Offers a wide range of illustrated articles from "Nautical Quarterly."

Surveys trends in yacht design, discusses safety, modern construction techniques, spars, rigging, sails, and auxiliary equipment, and describes five good boats.

Boat owners, perhaps more so than other motoring enthusiasts, want to spend their time playing, not maintaining, their toys. Unfortunately, due to their higher exposure to damaging elements, their longer periods of non-use, and the remote locations to which they transport their users, it could be argued that boats also require more care than cars or motorcycles. This guide breaks down by system the routine maintenance procedures every boat owner should know, presenting in more digestible chunks the upkeep of any modern boat, whether it's 16 or 60 feet, inboard or outboard, open-hulled or cabin-equipped. Much of the information included is even applicable to sailboats, as well as runabouts and cabin cruisers.

In 1977, with a $20,000 investment and a speedy, garage-built sailboat, brothers Rod and Bob Johnstone launched the company that today dominates the performance-oriented sailboat market. The J/24, the boat based on Rod Johnstone's first homebuilt vessel, has become the world's most popular recreational offshore keelboat. The J/Boats brand has earned renown not just for performance but also for comfort and day sailing suitability.

No vessel that sailed the Arctic seas has raised so much speculation or triggered imaginations as has the legendary Hudson's Bay Company ship Baychimo. In the 1920s, Baychimo set up trading posts in eastern Canada, sailed on fur-trading expeditions to Siberia during the turbulent years of the Russian civil war and made dangerous annual voyages around Alaska to Canada's western Arctic coast, shouldering her way through ice floes to resupply the HBC's remote trading posts. Anthony Dalton digs deep to unveil the incredible tale of the hardy ship and her sometimes irascible captain, Sydney Cornwell, bringing to life the larger story of the community of northern traders, hunters and sailors of which Baychimo was a part. This ship's story had a remarkable twist. Caught in 1931 in an ice floe that refused to let go, her crew expected her to sink at any moment, and abandoned ship. But Baychimo was as stubborn as the ice, and she floated away unharmed to begin what would prove to be the longest phase of her seemingly charmed career: for the next four decades she would appear on the horizon at unexpected times and places, always defiantly upright and afloat, becoming the legendary ghost ship of the Arctic.