June 2021

Raise your hand if you played hooky for all or part of a weekday to do boat work in the past month. Excellent…very shrewd of you, as the weather turned perfect from the second week of May onwards. Now, raise your hand again if you pressed any children into service to expedite the boat work. I find that 13 and over is really the line of demarcation for significant progress being made versus needing so much instruction,…

Our friends at the Herreshoff Marine Museum & America’s Cup Hall of Fame in Bristol, RI have launched their Golden Jubilee year; the 50th anniversary of its founding by Sidney DeWolf Herreshoff and Rebecca Chase Herreshoff in 1971. The museum is now open to the public for this very special season, with events celebrating fifty years of museum collections, preservation, education and inspiration.   June 26: A Celebration of Herreshoff One Design Yachts Hosted by the New…

Our friends at North Sails are moving their Milford, CT manufacturing, sales, and service loft to Steelpointe Harbor in Bridgeport, CT.     Located in the former Derecktor Shipyards facility just off Interstate 95 on Seaview Avenue, the 35,000 square foot flagship loft will open on July 1, 2021, bringing several global departments under one roof and serving as the global headquarters for North Technology Group. This location puts North Sails at the heart of an exciting nautical destination…

The Boothbay Harbor Yacht Club (BHYC) in West Boothbay Harbor, ME is expanding its 2021 regatta to include four classic yacht divisions, which will sail under the Shipyard Cup Classics Challenge banner. The 47th running of the historic BHYC Regatta takes place the weekend of July 24 & 25, 2021. The Shipyard Cup Classics Challenge was inspired by growing participation in classic yacht races in Maine and evolved out of The Shipyard Cup Regatta, which ran for…

A remarkable victory for Roust in the 2013 Marion to Bermuda Race By Ian N.H. Gumprecht In February 2013, I had been doing my best for the previous couple of months to pull together a crew for the 2013 Marion to Bermuda Race. Of the four individuals I was hounding, only one, Mark Swanson, had thus far committed. Mark and I had done five Newport Bermuda Races together as crew on a J/44. For this race however,…

  By Wendy Popp-Simmons, Allegro S20   Editor’s note: This is the fifth article in a series we’re publishing throughout 2021, showcasing iconic Herreshoff fleets and their owners as important stewards of Herreshoff boats, originals and replicas alike. Our friends at the Herreshoff Marine Museum in Bristol, RI 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.  The Herreshoff Marine Museum is located…

In many races, changes in wind direction are the most common and significant strategic factor. The wind is almost always shifting, and even small changes in direction can lead to huge gains and losses in the race. Therefore, if you want to get to the first mark in good shape, you must be skilled at recognizing and playing the shifts. In most races, the windshift pattern is either oscillating (i.e. shifting back and forth around a fairly…

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…

As of June 1, hurricane season is upon us. Almost without exception, we in the Northeast USA get the tail, shoulder or rump of one or two of the dozen or so that form up in the Atlantic between the Caribbean and Africa and bring so much destruction and misery with them as they thunder west and north…and now, an “average” season is worse than ever. This column is about that. As the time of this writing…

Habits are a funny thing. You’ve got decent habits, like a black coffee with two sugars and a float plan with a fuel reserve. And then they’re the bad habits like those Marlboro Reds, wearing your COVID mask under your nose, and open water trips with a single outboard and no float plan. Sometimes a mariner’s innocent habits can lead to disaster. Yup, your nautical patterns might chart a course straight onto the legal shoals, making it…