Steve Knauth

When a retired couple decided to live aboard, their search led them to a Pearson 365 sloop that turned out to be the perfect platform.

Ron Gallagher’s Jersey Cape 36 Express was designed as a marlin-catching, tournament-topping machine.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

The presidency used to come with a yacht.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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