Connecticut can deny us a breeze and that’s exactly what happened on day one. The 23-boat fleet and crew sat at the dock telling…

By Diane Kropfl & Emily Smith, Ms. Race Co-chairs The Atlantic Highlands Yacht Club (AHYC) in Atlantic Highlands, NJ hosted the 18th Annual Ms. Race on Saturday, August 20 on Sandy Hook Bay under clear skies and a favorable breeze. A record showing of accomplished women racers from five New Jersey Bayshore yacht clubs raised their sails to pay tribute to the life and legacy of Eileen Campbell, a woman who had participated in every Ms. Race…

Good Decisions Yield Winners in Four Classes Fully expecting light and variable breezes overnight, forty-three sailing teams started the 2022 Ida Lewis Distance Race presented by Bluenose Yacht Sales on Friday, August 19 and returned throughout the day Saturday, August 20 to complete the event’s 17th edition. The wind conditions wound up ranging from 8-10 knots at the start to high teens and 20s out near Block Island to nearly nothing at points near the finish, making…

The Mixed Offshore Doublehanded European Championship By Barbara “Basia” A. Karpinska Between the pandemic and tough competition for new Olympic sports, we now know that the efforts pioneering Mixed Offshore Doublehanded as a new discipline in Olympic Sailing will need to continue beyond the Games in Paris 2024. Initiated in 2019 in a one-design boat called the L30 (developed by Rodion Luka and designed by Andrej Justin), over the course of the last three years the event…

By David Schwartz The Narragansett Bay Yachting Association held its annual ‘Round The Bay race on Saturday, July 30. NBYA worked with The Nature Conservancy, a global conservation organization dedicated to conserving the lands and waters on which all life depends. Working in this state for fifty years, The Nature Conservancy has helped to conserve 35,000 acres of land in Rhode Island and to protect the quality of the waters we sail in. The seventeen boats racing…

In the spring of 2021, we embarked on a four-episode podcast tracing the development of the International Six Metre Class. The hubs of that furious design and competitive scene were Seawanhaka Corinthian and Larchmont Yacht Clubs in New York. The sailing characters included Briggs Cunningham, Herman Whiton, and many future 12 Metre skippers. We still get podcast listener comments today on those episodes; Sixes stories abound. The drama of the competition played out between designers young and…

By Nick Bowen   The Twenty Hundred Club had their third race of the season on Saturday, July 23. This was also their first of two destination races. The “Cuttyhunk Race” starts just south of Rose Island near the “G3” buoy, takes the sailors about four nautical miles south to buoy “R2” at Brenton Reef. This mark is about two nm south of Castle Hill where the boats turn east for a 19.5 nm run across Rhode…