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Old Racers Rule We’ve sailed Thursday Farkles races every week, year-round, out of Dana Point Harbor, California, for the last few decades. (It’s called the Farkles as a more socially acceptable stand-in for Old Farts Race—because mostly only old farts can race mid-afternoons on a Thursday.) The race has a 2 p.m. start for boats rated 192 PHRF (Catalina 30s), and every other boat type either starts earlier or later, depending on their rating and the distance of the called course. The idea is that this should generally equalize everyone at the finish. There are no race committees, protests, trophies, or entrance fees. Whoever won the previous week’s race calls the next week’s course and the start on the VHF. Basking in the glory of your finish or complaining to another…

Thursday, April 21, in Lorain, Ohio. The forecasts are calling for clearing and gradual warming, but at 8:30 in the morning when I arrive at Spitzer Riverside Marina, it is 42°F, dark, and overcast with wind gusts approaching 40 mph. I am scheduled to launch Valhalla, my 1977 Cape Dory 30, today. The first thing I do is walk toward the marina office, the tiny, dark space carved out of the warehouse with boat rack storage, an old couch, and a desk from 100 years ago. But before I get there, I see a 10-year-old silver SUV parked at the edge of the paved area in front of the warehouse. The front bumper is nearly hanging over the steel piling wall that separates land from the river. The driver’s side window is…

After 32 years of operation, Chesapeake Region Accessible Boating (CRAB) is moving. Six years, countless volunteer hours, persistent efforts working with state, county, and local lawmakers, and $5 million have gone into creating the country’s premiere Adaptive Boating Center, CRAB’s new home on Back Creek in Annapolis, Maryland. It opens this spring. CRAB’s mission is to make sailing possible for folks with a range of disabilities both physical and developmental, as well as for their families and caregivers. This means that the facility had to be built with the full gamut of guests’ needs in mind. It’s fully ADA compliant with well over the required number of handicap parking spots. There are no steps anywhere on the nearly one-acre property. Signs in braille, large-print laptops, and bluetooth sound amplification for the…

Charley Morgan, one of the great pioneers of fiberglass boatbuilding and design, left this world in January, bound for whatever comes next. He was 93, and reportedly passed just a few hours after his wife, Maurine, died. Sailors of a certain age will remember Morgan only for his most successful boat, the wildly popular cruiser called the Morgan Out Island 41. But in fact, Morgan first established his reputation on the racing scene. Born in Chicago, he was raised on the west coast of Florida, and the first boat he ever built, Brisote, was a 31-foot plywood yawl with a keel and rudder off a Star, a mainsail off a Thistle, and a mizzen from a Penguin. With his buddy Charlie Hunt, who helped designed and build this unlikely machine, he…

AT THE HELM Nerd alert: We’re talking networks and data this month, none of which is really integral to the safe running of a boat as far as seamanship is concerned, but all of which is addictingly fun and surprisingly enlightening. Specifically, I’m looking at NMEA 2000 networks and how to get the most flexible use from them without being tethered to a built-in multifunction/chartplotter display. Turns out, this is harder than I thought. I’d never had a boat with a modern NMEA 2000 (N2K) network built from scratch, so with the refit of Falken (our new-to-us Farr 65) nearly complete, this has been an interesting process to learn about and to implement, and a strangely opaque topic to find good, unbiased information on. Unlike most modern, networked electronics packages, Falken’s design does…