Picture this...
What’s not to love about this picture, below? The feet belong to Tony Smith, a regular PBO contributor and published author, who sails without an engine (see page 32).
This issue also features Sam Llewellyn’s description of ‘no sail week: the idea is to climb on board boats of various sizes and use only the wind and the tide to perform the usual manoeuvres and some unusual ones.’
Last month in this column I was looking forward to the future of clean power, but various stories in this month’s issue remind me that all the alternative we need – for leisure purposes anyway – is perhaps staring us in the face.
Foiling technology for sailing is featured on the New Gear pages (page 52). Could high-speed sail really make inroads into cutting marine pollution? Perhaps... we’ll be looking into cargo ships being built with sails in a future issue.
But the key story for me on this topic is the ‘conversion’ of our relatively new contributor Drew Maglio from power to sail.
Many powerboaters enjoy sailing but how many actually quit powerboating to become yacht owners? Drew and his wife, Avery, are planning to live aboard and cruise far and wide and their first steps are recorded on page 78. They’re not looking at high performance sailing or even engineless – air conditioning is quite high on the list of requirements for their Florida base – but who ever knows what’s around the corner?
Rob Melotti