Charles J. Doane

Charlie has worked as a boating journalist since 1986, including stints on staff at SAIL, Cruising World, and Offshore. Currently he is cruising editor for SAIL. His freelance work has appeared in Ocean Navigator, Blue Water Sailing, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Sailing, Yachting Monthly, Yachting World, Good Old Boat, and other seemingly reputable publications. He is also the author of three books: The Modern Cruising Sailboat (McGraw Hill/International Marine, 2010), a reference work, The Sea Is Not Full (Seapoint Books, 2017), a memoir, and The Boy Who Fell to Shore (Latah Books, 2022) a non-fiction biography of Thomas Tangvald.

Exposed to boats at an early age during summers spent on the Maine coast, Charlie earned his stripes as a journalist working for a daily newspaper in northern New Jersey, where he rubbed shoulders with and wrote stories about corrupt politicians and befuddled mobsters. He later attended law school, escaped from a brief period of servitude at a Boston law firm, and started roaming the planet’s oceans in sailboats in 1991. To date he has logged nearly 100,000 miles offshore, including seven transatlantic passages and a number of single-handed passages between the West Indies, Bermuda, and New England. In addition to several lesser craft, he has owned and maintained four different cruising sailboats: Crazy Horse, a Pearson Alberg 35 yawl; Sophie, a Golden Hind 31; Lunacy, a Tanton 39 cutter; and (yet another) Lunacy, a Boreal 47.