Guest perspective/Christopher Birch The longer I have been around boats, the more I have come to appreciate the small ones. When I was young, I dreamed of how grand it would be to have a massive sailing yacht of my very own. Now, some years later, my heart skips aRead More

By Bob Muggleston For Points East Last summer, in the crowded Connecticut anchorage where I kept my boat, there was one vessel that always caught my eye. It was a small catamaran with a rectangular cabin aboard it that had not one, but two, decks – one on the roof,Read More

Guest perspective/Paul Brown The ’Bird: A Thunderbird 26 sloop is a so-called one-design “racer/cruiser.” In 1958, it was the winning design, by Seattle naval architect Ben Seaborn, in a plywood association’s contest for the best sailboat fashioned from marine plywood. The objective was a low-cost “Volkswagen,” simple to build andRead More

Guest perspective/Capt. Michael L. Martel Anyone restoring, or even replicating a traditional Maine-built craft, pleasure or working sail, knows that these vessels, when originally built, were not outfitted with Herreshoff bronze, generally. Instead, their fittings – from spar hardware to windlasses to chainplates – were forged steel or cast steelRead More

It was love at first sight when, in 1983, the author laid eyes on the very first Hinckley Pilot 35 to come down the ways, and he bought her. Last summer, he celebrated her six decades of sailing.

Midwinter 2017 By Christopher Birch The best advice I ever gave my children was to drink their coffee black and their whiskey neat. I rest easy knowing how much time I have saved them from rustling around looking for things like cream and sugar and ice. If other parents hadRead More

The timing was right for the semi-retired couple and although there have been some challenges, they wouldn’t have it any other way.

Capt. Bob Brown Ultimately, this is a story about a boat. But it has to start as a story about our marina – Cove Marina, in Salisbury, Mass. For 19 of our 20 years of boating, we have begun our journeys from Cove Marina and, more or less, have endedRead More

On a recent sailing trip that involved passing through Woods Hole, we were again reminded of the important role that tides play in our boating activities.

Ensign Hull No. 1337 has been in the author’s family for five decades, and five generations of Coppas have sailed her off the same Wickford, R.I., mooring since the late 1960s.