Author: Tom Darling

With Conversations with Classic Boats, “the Podcast that Talks to Boats,” in its fourth seasons, we listened to our focus group. They were calling for conversations with famous people. We obliged. For Episode 1 of the Classic Conversations Sailors Log, we recruited the ever-optimistic Dave Perry, back on the circuit giving his well-known live shows on the Racing Rules and heading to France in 2024 as Rules Advisor to the U.S. Olympic Team. We caught up with…

A century ago, the establishment of a U.S.-UK challenge, the British American Cup (“BAC”) brought with it a golden age of innovative racing keelboat design. In our 2021 Conversations with Classic Boats series on the development of the Six Metre, we marked the BAC as an inflection point in modern yacht racing. The BAC was a challenge in 1921: You designed a boat to the International Six Metre rule (then virtually unknown in the U.S.). Each side…

Our Hardwater Sailing President By Tom Darling, Conversations with Classic Boats Who would have thought that the 32nd President of the United States, a known yachtsman, honed his skills in hardwater sailing on the Hudson River. In fact, Franklin Delano Roosevelt followed in a long family tradition of ice yachting.     Records at the FDR National Historic Site in Hyde Park, New York tell the story of the active ice yachting scene on the Hudson in…

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…

By Tom Darling, Conversations with Classic Boats Photos by the author, Princeton 1975, and Hali Liu, Princeton 2025 Princeton University Sailing, which lays claim to being the oldest intercollegiate sailing team, has entered into an innovative collaboration to house its dinghy sailing activities at Anchor Yacht Club, a member owned and maintained club on the Delaware River.   The collaboration, or CoLo (“Co-Location”) as I call it, went into its second year in September 2022 with the…

Have you ever, in the dead of winter and a long way from sailing, looked back to a stretch in the prior racing season where it seemed you could do no wrong? This was midsummer 2022. The place was Nantucket, Harbor and Sound. The boat was a Nathanael Herreshoff design, the Nantucket Alerion, a boat we profiled in our second Conversations with Classic Boats podcast exactly two years ago. The story of the modern evolution of this…

In the spring of 2021, we embarked on a four-episode podcast tracing the development of the International Six Metre Class. The hubs of that furious design and competitive scene were Seawanhaka Corinthian and Larchmont Yacht Clubs in New York. The sailing characters included Briggs Cunningham, Herman Whiton, and many future 12 Metre skippers. We still get podcast listener comments today on those episodes; Sixes stories abound. The drama of the competition played out between designers young and…

By Tom Darling, Conversations with Classic Boats On the PBS program Antiques Roadshow, the hosts consider things fifty years or older to be vintage, antique. Proud owners of boats over 50 think similarly. What about the regattas they compete in? On August 21 in Nantucket Sound, there will be a new “Antiques Sailshow,” a celebration of the 50th running of the Nantucket segment of the Classic Yacht Owners Association season. It is the 50th Opera House Cup…

The Song of the Solo Sailor By Tom Darling, Conversations with Classic Boats     What is it about the solo sailor that so captures the imagination of the ranks of normal sailors? Slocum. Chichester. Knox-Johnston. All have this mystique of man against the elements, alone. In curating Mystic Seaport Museum’s current exhibit, “Story Boats: The Tales They Tell,” Christina Brophy, Senior VP of Curatorial Affairs, ran her own “Maritime Idol” competition. Of the eighteen boats and…

By Tom Darling, Conversations with Classic Boats   In a typical Bermuda Race year, there is a small contingent of vintage boats, 50 years or older, who prepare for and participate in American offshore sailing’s Big Race. Many skippers opt for the Marion to Bermuda event, but Newport Bermuda is THE Bermuda Race. Back in 2020 it was Jesse Terry’s intention to do the Big One. He had worked on his boat, counted the screws in her…