Has technology reduced sailing’s spirit?

With Starlink mid-ocean, have we traded the romance of adventure for the safety of assurance? Nikki Henderson explores in Yachting World:

Now that we’ve entered a new chapter in sailing with the proliferation of affordable, high speed internet at sea, is sailing still actually an adventure? Or has the age of ocean exploring come to an end?

A few weeks ago, I was chatting with a friend – a lifelong sailor from Brittany who ran a yacht delivery company in the era before GPS – about ‘the good old days’.

“It was much more fun back then,” he lamented, his eyes twinkling with nostalgia.

“But surely more stressful too?” I pressed him. “Entering somewhere like St Malo without GPS must have been pretty difficult, right?”

But I’d lost him to his dream-state, lusting over the romance of dead reckoning and the freedom of losing sight of shore. – Full report