Kenneth Grahame, in his classic children's story, The Wind in the Willows, has the Water Rat describe it this way:

"...there is NOTHING - absolutely nothing - half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. Simply messing about in boats - or WITH boats. In or out of 'em, it doesn't matter. Nothing seems really to matter, that's the charm of it. Whether you get away or whether you don't, whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else, or whether you never get anywhere at all, you're always busy and you never do anything in particular. When you've done it, there's always something else to do, and you can do it if you like, but you'd much better not."

Beard & McKie, in their book sailing: A Sailor's Dictionary, defines the activity:

"sail•ing (sâ'ling),  1. n. the fine art of getting wet and becoming ill while slowly going nowhere at great expense."

This area of the web site is devoted to (sadly), my old yacht s/v Lazando la Brisa, and the new one, s/v Dakota, a 1996 Hunter Passage 42.  Click on the links to the left to see more about them.