The college admissions scandal, aside from being distasteful and embarrassing, has taught me a new term. To all of you from nasty northern climates with very short sailing seasons, a snowplow is somet

In our family, every gift-giving opportunity—birthdays, Christmas and Hanukkah, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day—are less about thoughtful and creative generosity, and more about collecting what

I really do understand that “it’s-all-about-me” seems to be pre-installed in today’s precious snowflakes at the factory before delivery, and snowflakes are apparently old enough to have t

Sailors usually have more stories than their nonsailing friends have the patience to hear. Surround a sailor with sailing friends and liquid refreshments and colorful and unforgettable tales will flow

As faithful (and even unfaithful) readers of this column know, I’ve teed off in the past about products that promise to take us sailing. No, not boats, but offerings such as a perfume that vowed to

I’ve been captivated by the intentionally regressive singlehanded Golden Globe Race, which has knocked out more than half of its entrants and unleashed months of Southern Ocean drama with giant stor

To quote Peter Finch as newscaster Howard Beale in the movie “Network,” “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” What led to this state of affairs was a phone call to an

Listening to racers talk about handicapping is like listening to patients explaining the health care market. In health care, nobody knows who is paying what, to whom and for what. In handicapping, nob

Hello, my name is Chris. I’m a charterholic. It’s been four months and 12 days since my last bareboat charter.” Whoops, wrong meeting. Or maybe not. If you’re reading this, you might be a char

 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

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

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

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.” 

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.

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.

It seems a contradictory statement to make in a magazine issue dedicated to safety, but the fact is this: None of us are getting out of here alive. We all have a “sell-by” date, time and place unknown. It’s up to each of us to make it to that point where, in a grocery store, milk would be taken off the shelf, and perhaps a little longer if we’re careful. But it’s going to depend entirely on your own personal responsibility.