From hanks to high-tech, there’s been one constant in sailing: the beauty
If it wasn’t a surprise to see a tabloid called SAILING roll off the press in our small-town newspaper print shop in 1966, it was only because little my father did was surprising to those who knew him. He had a knack of pulling unlikely ideas out of nowhere and making them happen, albeit with varying levels of success. That’s how he brewed root beer in our basement and founded a yacht club in our town when it had virtually no yachts, no yachtsmen and no pleasure boat facilities. The root beer was overcharged with yeast and bottles exploded day and night for weeks. The yacht club, on the other hand, thrives to this day. When he got the idea for SAILING, he just did it. He wrote the stories, sold the ads, took some of the pictures and with an assistant laid out the pages of that first issue.
The surprise is that SAILING is today a glossy national magazine celebrating its 40th anniversary.
In the magazine business, survival is considered a significant achievement. SAILING has survived longer than any other American sailing magazine except one, and is the oldest continuously published sail-only magazine. The “continuously published” qualification refers to One-Design Yachtsman, an all-sail magazine that was started in 1962 but suspended publication during periods of hard times, and went through several name changes. SAILING has never missed an issue since the first appeared in black ink on newsprint. O-DY, now known as Sailing World, has always been a racing journal. So how about this claim: SAILING is America’s oldest general-interest sailing magazine. And here’s another, which I promise will be the last, that needs no qualification whatsoever: SAILING is the oldest sailing magazine in the U.S. still owned by its original owner, the same independent, family-owned company that owned it when it appeared out of nowhere 40 year’s ago.
That is just for perspective, folks. I don’t put much stock in the distinctions that come with surviving to old age. I know that all that really matters is that our readers like the issue they’re reading now.
What this issue, like the 486 that came before it, does is to reflect the contemporary world of sailing as interpreted by our writers, photographers and editors. I don’t know about you, but I like what I see in that reflection. Certainly there’s more to like than there was when SAILING was born.
The boats, for example. Technology has been kind to sailing, giving us some amazingly able craft, and I’m not referring to the new breed of extreme racing sailboats that can go as fast as powerboats. I mean the garden variety cruisers produced by the thousands that are easy and rewarding to sail, comfortable and safe. Boats that were launched about the time SAILING was launched were, well, safe.
That was the era of hanked-on jibs, baggy Dacron sails, fat, stretchy rope, thick, gooey bottom paint, massive wooden blocks and winches that seemed better suited to agricultural tasks than nautical ones. Roller furling wasn’t so much as a gleam in an inventor’s eye and virtually every cruising size sailboat under 50 feet long was powered by an Atomic Four gasoline engine. Somehow that doesn’t generate fuzzy feelings of nostalgia for me.
If the tangible improvements in sailing were impressive, the intangible changes were downright revolutionary. Four decades ago sailing was a mysterious and daunting universe few who had not been born into it were intrepid enough to enter. The anointed and initiated often discouraged visitors to this world with tales of the complexity and danger of sailing. The yacht clubs under whose burgees most of the sailboats then extant were gathered showed little interest in admitting new faces to their blue-blazered ranks.
That universe is now lost forever in space, and good riddance. I may sound like an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal here, but the truth is this is a case of private enterprise, good old robust capitalism, improving society. The barriers to sailing have been knocked down and discarded. Sailing is inclusive, not exclusive. Good sailboats are everywhere, to own, charter or use at a community sailing center. Sailing is no longer esoteric or scary. All because as SAILING was aborning, so was the sailing industry—the business of sailing.
The ability to mass produce fiberglass sailboats—increasingly user-friendly sailboats—in effect mass produced sailors. The industry didn’t stop with selling its boats and the widgets that make them work. It has for the past 20 years or so led to an effort to sell the pastime, sport and lifestyle of sailing. The best of these efforts have been successful at getting people on the water to try sailing.
Sailing has grown as a result, but at a slower pace than other recreations. This has caused angst in some quarters, but I think it should be accepted as the natural state of things. Because sailing, though more welcoming and accessible than before, is not for everyone. It’s easier than ever, but it still requires learning some skills. It doesn’t produce instant gratification. There is a good deal of nuance involved in appreciating it. And while it’s safer than most things we do, there’s still a whiff of risk in the unknown of the weather, the potential fury of the sea and the premium it puts on self-reliance.
But what turns some off about sailing turns others on. What are qualms for some are the reasons many of us love sailing: We revel in the challenges. In the end, though, I think sailing’s enduring appeal derives mainly from its beauty—experiencing the glory of nature away from the visual and aural clutter of the shorebound world in one of man’s most aesthetically satisfying objects. That explains the motto on our cover—The Beauty of Sail—and this magazine’s reverence for the superlative sailing photograph.
That’s why SAILING, in terms of page size, is the biggest sailing magazine of them all. I know, I broke my promise with that claim. You’re allowed to do that when your magazine hits 40.
