Author: Tom Darling

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…

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 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…