September 2021

We have been on quite a roll with our “classics” content in 2021. Beyond working with our friends at the Herreshoff Marine Museum & America’s Cup Hall of Fame as a partner for their Golden Jubilee Celebration, we have continued with our relationship with Conversations with Classic Boats. The content from these contributors has been just fantastic, and we hope you have enjoyed digging into a very uniquely Northeast/New England topic, one we can all be both…

Our friends at Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic, CT have appointed Chris Sanders as the new director of the Henry B. duPont Preservation Shipyard. Sanders succeeds longtime director Quentin Snediker, who will stay on at the Museum in his role as the Clark Senior Curator for Watercraft. “Chris brings a wealth of ship and boatbuilding experience to the leadership of the duPont Preservation Shipyard,” said Peter Armstrong, president of Mystic Seaport Museum. “He has proven his knowledge…

Our friends at the New England Science & Sailing Foundation (NESS), a nonprofit ocean adventure education organization in Stonington, CT, have announced the appointment of Eric Isselhardt, PhD to the position of President. Isselhardt joined the NESS team as Executive Director of Education in January 2020. Spike Lobdell, who founded NESS in 2002, will continue to lead NESS in his role as Chief Executive Officer. “The title of President reflects Eric’s leadership role at NESS,” Lobdell said.  “We are excited…

Doublehanded Sailors Ken Read/Suzy Leech Win Coveted Venona Trophy   Sailing doublehanded on the Jeanneau Sunfast 3300 Alchemist, Rhode Islanders Ken Read (Portsmouth) and Suzy Leech (Jamestown) collected a boatload of trophies for their ‘Round-the-Island (‘RTI) Race performance at the annual Edgartown Race Weekend, hosted by Edgartown Yacht Club in Edgartown, MA on July 22-24. The most impressive piece of silverware – the prestigious Venona Trophy, which dates back to the origins of the race in 1938 – validated…

  The concept of racing doublehanded got a serious boost last year. This was driven, apart from “distancing” restrictions, by the proposal to include a doublehanded co-ed offshore class in the Olympics. Well, like many of the highly caffeinated drinks one might imbibe during the O’dark-thirty watch, this boost went up and came down pretty quickly, surrendering the field of DH racing back to the folks who have been doing it, in some cases, for years. Competitors…

The Herreshoff Legacy Lives On   By John Burnham By far the most distinctive trophy in the Fishers Island Yacht Club (FIYC) for the last 55 years is a scale model of a 15-and-a-half foot Bullseye in a glass case. Awarded to the club skipper who finishes first in the summer series each season, the trophy is named for its former owner, H. Lee Ferguson, and houses a model of Ferguson’s boat, Peregrine. Known as Lee, Ferguson…

If you want to get around the windward mark quickly, you have to know something about laylines. Laylines are those imaginary dotted pathways on the water that show the course a boat would sail to fetch the mark on either tack. Though laylines are generally good places to avoid, you have to reach one sooner or later in order to round the mark. So it’s important to know where they are. Of course, laylines are never etched…

A Stopover at the RS Feva Class North American & JSA of LIS Feva Championships Cedar Point Yacht Club in Westport, CT hosted the 2021 RS Feva Class North American Championship and the Junior Sailing Association of Long Island Sound Feva Championship on July 29 & 30. The day before the regatta, sailors attended a US Sailing sponsored clinic led by coach Mackenzie McGuckin, to practice and refine their boat handling skills on these sporty 12-foot youth…

By Javier Roman-Nieves, ecological communications specialist At the time of this writing, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—the world’s leading authority on climate science—had just issued its latest report on our ongoing climate catastrophe. More than eight years in the making and based on the peer-reviewed work of hundreds of researchers around the world, the report’s findings are the direst yet. The 2015 Paris Agreement goal of stopping temperatures from rising more than 1.5° C, or between…

When the perfectly calm day sneaks up on you while you are daydreaming and turns into a snarly, life-stealing beast, all your training rushes to the front of the “screen.” But sometimes, all your skill isn’t going to get you home. And sometimes the boat itself is what betrays you as she threatens to slip away beneath you. You are going to be hard to find – unless you are sending a personal signal to the satellite…