Premiere Down East coastal living magazine Maine Boats, Homes and Harbors featured Maine Yacht Center in its May 2008 issue: "Fast Boats, Fast Times: How Did the Maine Yacht Center in Portland become an epicenter for high-end racers?"

Charles Doane interviewed Brian Harris about his involvement in the racing world and the big-ocean racer projects recently completed at Maine Yacht Center.

Author Doane describes Harris’s involvement in “the exotic realm of professional ocean racing"’ and chronicles his passion for the sea from his high school semester spent aboard the tall ship Young America, to the Landing School and a physics degree from Tufts university, through his 9 years managing (and owning) Rumery’s Boat Yard in Biddeford, to his introduction to the international racing scene as part of the shore team for Josh Hall’s Open 60 Gartmore. “For the next six years Harris was quite the anomaly,” writes Doane, “-he was an American, perhaps the only one in all the world, earning a living in the very exclusive Euro-centric world of the IMOCA (International Monohull Open Class Association) singlehanded ocean racing. Better than that, he was one of the best in the game, managing shore teams for such top competitors as Josh Hall, Emma Richards, and Alex Thompson in top events: the Vendee Globe, Around Alone, Route du Rhum, and Transat Jacques Vabres.” Doane adds, “Along the way he gained invaluable experience outfitting and maintaining some of the world’s most sophisticated sailing machines.”

The article goes on to describe the advent of Maine Yacht Center and its “super-sized indoor boat-storage facility,” which soon housed a privately-owned Open 40 in for a refit under Brian’s experienced eye. The next ocean-racer to come up Maine Yacht Center’s slipway was Rich Wilson’s Open 60, Great American III, for a complete refit prior to the 2008 Vendee Globe. Writes Doane, “Over the winter Harris and the MYC crew gutted the boat entirely, transforming it from a low-budget racer for a young hard-as-nails Frenchman [Thierry Dubois, who sailed it as Solidaires] into a somewhat more forgiving beast…” and he goes on to detail the extensive refit and revisions made (for a detailed list, see our Open 60 refit page). Pick up a copy of the May 2008 Maine Boats, Homes & Harbors to read the full article for yourself!