Steve Knauth

Seventeenth-century travelers coming to Chesapeake Bay were constantly amazed at the quantity, size and quality of its oysters.

The East Bay 43 Flybridge was a popular Grand Banks model drawn with good- looking Downeast lines. Sara and Scott Conner consider their 2001 model their dreamboat.

About 700: That’s the number of Pearson Tritons built during its mid-20th-century production run.

For TJ Karbowski, it was all about the fishing—the camaraderie, the excitement of the chase, the joy of being on the water with a good boat under him.

The 1950s were a decade of change.

The 52-foot racing yacht Dorade careens in a very stiff following wind on her way to a record performance in the 1931 Transatlantic Race, with the spinnaker sheet led to windward of the forestay and eased out.

Sisu is a Finnish word that’s difficult to translate. It means something like endurance, determination, stamina, fortitude—or, in American slang, guts.

“Available for Charter: Mayflower, of 180 tons, owners Robert Childe, Thomas Short, Christopher Jones and Christopher Nichols.

The storm clouds and a veil of rain move off over dark water, taking the violence of the tropical hurricane with them.

The True North 38 made its debut in 2001. Seventeen years later, it’s still turning heads.

Roberto Labrador was looking for a sailboat to carry him around the world. He found a capable cruiser, and his dream boat, in a robust Tartan 37.

This 28-foot design won California’s Newport to Ensenada race in 1978 and also came in first in class in 1979.

The 250-foot coastal liner Princess May sits high and dry on rocks near Sentinel Island in Alaska’s Lynn Canal.

It’s well before dawn in Maine, and 15 miles offshore, in the early morning murk, a Jonesport lobster boat is getting ready to go to work.

Bill Doherty has owned a number of fishing boats, but his Henriques 42 Flybridge is the fish boat of his dreams.

The presidency used to come with a yacht.

“Designed by a fish.” That’s how the Fortier 26 was described in issue 12 of Nautical Quarterly, back in 1980.

Back in 2005, Howard Newman tested a boat at the Palm Beach International Boat Show.

Don Demers’ oil painting “Rescuers from the Deep; USS Scamp” tells a dramatic tale.

The Sunny K, a Fairform Flyer Linwood 53, rides majestically across the pages in this advertisement from the late 1950s.

Jon Baker needed a 30-plus-foot boat to safely take his family and friends on longer trips offshore. A 2010 Regulator 34 Center Console fit the bill.

Wind and waves set a double-ended, lug-rigged fishing boat to plunging through the white-capped rollers off the coast of northern England and Scotland.

The Hampton boat is one of those wonderful, enduring designs that has survived for more than a century, tweaked and modified by builders along the way.

In 2001, Ed and Vivian Steele sold their business and started looking for something to do for a few years.

Back in the day, as yachtsmen in northern waters sat out the long winters, they thought about boats to race and cruise.

Anyone who’s driven down into the town of Watch Hill, Rhode Island, and along the stretch of harborfront knows the scene.

A late 19th-century pilot boat rides off Sandy Hook, New Jersey, at the outer entrance to New York Harbor, in this image from the early 1900s.

Boston Whaler caused quite a sensation in the early part of its distinguished 60-year history.

The wave in the foreground dominates the scene in Paul Garnett’s dramatic Charles W. Morgan Off Cape Horn.

The Titanic survivors staggered down the gangplank of the Carpathia, chilled from the cold and numbed from the sinking of the “unsinkable.”

So many boats, so many ways to get out on the water. For Allan and Sally Seymour, it was trailer-boating with a 19-foot Boston Whaler, covering the East Coast from New England to Norfolk, Virginia.

When a couple has logged a lifetime’s worth of boating, they know what they want out of the lifestyle; they know how to be comfortable in, and on, the boat of their choice.

The 1950s and ’60s were a time of great activity and innovation in the boating world, with new boats and a new audience waiting to buy them.

They were known to the British as the “Big Class.” The America’s Cup boats of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were unruly — sometimes downright perilous — racing machines.

Would it not be well if she could contract with the Postmaster General to carry the mail from this city to Albany?

Scott Harrell loved tractors. The Edenton, North Carolina, native “delighted in mowing and moving dirt,” as one observer put it.

Glassy waters swirl around a buoy in the harbor at Southport, Maine.

Howard Wheeler founded Wheeler Shipyard in 1910, and for more than five decades the New York City company would be one of America’s most innovative and influential builders.

You can’t get much closer to the water than you do in a kayak. That kind of one-on-one feeling is what got Vickie Silvia started on boats.

Nantucket Harbor, Massachusetts. We’re looking across the main channel toward Brant Point Light; the Coatue Wildlife Refuge is behind and to the right of this iconic island symbol, with Wauwinet in the distance.

The Brenton Reef Lightship Station guided vessels in Rhode Island’s lower Narragansett Bay around the clock, 365 days a year, from 1853 to 1962.

When Boston Whaler moved from Rockland, Massachusetts, to Florida in 1991, Paul Hureau stayed behind.

The dream was always there. “For years, I would go past marinas on beautiful summer days, full of boats that no one ever seemed to use,” says Peter Clarke.

“In my dreams, I am standing a 2 a.m. wheel watch, running down some long, lonely reach of flat water, snow-capped mountains glistening in the moonlight on either side … [cruising] endlessly through the black Alaskan night,” says watercolorist Cooper Hart.

Steve Ehrler and Jan Murphy wanted to try the liveaboard lifestyle. They were looking for a good boat, about 10 years old, well equipped and well maintained, says Ehrler, 63, a former Navy submarine officer. “It also had to feel like home,” he says.

Just $250 a month. That’s what it took to buy the 35-foot Flagship Cruiser from Owens Yacht Co., a boat the company called the “crowning achievement of Owens’ revolution in boatbuilding.”

It was called the Bug. George “Pop” Corry’s little one-design sailboat, which had come off New York designer William Gardner’s drawing board in 1906, was fun to race, gave skippers an even chance to win and was inexpensive at $140.