Cruising World Magazine is celebrating its 50th year in 2024! I’m excited to have a feature in the April issue, especially since that gave me an excuse to catch up with Captain Andrew Burton. I first met Andy in the early 1990s, shortly after I moved to Newport; he had just started Adventure Sailing. Thirty years later, after an estimated half a million miles at sea, he has racked up surprisingly few sea stories. Instead we talked about the joy he finds in Getting More Sailors Offshore, sharing his expertise with shipmate-clients.
I couldn’t remember exactly when I wrote my first article for Cruising World, so I dug back into my archives—and it was, coincidentally, April 1994! “More Power with Less Muscle” leaned on my experience as a rigger, explaining various upgrades and tricks for reducing the brawn required to handle bigger boats.
Leafing back through the yellowed pages, what surprised me most was how short my own attention span has become for last century’s meaty magazine pieces. I was also amazed by both the length and depth of the 1994 masthead; even in tiny print, all those fantastic editors and support staff took up a whole column.
The magazine has morphed and evolved since then of course, alongside its sister publication Sailing World, but they are still putting out quality stories by and for sailors. I’m grateful that both have managed to weather the drastic transitions in tastes and technology of the last three decades.
Cruising World has graciously allowed me to share a PDF of Andy’s story with you, and I encourage you to support them by subscribing. Meanwhile, Happy 50th Birthday to a fine magazine, and thanks for the excuse to write about a sailor who keeps the ratio of sea stories to sea miles impressively low.
P.S. I’ve got more articles in the works, so if you want to stay informed please subscribe to the Thursday blog.
