Yachting History

In the Gilded Age, gentlemen sailors looked to designers like Herreshoff, Crane and Burgess for their custom sailing yachts. As the 20th century unfolded, however, a new age design emerged, that of the semi-custom keelboat, purchased by like-minded sailors interested in competing in fleets as one-designs. We call it the “Club Classic Keelboat.” The idea of designing a boat to a single design or class was a 20th century phenomenon. When young Clinton Crane was commissioned in…

By Brian Stinson This September 26 marks the 40th anniversary of Newport losing the cup – the America’s Cup. I was born in Providence but raised in Newport, Rhode Island – the sailing capital of the world and beyond – and feel extremely privileged to have witnessed many incredible, outrageous, comical, over-the-top moments and spontaneous events.     The summer of 1983 was not my favorite, but events of that momentous day produced the most incredible spectacle…

By Tom Darling, Conversations with Classic Boats I have been accumulating my travel notes over the past six months of crisscrossing New England and present this Baedeker of my favorite nautical museum venues present and future. These collections are as classic as their contents. From the 2022 opening of The Sailing Museum in Newport, RI to the exciting prospect of a dramatic new home for the watercraft collection of the Mystic Seaport Museum, there has never been…

1922–1932: Star Racing Expands Around the World By Carol Newman Cronin Published by the International Star Class Yacht Racing Association, all rights reserved     The first decade of international Star Class competition saw exponential growth on almost every continent. In 1922, six boats sailed a championship out of Manhasset Bay in Western Long Island Sound; it was the first time that any sailors from the East and West Coasts and Great Lakes had all started together…

Not many clubs can boast of having supported junior sailing for 100 years. Indian Harbor Yacht Club in Greenwich, CT is proud to be among the few. Started in 1923, the Club’s junior sailing program has given thousands of children, those of members and non-members alike, an appreciation for the “sport of yachting.” To celebrate this momentous occasion, alumni of the junior sailing program and former instructors are invited to return to the Club on Saturday, June…

By Tom Darling, Conversations with Classic Boats This boating history is one of connecting the dots of boat design over almost a century, with names that are larger than life: Uffa Fox, Bruce Kirby, Dr. Stuart Walker. Their common heritage is small boat performance sailing. As a sailor in Long Island Sound who escaped the slow and steady Blue Jay and Lightning for the speed and trills of the Thistle and the Laser, I can identify. I…

Great boats make great stories. Iconic small boats and the stories that launched them – that is the subject of the new exhibit, Story Boats, at Mystic Seaport Museum (MSM) opening May 28 in the Collins Gallery at the Thompson Exhibition building on the Museum campus in Mystic, CT. Just a few of more than 400 small boats at Mystic Seaport Museum   Story Boats: The Tales They Tell is the brainchild of MSM’s Senior Director of…

By Tom Darling In the fall of 2020, we followed in the wake of an iconic yachtsman, photographer, raconteur, all-around waterman, and tropical sailing pioneer. That would be Carleton Mitchell, born in 1910, who filled the 20th century with the writing on sailing that defined the activity of “cruising.” “Mitch,” as his friends called him, was a modern day Odysseus; his quest was to show the West Indies, its water, its people, its boats, to a curious…

  Editor’s note: Our friends at the Herreshoff Marine Museum & America’s Cup Hall of Fame in Bristol, Rhode Island are celebrating their Golden Jubilee year – the 50th anniversary of the museum’s founding, and WindCheck is honored to be the official Jubilee Media Partner. We’re changing course for this month’s Golden Jubilee feature with a look at a few of the museum’s countless archival images. Most of the photographs shown here appeared in The Chronicle, a paper newsletter…

A handy guide for sailors By Joan Wenner, J.D. Most of us sailors have thanked one or more Gods of the Sea on more than one occasion for safely delivering us from a potential disaster. In veteran sailor John Kretschmer’s 2014 highly popular book Sailing A Serious Ocean: Sailboats, Storms, Stories, and Lessons Learned from 30 Years at Sea (and I might add more than 300,000 offshore sailing miles, circumnavigations, numerous transatlantic an transpacific crossings, and captaining…