He tells us in one of his sailing ditties that he’s the son of a son of a sailor. But he’s more than that—he’s a sailor himself. His latest sailboat graced the cover of the July/August issue of SAILING in a photograph of a turquoise-hulled 50-footer named Drifter carving a frothy white wake through turquoise Caribbean water. Yes, Jimmy Buffett is one of us. Schedule

 You may be familiar with the concept of the sailing timeshare, that is, fractional sailboat ownership in order to be able to sail for a few weeks a year in an idyllic place like the tropics. A f

I witnessed an enormous spinnaker acting like a parachute-type sea anchor built for a battleship being pulled through the water on a kite string by a sailboat driven by strong wind and big waves.

Longtime readers know that I have a few rants that pop up from time to time, so consider yourself warned. This is going to be one of them. One of my rants has been the late, great, America’s Cup, wh

Jack tars in the Age of Sail were probably better athletes than today’s sailors. If they served before the mast, they had to be in order to survive scampering up the ratlines, crawling out on yards,

We’re sailboat shopping. Replacing one beloved family boat with another is a big change, so we’ve spent a lot of time pondering the ideal design. Our wishlist asks that it be:1. Large en

A white yachting hat sporting an anchor badge on the crown and faux admiral’s scrambled eggs on the visor, blue yachting blazer with polished brass buttons, pleated Breton red pants adorned wit

Batten down the hatches. Another sailing movie is setting sail.  At least I hope we have to secure the hatches in preparation for some stormy drama. The last sailing movie I saw induced a torpor

We live in a 9-to-5 world, our calendars, computers and appointment books jammed with scribbled must-dos and don’t-forgets, and we have very little time that isn’t scheduled. The very concept of “spare time” has disappeared from our vocabularies. Kids scurry from soccer practice to dance lessons without pause for either kid or parent.

A popular one-design dinghy class association recently announced that its rules committee had approved new class-legal digital compasses. I was curious to learn more about the breakthrough, wondering if the committee had finally given in to data. Cruisers and handicap racers find that data can simplify sailing: inexpensive computers tie routing to actual weather, a start can be precisely timed with clocks that account for speed and distance, and tactics can be determined based on actual fleet and global positioning. Instead, I learned that the committee had barely budged: Finally allowing its sailors to pick from two 20-year-old digital compass designs, in addition to the analog kind, but only “provided that the devices do not have the capacity for information other than heading.” 

We lost a subscriber last summer. That’s not unusual. It’s part of the ebb and flow of the magazine business, gain some readers, lose some. Yet this loss was remarkable because of the stature of the subscriber. Let me tell you about Rudy Haase.

As a card-carrying member of the Mainstream Media (Ink-Stained Wretch Newspaper Division), I cringe whenever my brethren in national news organizations report on sailing. They never get it quite righ

Hurricane holes live in Caribbean legend as promises of survival in the hurricanes that scourge the islands. These scattered anchorages are invariably landlocked except for a skinny entrance channel and many are bordered by storm surge-absorbing mangrove.

Recently, a photo of two sailboats—one large and one seemingly quite small—went viral. The larger of the two boats was Comanche, the 100-foot record-crushing super maxi.

OK, I admit it. I’ve been a harsh critic of helicopter parents for a long time. You know, the parents that hover around their children, never giving them a chance to think or do on their own. They rig their boats, follow them on the racecourse aboard mommy boats, hire coaches to video and critique them.

To paraphrase a viral White House comment about health care, nobody knew that safety at sea could be so complicated. Some sailors think it can be simplified by applying rigid rules and rote procedure

America’s Cup foiling ranks among the top technical feats of this young century, on par with the booster rocket that lands itself or the pictures sent from the surface of a comet. Well-funded teams of great engineers make miracles.

You can buy the best sailing instrument ever made for 40 bucks.