Yachting History

Great boats make great stories. Iconic small boats and the stories that launched them – that is the subject of the new exhibit, Story Boats, at Mystic Seaport Museum (MSM) opening May 28 in the Collins Gallery at the Thompson Exhibition building on the Museum campus in Mystic, CT. Just a few of more than 400 small boats at Mystic Seaport Museum   Story Boats: The Tales They Tell is the brainchild of MSM’s Senior Director of…

By Tom Darling In the fall of 2020, we followed in the wake of an iconic yachtsman, photographer, raconteur, all-around waterman, and tropical sailing pioneer. That would be Carleton Mitchell, born in 1910, who filled the 20th century with the writing on sailing that defined the activity of “cruising.” “Mitch,” as his friends called him, was a modern day Odysseus; his quest was to show the West Indies, its water, its people, its boats, to a curious…

  Editor’s note: Our friends at the Herreshoff Marine Museum & America’s Cup Hall of Fame in Bristol, Rhode Island are celebrating their Golden Jubilee year – the 50th anniversary of the museum’s founding, and WindCheck is honored to be the official Jubilee Media Partner. We’re changing course for this month’s Golden Jubilee feature with a look at a few of the museum’s countless archival images. Most of the photographs shown here appeared in The Chronicle, a paper newsletter…

A handy guide for sailors By Joan Wenner, J.D. Most of us sailors have thanked one or more Gods of the Sea on more than one occasion for safely delivering us from a potential disaster. In veteran sailor John Kretschmer’s 2014 highly popular book Sailing A Serious Ocean: Sailboats, Storms, Stories, and Lessons Learned from 30 Years at Sea (and I might add more than 300,000 offshore sailing miles, circumnavigations, numerous transatlantic an transpacific crossings, and captaining…

In Oyster Bay, New York, in the basement of the oldest yacht club in America, born 1871, there is a vault. In that vault and on the paneled walls of that club is the history of the oldest, most venerable racing class on the continent, in photo and half model. The club is the Seawanhaka Corinthian Yacht Club. The class is the International Six Metre. From the 19th century roots of the boat that evolved into the…

By Tom Darling In Part I of this article (windcheckmagazine.com/article/alerion-past-present-and-future-part-1-whats-an-alerion-1913-1977-perfect/), we detailed the design and early history of Alerion III, Capt. Nathanael Herreshoff’s favorite of dozens of personal boats. When we left Captain Nat in the 1920s, he had retired to Florida in an Alerion derivative named Pleasure and spent his eighties going into the Great Depression. He was on the sidelines for the rise of the mighty J Boats, designed by new blood like Burgess and…

By Dave Easterbrooks and Chip Hawkins In February of 1938, twelve sailors representing yachts clubs from around Narragansett Bay gathered at Rhode Island Yacht Club. RIYC was a fitting gathering place, as it was the oldest yacht club in Rhode Island – chartered in 1875 as the Providence Yacht Club and renamed the Rhode Island Yacht Club in 1887. The 1887 name change coincided with the construction of an impressive clubhouse on Great Rock at Stillhouse Cove…

By Ron Breault Editor’s note: Ron Breault of Old Lyme, CT has owned and successfully campaigned his Sparkman & Stephens Dolphin 24 Marionette for a quarter century. He’s written a book about his custodianship of this lovely classic, Voyaging with Marionette, soon to be released by Whaler Books.   The book will contain the historical record of how finding, buying, restoring, maintaining, and using a ‘classic’ small sailboat opens doors – not just to enjoying sailing in…

By Tom Darling Imagine, if you would, if there were a television game show called “Herreshoff Jeopardy.” You know, the one where you begin your answer with “What is…?” Here, the category is “American Daysailers of the 20th Century.” The game goes like this: “The category is Herreshoff daysailing boats. For $100, this 26-footer was launched in 1913 and sailed for a dozen years, spawning numerous offshoots such as the Newport 29, the Buzzards Bay 25, and…