Publisher's Log

I was Sonar racing with a mentor out of Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard in the late eighties. It was a one-day event with fantastic summertime conditions. After the cookout, it was revealed that Mentor had not lined up a place for us to spend the night. Since the forecast called for a big cold front and northwester, it seemed a good idea to beat the rush to the hoist and avoid what promised to be a…

Raise your hand if you played hooky for all or part of a weekday to do boat work in the past month. Excellent…very shrewd of you, as the weather turned perfect from the second week of May onwards. Now, raise your hand again if you pressed any children into service to expedite the boat work. I find that 13 and over is really the line of demarcation for significant progress being made versus needing so much instruction,…

I’ll say one thing about this past year…a lot has changed. Behaviors mostly. I distinctly remember how a year ago, we were so excited to be getting ten more “boxes” in mid-town Manhattan where WindCheck would be available. I also distinctly remember making plans for a Taste of Essex℠ exhibit within the CT Spring Boat Show℠. We were going to have ten or more restaurants and other retailers providing samples under the big clubhouse tent on Essex…

I am seriously hoping for a joyous spring. After watching what felt like a million of Connecticut Governor Lamont’s press conferences and daily studying of the vaccination and testing rates in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut and New York, we are forging ahead with our Connecticut Spring Boat Show in Essex, CT. It is both a relief and a welcome burden to do it carefully. The enthusiasm from many sectors has been really uplifting. Yacht brokers’ biggest concerns…

Having just finished editing the first proof of the March 2021 issue, Zep (Editor-in-Chief) pointed out with great pride that we’d created our very own “women in sailing” issue. After all, four out of five of our feature stories are about women in the sport, the subject of our On Watch article is a woman, and Coop’s Corner is (partially) about a woman as well. That is six stories in one issue. I confess, during the gathering…

It has taken a long time to get here, or so it seems. In just one year we’ve gone from making big plans to lockdown, to grumpy adaptation. But along the way, parts of our sport flourished. Go figure. Of course our predecessors would scoff at the idea of grumbling over just one year of hardship. Perhaps it’s the era of non-stop cacophony, the loudness of the “news,” generating forced opinions and divisiveness that made it seem…

In the past 199 issues, WindCheck has not typically printed eulogies. This is in part because so many other publications, not the least of which is Scuttlebutt, do them and do them promptly and very well. We have had exceptions. There have been certain people, bigger-than-life types, who were so key to WindCheck from the beginning and who also happened to be very important figures in the WindCheck Community, that we were duty bound to honor them….

Stamford Yacht Club and the Storm Trysail Club with Riverside Yacht Club hosted three regattas on three successive weekends. The Vineyard Race, The Valeur-Jensen Stamford Denmark Race and the Long Island Sound Championships all had beautiful September weather. And sandwiched in there on the middle Saturday, 9/12, was Larchmont Yacht Club’s Edlu Race, a short distance race traditionally sailed as a warm-up to Block Island Race in the spring. I have sailed a big handful of Edlu’s,…

This summer we saw junior program directors and instructors trying really hard to make their classes possible, never mind fun or normal. But as many have observed, this brought a lot of “old school” behaviors back into play, some of which have been called for, without a pandemic to force the situation. Fierce competition at regattas had to take a break this summer. I’m wondering how that will turn out. Will kids have (gulp!) lost a step…be…

If you read last month’s iteration, I waxed on about the Covid-driven explosion in boating and the process of finding a new family boat and ended with teasing the grand plan to bring the boat back north with my 12-year-old. Well, what a surprise! Things did not go as planned.     Many aspects of the mission were accomplished. My son got to experience firsthand the logistics of getting a survey done, doing sea trials, making friends…