Author: Tom Darling

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…

Reliving the Past in Intercollegiate Sailing We learned in the recent streaming series on the New England Patriots, “The Dynasty,” that a true dynasty team needed to have at least three successive championships in four attempts to be described with the D-word. The 1960s Boston Celtics, the ‘80s LA Lakers, and ‘90s Chicago Bulls come to mind. In the mid-1970s, in the very early days of Women’s intercollegiate sailing, one team made that grade and went one…

Interview by Tom Darling, Conversations with Classic Boats, “the Podcast that Talks to Boats” Last month, we opened this gam – that’s whaling talk for a social conversation at sea – with whom I consider the top curator minds at Northeast marine museums. Christina Connett Brophy (CB), Senior VP of Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic, CT, and Evelyn Ansel (EA), Curator of the Herreshoff Marine Museum in my old homeport of Bristol, RI, follow up this month…

This month we continue our series of what we call gams. That’s a whaling term for conversations, and we’re speaking with the curators of what I consider the most important marine museums in America, if not the world. Christina Brophy is Senior VP of Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic, CT, and Evelyn Ansel is Curator of the Herreshoff Marine Museum, the flagship attraction in my old hometown, Bristol, RI.   TD: Hello to both you, and thanks…

By Tom Darling, Conversations with Classic Boats Ever wonder what seasoned amateur marine writers do in their free time? More often than not, they are having a “gam,” somewhere, anywhere. For those of you not conversant in whaling terminology, a gam was a timeout at sea, an opportunity to sit around and shoot the breeze. In his novel Moby-Dick, Melville brought this seagoing social media format to life in chapter 53, defining it thusly: “Gam (noun) –…

Keelboat racing was the original form of intercollegiate sailing. From the McMillan Cup, first sailed in 1928 and formalized in 1930 as a quasi-national championship for college big boat crews, sprung a small number of spinoff events like the Kennedy Cup. Focused on the larger offshore keelboat fleets of the service academies, this form of intercollegiate big boat sailing was mega one-design competition. In the 1970s, that offshore schedule expanded with events like the Corinthians, rebranded in…

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…