Conversations with Classic Boats

In 1959, Carleton Mitchell, the adventurous sailor and author that brought Caribbean cruising to the sailing public, released a very different book. It was called Summer of the Twelves and it was based on the Sports Illustrated articles that he wrote on the events of the summer of 1958, when America’s Cup racing resumed after the wartime hiatus. The boat in question was the 12 Metre, some 69 to 72 feet long overall, 30 feet shorter than…

Last summer we took a trip down the trail of my family’s yachting history, to the fabled hub of New York yachting, City Island. We learned in our research that many of the skilled workers in the shipyards and sail lofts were immigrants. Several were Scots. Much of what has created American yachting tradition came from the British Isles, predictably from England and, surprisingly, a wee bit more from Scotland.     The Solent and the Clyde…

“It’s not history. It’s fiction based on fact.”     The story of the schooner, America’s first iconic yacht design, often follows along fanciful story lines. From the original America, namesake for the Cup that’s launched a hundred campaigns, to working fishing boats and more recently built craft constructed with modern materials, the schooner is a design mystery tucked in a long-lost history book. What makes a schooner a schooner? It’s a sailboat built with a minimum…

August, midsummer. It is THE season. Art shows, antiques shows, car shows and of course, boat shows. We are not visiting boat shows to kick the tires or buy a boat; we are touring collections of vintage, usually all wooden, boats brought by their owners for viewing by the boating public. We’re talking about an Antiques Roadshow of floating vintage wood. There are many such shows but we have picked two, one about as far east as…

New York City’s boating history comes alive at the City Island Nautical Museum   In late June, I took a trip down a personal nautical memory lane. My cousin Peter Taylor, a talented marine photographer, and I drove over the bridge, first built in 1874, from the Bronx mainland and crept down City Island Avenue, the island’s main north-south artery. We were looking for the City Island Nautical Museum at 190 Fordham Street because we have family…

At the end of the North Fork of Long Island, there’s a fishing and boating town called Greenport. For most, it’s the jumping off point via ferry for Shelter Island, long past its origins as a sleepy Quaker refuge. Shelter Island is home to the largest concentration of classic boats out East. That fleet numbers as many as fifty fiberglass Doughdish sloops, Cape Cod Shipbuilding’s transcription of Herreshoff’s most prolific 1914 design, the Herreshoff 12 ½. At…

Betsy Alison and 38 Years in Modern Women’s Sailing By Tom Darling, Conversations with Classic Boats In last month’s WindCheck, we interviewed our old friend and Princeton classmate Marilee Allan. From a Southern California sailing family, Marilee anchored the team that won the 1974 Women’s Intercollegiate Championship and went on to win them through 1977. She was a pioneer who along with her Newport Beach neighbor, the late Nina Nielsen, were the first female inductees into the…

  There are always boats that have stuck in our mind; some for their size and speed, some just for the impression that they made on you the sailor at a time in your boating life. Some of those boats have had an enviable and remarkable lifespan. For me, one of those boats was Illusion, the Cal 40 from Larchmont, pitch black. The black Cal 40, a Left Coast design that transported to the East in overnight…