Table of contents for Winter 2026 in Sailing World

THE deck is still wet with dew as the crew arrives one by one for boat call. The stillness of the sunny morning is broken by sailbags heaved onboard and dragged across the non-skid. Trimmers stroll from bow to stern leading tapered sheets and guys through and blocks. It’s the regular busy work of getting a 12-Metre off the dock and racing and it’s the first day of the 12 Meter North, Americans in Newport, Rhode Island. It’s also Weatherly’s big day. The boat’s owner Steve Eddleston eventually arrives with the sandwiches. He’s got a cup of coffee and a big smile as he admires all the activity from the aft deck. We’ve never met, and he’s invited me aboard for the day’s races. I’ve got GoPros and microphones, and…

“ONE thing that I love about distance racing is the 10-minute victories,” says Jaime Mack, a few hours into the 2025 Round the County Race. This annual two-day event organized by the Orcas Island YC and the Friday Harbor Sailing Club circumnavigates the islands comprising Washington State’s San Juan County with a Saturday night stopover in Roche Harbor on San Juan Island. The 65 nautical-mile race regularly attracts triple-digit fleets and unfurls in early November, with even-numbered years rounding clockwise and odd-numbered years taking a counterclockwise course. The direction matters, of course, because the waters surrounding the San Juans have notoriously strong currents that can leave a fleet parked up or inverted, especially when someone forgets to ply the wind machine with enough Benjamins. Much like the 2025 race. I…

THERE’S beauty in steering a sinking ship. Everything becomes surreal. But here I am, on Magic Bus, my family’s beloved escape pod, sinking 280 miles off the coast of North Carolina. The helm is lifeless and both engines are dead, awash in oily seawater. Soon, I’ll be saying farewell forever to a boat that taught me to problem solve, to fix things, to be an adult. Black is this offshore night, a void between a spotlight moon and 15-foot waves hissing and heaving on an early November night on the Atlantic. The 45-knot gale makes me think loudly to hear myself. It’s not raining, but plumes of spray pelt the deck as sloshing waves lash the hulls. The horizon disappears beneath each new roller. It’s impossible to say which heaving…

“Love the little trade which thou hast learned, and be content there with.” — Marcus Aurelius IT was hardly a little trade Tony Parker was practicing at the helm of an America’s Cup 12 Metre in the summer of 1978 off Newport, R.I. He’d been asked by Baron Marcel Bich to skipper the French trial horse in training for the next Cup, and was doing so well against the A team, by his own account, that its helmsman Bruno Troublé took him aside at one point and beseeched him to lighten up. The Cup was on the verge of taking the sports world by storm with Dennis Conner, Australia II, the winged keel, ESPN and Fremantle in the wings. Parker, having finished second in three straight Congressional Cups and with…

The real magic of sailing high-performance dinghies lies in finessing the sheer chaos of forces acting simultaneously across many surfaces. When all are harmonious, the speed and stability feel downright mystical. But it only takes one little disruptor—a stray gust, a rogue wave, a poorly timed sneeze—to send the whole equilibrium into a nosedive. And even when everything is in its right place, sometimes there’s just nothing a small-craft sailor can do to stop the inevitable “stuff.” Whether the quick-thinking skipper’s decision to shove the tiller toward trouble would have actually saved these two from a frosty baptism is debatable. Regardless, to truly appreciate the magic of sailing on the edge, it’s essential to fuss around with forces and find out what makes the boat tick. Or tip.…

RANDY Hecht got the call while racing at the International Knarr Championship, in Copenhagen, Denmark. The good news? His boat had made the 2,600-mile journey from San Francisco to Toronto in time for the 2025 J/105 North Americans. The bad news? The boatyard in Toronto accidentally broke the mast. With barely two weeks to spare before the start of the championship, his two-week Danish regatta swiftly became fraught with faraway logistics. “I was confronted with both finding a replacement mast—you cannot just go to a store to buy an immediate replacement—and also finding a skilled rigger to get a replacement mast ready for the boat,” Hecht says. “I was close to throwing in the towel and towing the boat and the broken mast home.” Hecht, however, was on a mission…

AS I exit the offset mark, I am already looking behind me to see how things are developing. Dirty air is an inevitable part of the game, and I need to actively find a lane with clear air. Are the following boats going to sail high? If so, then I should turn extra low to clear below them. Are they going low? If so, I may check my turn and stay high. Even if the next immediate boat to round the mark is not on my air, it’s likely the next boat or the boat after that will be. Fortunately, escape is easier and quicker than it may seem. Success is all about the way in which I redirect my apparent wind. Apparent wind is the wind we sail in,…

AS I’ve traveled around the country over the years visiting yacht clubs and community sailing centers big and small, I’ve observed an extraordinary amount of perfectly good raceboats sitting idle on their trailers, racks and moorings. It’s easy to tell which ones don’t get used very often, their owners likely at home and thinking about the happier times when they bought the boat with aspirations of using it frequently and maybe even winning a few races. Either life gets in the way, or in the case of many older one-designs, when new classes come on to the scene, older ones tend to fade away. Too often, remaining boats don’t have a place on the racing schedule, a spark plug to keep the fleet active or a community to rally. This…

THERE’S one moment from the 2023 Mini Transat Race that is seared into my memory. I was six days into the Atlantic, crossing alone on my 21-footer Terminal Leave. The trade winds were cranking and the boat was surfing along. I remember it vividly—tiller in one hand, mainsheet in the other, appendages humming as the boat accelerated down each wave. Nothing but wave tops and open sea in front of me. For hours everything felt perfectly in flow. And then, in one explosive moment one of my rudders sheared off the transom. The boat rounded up violently, and I was suddenly in survival mode. Once I discovered that there was no water coming into the boat, I focused on the repair and diverted 300 nautical miles further south to Cabo…

THE New York YC’s American Magic was 0-2 with its America’s Cup challenges, and given its early eliminations from AC36 and AC37, the money burn rate was high and the return on investment low. It’s all par for the course with the America’s Cup. After decamping from Barcelona to the team’s base in Pensacola, Florida, there was plenty of lip service about another go at the Cup in Naples, Italy in 2028, but in October, what was a hard maybe became a hard pass. They didn’t agree with the final Protocol or the defender’s proposed scheme to take management of the regatta out of the hands of Emirates Team New Zealand and into the hands of a quasi-independent governing body called the “America’s Cup Partnership.” With American Magic’s exit, for…

IN our previous column in these pages, outlining the extensive refit project of my father and his boat partner’s 1990s-vintage Melges 30, we went in depth about the deck hardware and running rigging choices we made with the help of Harken and Marlow. The next and final phase involved a slightly more sophisticated steps: the electronics and then the deck detailing, which brought the boat to its current status as one fine handicap race yacht. We decided not to invest in the older instruments that came with the boat. It was an opportunity for new technology. Not an inexpensive proposition but a necessary one. Our goal as a 30-foot sportboat is mainly local PHRF racing with some traveling in the future. As such, we wanted good instruments, but we didn’t…

They anticipate the moment, framing it wide in their mind before it happens, before hefting the big lens and camera body into position, cocking their head and squinting. They bring a trained eye to the viewfinder, their focus narrows into the confines of a dark box, a small window to the subject, a window cluttered with digits and icons. Their subject moves three dimensionally, as does the boat or helicopter underfoot. The light is erratic, shadows and colors shifting and the composition instantaneously changing. There is nothing static about it—until their finger presses a button. One click, or rapid fire, in this fleeting and unrepeatable moment in time, they capture what will be admired and shared, framed or published. Or discarded in the edit. They are, of course, the cadre…