After being postponed for two days by high winds, the 35th America’s Cup is scheduled to start this morning. Many consider the races to be the greatest show on the water — a thrilling, high-stakes extravaganza featuring cutting-edge technology and the best sailors in the sport. Others view the races as an ego-fueled billionaire’s extravagance featuring obscenely costly beach-cats, wholly unrelated the rest of the world of sailing. There may be elements of truth in both viewpoints.
The races have certainly changed from the more stately America’s Cups of old, before the competing sailors started wearing crash helmets as part of their uniforms. The 35th competition is a continuation and refinement of the “foiling revolution” introduced in the last running of the races. The 50′ catamarans in this year’s race are among the most advanced sailing vessels ever seen and can sail at 45 knots in a 15-knot breeze, and up to 30 knots upwind.
For those near New York harbor, there is a very interesting exhibit opening on the historic 
I first arrived in New York harbor forty years ago, as a freshly minted naval architect working for Moore McCormack. In those days, the Brooklyn docks were crowded with US flag shipping companies, many with their headquarters or sales offices in Lower Manhattan. Just to the north, in the narrow streets of Tribecca and Soho were clusters of little workshops where often elderly craftsmen repaired or calibrated chronometers and sextants, and rebuilt or reconditioned everything from pumps and valves to ship’s order telegraphs to the old tube radar sets. 
For Royal Navy sailors and British soldiers in the West Indies during the 18th century, rum was a refuge for the discomforts of the duties of the day. The rum also may have been killing them. It wasn’t the alcohol, but the way it was distilled that proved deadly.
Yesterday, we posted about signing aboard as trainee crew on the square rigged barque Picton Castle, to sail all or part of the way around the world. But what if you want to sail in a globe girdling ocean race instead of on a beautiful square-rigger? To participate in an around the world ocean race usually requires millions and often tens of millions of dollars, but there is an alternative — the 
Let’s say that you want to circumnavigate the world by sail and yet you don’t necessarily have enough experience or even, for that matter, a boat. All the same, you really want to make a-once-in-a-lifetime voyage where you are more than just a passenger, where you stand your trick at the helm, set and furl sails and watch the sun rise and set on a rolling sea. The good news is that you can do just that, and you even have several options. In the next two posts, we will look at two very different, and yet, in many respects, interestingly similar, ways to take make that epic voyage around all, or part, of the world under sail. 
In an interview with 
In September, we posted about an 
The oil fields beneath the North Sea are running out of oil. As there is less oil to pump, costs rise per tonne of oil delivered from the now aging offshore platforms. A decline in oil prices only makes the economics of these rigs worse and yet they cannot be simply shut down and abandoned. Under a 15-nation protocol called the “Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North East Atlantic,” known simply as 
For one Scottish ship’s engineer doing the right thing paid off. In 2013, Christopher Keays risked his entire career when he turned whistleblower shortly after taking a job as a junior engineer on board the cruise ship, Caribbean Princess. At the end of last month, he was awarded by US courts $1 million for his role in exposing Princess Cruise Line’s illegal polluting.