May 2018 By Lawrence Smith It looks like skiffs are making a comeback. The Maine-based website, Off Center Harbor, is running a video series that features bright-eyed youngsters engaged in the communal building of some fine 13-foot wooden skiffs. Plans for the homebuilder are advertised in the back pages ofRead More

Guest perspective/Paul Brown I bought my first sailboat in 1987, when I was 52 years old. It was a Thunderbird 26 sloop, a pretty little one-design built for cruising and racing. One could sit on the un-enclosed marine toilet and touch all four berths, the stove and sink. Needless toRead More

Transitioning from a 22-foot sailboat to a Pearson 30 wasn’t as easy as we’d thought. The larger boat had copious stowage, but the “Venus/Mars” syndrome transpired – then morphed us into a team.

Guest perspective/Hank Garfield We didn’t know what we were doing. All we knew was that the waterline on my Cape Dory 25, Planet Waves, was terribly wrong. You can see it in the photos: her stern is apparently thrust upward like a duck’s, making her look bow-heavy. But nothing wasRead More

March/April 2018 By Christopher Birch There we were: In an engineless sailboat, in the Atlantic, in December. Paddling. Sea and sky were the same shade of slate. Light snow further blurred the boundaries between frozen, liquid and gas. Koshare’s faded dirty whiteness blended into the scene. We’d been paddling forRead More

Can you cruise without a dinghy? After a long, checkered history with nine of them – hard and inflatable – on five different boats, we now happily make coastal passages without one.

Guest perspective/Ben Emory Navigating along the Maine coast has always been a welcome challenge of summertime, especially to the east of Schoodic. “. . . conditions change rapidly after passing [Mount Desert Island] bound east. There is more fog . . . The currents are stronger everywhere . . .Read More

Guest perspectve/Marilyn Brigham I make lists – shopping lists, birthday lists, Christmas lists, to-do lists. They keep me organized and focused, and I enjoy a feeling of some accomplishment when the task has been completed and all the items have been crossed off. But, early-on in our cruising, I’d drawnRead More

Guest perspective/W.R. Cheney I used to see her on my way into town from our winter home at Lady’s Island, S.C. Factory Creek runs parallel to Route 21 – the Sea Island Parkway – for a short distance, just east of the bridge connecting downtown Beaufort with Lady’s Island. There’sRead More

Guest perspective/Russ Roth Two years ago we made a decision to repower our sailboat, Skiya (see Points East, August 2015). This spring I needed to be repowered. Last June, Marty and I left our mooring in Portsmouth Harbor on our yearly migration to our mooring in Rockland, Maine. We hadRead More