Steve Knauth

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

In 1957, Charles Johnson approached John Rybovich in his quest for a motor­yacht to be the mother ship to his Rybovich sportfisher.

Come, boys and girls, just listen to this news for you and me: They’re going to send a Christmas Ship across the deep blue sea!

For Andrew Walton, becoming an artist was in the cards. “The art chooses you, not the other way round,” says Walton, who is known for his detailed renderings of ships and boats and those who handle them.

The seeds of a boating life are sown early. Brian Torrance has been on the water for as long as he can remember.

About a century ago, someone in the Singer Building on Manhattan’s West Side took a moment from his workday to point a camera out the window.

Bernard Lyman was a skilled craftsman and respected cabinetmaker in Cleveland on the shores of Lake Erie.

Here’s a whimsical painting: a 19th-century steamship in full array, with a deck awash in circus animals and performers, acrobats in the rigging. But there’s more than whimsy to Ed Parker’s art.

The cruising dream is a powerful one. Far horizons beckon with new ports of call, new people to meet. There’s the challenge of running the boat and becoming familiar with it. And the moments of sheer pleasure, just being on the water.

We all know the feeling. Walking off the dock after a day on the water, you can’t resist turning around and taking one last look at your boat.

It’s early morning on Chesapeake Bay. A skipjack with its mainsail up ghosts past Baltimore Light, heading out for a day’s oystering. The rest of the fleet shows dimly through the diffused morning sun.

The lower Connecticut River has been called one of the last great places on Earth. For boaters who’d like to explore the region, Old Saybrook, at the river’s mouth, and Essex, 6 miles upstream, are good  places to start.

Life doesn’t stay the same. Boats don’t, either.

Bottom fouling. It's a problem as old as boats.

They started out building sailboats; they ended up creating one of the most distinctive motoryachts of the modern era.

You start out small in a skiff or a runabout, exploring the local waters: the river, the bays and the coves close to home.

Mississippi steamboat races, as depicted here, are the stuff of myth, lore and legend. And none is more famous than the Great Race of 1870.

“It’s like a vessel that needs a couple of coats of paint for the true color to come out,” William Davis says. He’s describing the way he layered the oils to convey nature’s subtle shades in Last Sail of the Season. “You work in stages. The sky — it might take several coats to get it right.”

“This is a scene from a month’s cruise in Antarctica,” says artist Nancy Zydler. “When this sailing boat appeared, we realized how tiny our boat was, too, in this vast seascape of mountains and ice. The yacht was sailing fast around icebergs, bergy bits and growlers — an exciting task even in a calm, but quite challenging when the wind pipes up and some serious-size ice may be mistaken for a breaking wave.”

Designer Ken Smith’s Grand Banks 42 is an acknowledged classic, a salty trawler yacht with an aft cabin, sturdy  wheelhouse and workboat-inspired profile that was built for nearly 40 years. The Europa version was an offspring.

The Cruis Along Sedan 31 made its debut in 1959, offering all the cabin-cruiser amenities of the day (though not the  final letter of the word “cruise”). The convertible yacht had a raised bridge deck that was well protected by a woodframe  windshield and streamlined wheelhouse.

It’s called “Andy’s Rock,” but you won’t find it so named on any charts of the Connecticut River. Still, it’s legendary  in the fishing lore of the Roussel family and their boat, Annie B II.

Emmett Lyman can remember being a boy, trying to boat and play along the Connecticut River during the 1950s and ‘60s. It just wasn’t the kind of place that any boy’s mother wanted him to hang out.

A few issues ago, we had a sailboat in a swimming pool. Here’s a battleship in Union Square.

Forty-eight boats. That’s the fleet 73-year-old Rick Anastos had owned during a lifetime of boating.

For more than 60 years, James Iams has been casting his artist’s eye around Chesapeake Bay, taking in the sights and spirit of the region’s creeks and rivers, islands and harbors, watermen and boats.

A Vineyard classic lives on in updated models from C.W. Hood

In the late 19th century, Wilbur Morse, a boatbuilder in Friendship, Maine, was turning out an unprecedented number of working sailboats of similar design.

'These old beauties are often overlooked'

Two catboats run before an afternoon zephyr, returning home at the end of a day’s sail. There’s a delicate luminosity, a glow of diffused light, a sense of gentle movement in Peter Arguimbau’s 20-by-30 oil painting. It’s a simple work, but the story behind it is complex and delves deep into art history.