November / December 2022

ST. LOUIS is a 36' Elco fantail electric launch from 1896. She has her original motor, much of her brightwork is original oak, and she has been housed in the same sublime boathouse, and owned by the same family, since 1900. She’s a bit of a local legend in Bolton Landing, on the western shore of Lake George, New York. Over the past year and a half, she has undergone a complete structural rebuild of her hull.

At the rim of the Grand Canyon, the overlook of multicolored canyon walls and buttes is one of the most spectacular sights in North America and one of the seven natural wonders of the world. A full mile below the rim on the canyon floor, the Colorado River cuts a slender silver ribbon between the rust-colored cliff walls beneath a cobalt blue sky. Yet this wonder, which President Theodore Roosevelt praised as being “unparalleled throughout the wide world,” nearly became just another large freshwater reservoir in the American southwest.

Even though this section of the Gunnison River was nearly flat calm, I found myself white-knuckling the oars of the river-running dory JOSHUA TREE as I held them for the first time. It’s not that I feared for my life. What made this run through an otherwise mellow stretch of water in Colorado so daunting was the pressure of guiding this boatshop’s showpiece through a low-water minefield of rocks just days before her designer and builder, Justin Gallen, was scheduled to take her on the road as a display.

There is sometimes a defining moment at a regatta when you know it’s going to be one of those special memories in your life. I recently experienced this when sailing between the brace of pretty islands called the Cumbraes in the mouth of Scotland’s River Clyde, where racing out to meet us came four yachts that took our breath away.

My first visit to the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation in the mid-1970s was memorable for many reasons. The collection of automobiles, steam and gasoline engines, locomotives, bicycles, and other objects ranged from marvelous to mind-boggling. But it was one particular surprise that remains foremost in my mind. During my wandering on what is said to be the world’s largest expanse of parquet flooring, I suddenly encountered, of all things, a catboat. There she sat in a well-fitted wooden cradle with a plaque identifying her as SPRITE, built by the Herreshoffs of Bristol, Rhode Island.

The foreboding, dark-gray sky looked ready to unleash a torrent of rain at any moment as I hustled along the bustling San Diego waterfront, trying to make it to CALIFORNIAN’s dock on time. It was hardly the weather I had expected when I packed my bag early that morning to race aboard the replica square-topsail schooner. The event was the 34th annual America’s Schooner Cup Charity Regatta, originally conceived in 1987 as a match race between the wooden-hulled schooners DAUNTLESS and BAQHEERA. It has grown over the years to become a celebrated gathering of West Coast schooners.

The Concordia 39 yawl OWL was built in 1955 by Abeking & Rasmussen, one of 11 Concordias the German firm completed that year for delivery to American buyers. My wife and I have owned OWL, No. 31, since 1996 and have sailed the boat more than 30,000 miles throughout New England and Canadian waters.

As I rowed up the River Dart in Cornwall, England, in my Western Skiff early one summer morning, I thought there was something incredibly appropriate about going to photograph the latest Nigel Irens design in a Nigel Irens–designed boat. Of course, my 14' skiff was a far more humble affair than the new 26' motor launch he was testing that day, but I liked to think there was a family resemblance between the two boats, if only in those slim, easily driven hulls and plumb stems. Nigel once told me that most yacht designers only ever design one boat, reproducing the same concept in many different guises, so the relationship between Ellen McArthur’s record-breaking trimaran B&Q, the new launch, and my own diminutive skiff may not be so tenuous after all.