Indholdsfortegnelse for April 2018 i Yachting

My crew singled up lines at Manhattan’s Chelsea Piers, and I idled the 40-foot convertible out of her slip and into the Hudson River. Our destination was Long Island’s South Shore for a few days of fun on the salt. It was June, and the afternoon sky was gray. The air was warm, but the water temperature hovered somewhere around penguin-friendly. When I first entered the river, I could almost make out the New Jersey side, but as I headed toward the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and to open water, visibility deteriorated to hand-in-front-of-your-face. Gray skies plus warm air plus cold water equals fog. It never bothered me much when I was a kid, but fog always weighed on my mind after I became a captain. Give me wind. Give me waves.…

No Barriers YACHT TOY THE FRAME is anodized aluminum, the hardware is marine-grade stainless steel, and the body is quarter-inch polycarbonate, a thermoplastic that lets light through almost the same way as glass. And the whole thing weighs less than 50 pounds while being able to carry as much as 425 pounds, or two adults at a time. ¶ Then again, the seats on Driftsun’s Transparent Kayak ($1,599) are also removable, letting solo paddlers ditch the second seat to see more of the reefs below. The company says the whole toy can assemble in five minutes, which should be fast enough to hop in the water at the first sight of fish. Take the next step: driftsun.com…

jeremy king grew up in a New York home where, on any given night, the adults would play the records of Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis or the Dave Brubeck Quartet. He knew the quintuple time of “Take Five” the way other kids know songs by the Muppets. When somebody said “Leap Frog,” he knew to tap his toes instead of jump. ¶ So, when the longtime sailor arrived in yachting’s best-known Rhode Island city about a decade ago, he couldn’t think of anything better than attending its annual Newport Jazz Festival. He went by land. He went by sea. He went back again and again, and he still wants more. ¶ “There’s multiple sides to the jazz fest,” says King, who is captain aboard the 115-foot classic schooner Eros. “Part…

AESTHETIC LED Imtra’s line of two-wire LED lights is designed to provide low draw and easy installation on new-build projects and refits alike. The LED lights (starting at $79 per light) are IP65-rated, have single-and bi-color dimming control via a Vimar dimmer switch, and are available in 10 models designed to match most yacht salons and interior spaces. Screw and spring mounting options are available, as are different trim rings to conceal prior installations in the same spot. Imtra, imtra.com SATELLITE NAVIGATOR Furuno’s SC-70 and SC-130 compasses use satellites to get latitude, longitude and heading data, as well as other vessel-motion data such as pitch, roll and heave. Both units employ GPS data to provide speed information (+/- 0.02 knots). The SC-70 ($4,595) provides heading data accurate to four-tenths of…

DESPITE ALL THE DESTRUCTION that Hurricanes Irma, Jose and Maria wrought in the British Virgin Islands, the archipelago remains the most-requested destination among bareboaters who book through The Moorings. In fact, if those autumn 2017 storms hadn’t wrecked so many boats, even more bareboaters would’ve been in the islands this past winter. ¶ “We literally can’t build the boats fast enough for people who want to go,” says Ian Pedersen, marketing manager of the Americas for The Moorings, which lost about a third of its Tortola fleet in the storms. “As soon as we can get more of the boats in, everything will be back to normal.” ¶ MarineMax Vacations also was reporting surprisingly high demand soon after the cleanup began. New Year’s was sold out, with a near-normal level…

LOA 78'5" MAX BEAM 19'6" AKOYA PEARLS ARE prize stones, cultured in salt water and known for their brilliant off white color, pink overtones and near-perfect spherical shape. An akoya is ideally engineered to thrive in its saltwater environment. The Pearl 80, a yacht with an off white tone, has a design that should see it thrive at sea as well. ¶ Produced across the pond with lines by naval architect Bill Dixon — who has designed everything from superyachts to sailboats — the yacht has a fine entry that dares the sea to try its luck. Her aggressive look continues aft, with the foredeck’s visual grit blending seamlessly into a sweptback, glassfilled, contemporary superstructure, all tied into a stern section that appears determined to move in one direction: forward.…

WHILE SPORT-BRIDGE MODELS ARE OCCASIONALLY MALIGNED AS NOTHING MORE THAN A compromise between a motoryacht and an express cruiser, the Princess S60 represents a solid counterargument to that gripe. There simply isn’t a whole lot of half-stepping to this yacht. That thought struck me in a relatively unlikely place: while looking at the television in the amidships master stateroom. Normally, I could not care less about onboard TVs. To my mind, yachts are meant for enjoying the great outdoors. But this particular television seemed huge for the yacht’s length overall. “Yeah, she’s 40 inches, the biggest we could fit in here,” said James Nobel, marketing director for Princess Yachts America. The TV was set inside a piece of Makassar ebony that gave the décor a mega-yacht feel. I also appreciated…

IF NOT FOR LOVE, Capt. Andrew Graham may have spent his whole life on the other side of the planet. ¶ He was born in Australia, where he fast became a water baby, freediving and spearfishing by age 4, and scuba diving by age 6. When he turned 18, he was already a scuba instructor working on his first captain’s license. ¶ Then a gal from the Mediterranean showed up. ¶ “My wife is French,” he says. “I met her in Australia, and she decided she didn’t want to live in Australia. She had a lot of family and didn’t want to live on the other side of the world.” ¶ As it turned out, they had boats where she was from too. Big ones. ¶ “My first job in…

I’VE BEEN THINKING about something my boatbuilder pal Mike said as I attempted to shimmy beneath my wife Nelia’s high-tech automobile. Mike had been warning me about the dangers of artificial intelligence. “Soon, computers will no longer have any use for humans,” he said. “They’ll do away with us.” I looked at the car and wondered if my time had come. After years of twisting wrenches in the bowels of boats, I decided a few years back that I no longer cared to be handy. Ergo, when my wife’s “smart” car refused to budge, she summoned the dealer. The driver of the flatbed that collected it offered his opinion: “Pal, consider yourself lucky. I shoveled up the remains of one of these sleds that had spontaneously combusted. It took the…

LOA 30'9" TOP SPEED 45 KNOTS WHILE IGUANAS are classified as lizards and not amphibians, anyone who has ever seen one paddle across a South Florida canal can attest to their prowess both in the water and on terra firma. That’s why Iguana is such an appropriate name for this builder. Its 45-knot, carbon-fiber Commuter (available in limo and sport models) has tanklike treads that allow it to climb onto beaches and other terrain for easy disembarkation and a novel way to explore a destination. • Whom It’s For: The Iguana Commuter is an ideal tender for someone who views the world just a little bit differently. She sees no real reason to delineate between earth and sea. It’s all hers to discover. She’s probably already dreaming up wings. • Picture…

GARY NELTHROPP SAYS HE AND HIS family view themselves as gatekeepers. Since the 1950s, they’ve been passing down the key to the Cruzan rum distillery on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The family has actually lived on St. Croix since the late 18th century, and Nelthropp and his siblings are seventh-generation residents. Nelthropp, who’s been the company’s master distiller for the past two decades and its president for 10 years, says that keeping up the Cruzan rum standard is crucial. “We don’t think alcohol should burn; it should be light,” he says. Cruzan uses a five-column distillation process to produce a clean rum, he says, ensuring that burn-inducing fusel oil never finds its way into the barrel: “That’s one of our calling cards. That is how we differ…