Cruising World March 2023

UNDER Pressure From my teens through my early 30s, my family’s Hunter 31, Ragtime, was my temple, my escape from all the intricacies of life. No matter what sort of week I’d had at school, no matter what kind of stress I was under in the corporate world, I took solace in knowing that Ragtime was always there for me with a dose of vitamin “sea” to set things right. Ragtime was my domain. Anytime we were out sailing, life just seemed to make sense. I knew all her tendencies: how she behaved at every point of sail, in any sea state. And I took great pride whenever I was at the helm. There was rarely a sheet or halyard out of place, the fenders were always properly stowed, and…

RALLY TO GRENADA: A Colorful Cast of Characters Although the Atlantic Rally for Cruisers was originally designed as a way for amateur sailors to cross the Atlantic in the safety of a group, many experienced sailors now take part for the community and camaraderie. cruisingworld.com/arc-2022 Bonus Features Sailing Totem: When Your Boat Kids Move Ashore After years of sailing as a family, Behan and Jamie Gifford prepare for their first significant passage as empty-nesters. Bringing on crew or offering passage berths isn’t in the plans. Mostly, they can’t wait to point Totem’s bow out to sea and put miles under the keel with just the two of them. cruisingworld.com/sailing-totem-empty-nest The Noob Files: Sleepless in Cat Harbor “Around midnight, after a couple of hours of snoozing, I poked my head out of…

Smells like dinosaur poop,” Lyra said, wrinkling her 4-year-old nose as we stepped out of our dinghy onto the delta of the Yellowstone River. “Mom, look! A dino footprint!” She wasn’t far off the mark. Great blue heron tracks traversed the mile-long mudflat, the pterodactyl-like claw prints bigger than Lyra’s hand. She skipped ahead to join her brother, who was collecting a bouquet of windblown osprey feathers to bring back to our boat. My husband, Rob, set out to stalk the shoreline with his fly rod, hoping to pull in yet another hefty Yellowstone cutthroat trout. I surveyed the wild scenery: The 11,000-foot-tall Table Mountain rose just behind a dense swath of green willows, with nary a trace of human life in sight. Behind me, our 1974 Catalina 22, Tranquilidad,…

Gear Up FOR SAILING SEASON Sailors can thank recently adopted commercial-shipping regulations for a new generation of electronic emergency beacons. These devices are designed to connect vessels in distress via satellite to a global network of rescue centers, while also broadcasting Automatic Identification System alerts over marine radio channels to (potentially) summon help that much quicker. Florida-based ACR Electronics (acrartex.com) and its UK sister company, Ocean Signal (oceansignal.com), are the first to take advantage of the new rules. They are set to go with products expected to be approved by US regulators and made widely available this winter. For mariners, this merging of satellite and VHF-radio-frequency technologies in a single device—either an emergency position indicating radio beacon or a personal locator beacon—is a game-changer. In a crisis, this tech will…

SAILING With a MISSION When Joan Conover arrives at Fiddler’s Green, the promised land for departed mariners, she’ll look back on an Earth better for having sailed it. Long before she took the helm of the Seven Seas Cruising Association, Conover was practicing one of SSCA’s founding principles: Leave a clean wake. On board, on land and on the airwaves, few have done as much as Conover to marshal the better angels of our privileged fleet. On her first trans-Atlantic in 2005, she and her daughter, Christina, took daily dips of marine life—160 samples—all the way to Portugal. They froze and shipped them to Old Dominion University to establish an oceanwide baseline to gauge signs of degradation. Christina, a high school graduate at the time, became an oceanographer. In the…

Fogbound CHERRY CRUMBLE Fog is a fact of life along the Maine coast, where my husband, Bud, and I cruise Opus, our 28-foot wood sloop. One day, we were anchored in the Barred Islands, a small archipelago in Penobscot Bay. It was isolated, beautiful and peaceful. We’d awakened early to a world of cottony gray, with fog so thick that visibility was reduced to near zero. A fine mist seemed to permeate everything, including our bones. Sailing in fog isn’t especially dangerous if you’re paying close attention to your navigation, but it can be nerve-wracking and tedious. At the time, we didn’t have a reliable radar aboard—and we were, after all, on vacation. We decided to stay put until the pea soup lifted, likely in a few hours. For extended…