Innehållsförteckning för March 2017 från Cruising World

 S ometimes you can be too smart for your own good. Galactic, our custom 45-foot cutter, was a week out of New Zealand, cranking eastward at 8.5 knots. But the forecast showed a low forming in the tropics and moving southeast to intersect our path. My wife, Alisa, and I decided to slow down instead of sailing right into it. So we heaved to, and with our two sons, 7-year-old Elias and 4-year-old Eric, we waited for the system to pass in front of us. But the low decided to move south instead of southeast, and then it stalled in place. The result was that we had stopped just in time to let its gale-force winds park directly on top of us. In our seven years of full-time sailing, we…

PROJECTS PROJECTS The dinghy is an invaluable piece of equipment on board a cruising sailboat. It’s the family car, the tour boat and the workhorse. Some people consider their dinghy a life raft, or at least another fl oatable vessel in case of emergencies. We’ve used ours to help pull boats off reefs and to assist disabled vessels maneuvering in tight quarters. Several times we rafted our dinghy alongside our own boat and used it as an auxiliary engine. Like any important piece of equipment on board, it pays to take good care of the dinghy. To protect our infl atable and prolong its life, I sewed a custom canvas cover for it, commonly known as a dinghy chap. The main purpose of chaps is to provide UV and chafe…

Perhaps it’s the allure of splendid sails along the Scandinavian coastline and 20 hours of sunlight each summer day that challenge the craftsmen at Hallberg-Rassy to build interiors exquisite enough to lure you below occasionally. Once there, you can appreciate creature comforts like rich mahogany joinery, thick cushions and soothing upholstery, a Webasto diesel furnace for when it’s cold, plentiful hatches and opening ports to make things bright and airy, and work and living spaces that have been designed for life at sea. That’s my theory, anyway, after having spent some time this past fall aboard the new HR 40 Mark II, a handsome center-cockpit bluewater cruiser from Sweden’s largest production boatbuilder. As CW’s Boat of the Year judge Tim Murphy put it after our dockside inspection and subsequent sea…

HIGH ON THE BUCKET LIST: AMERICA’S CUP 2017 Want the best berth of all in Bermuda during the 2017 Louis Vuitton series and America’s Cup? Sailboats managed by Nicholson Yachts Worldwide are among 50 boats that have been granted coveted VIP-flag spectator status and are part of a smaller fleet authorized to conduct charters during the two celebrated regattas. Boats with the VIP flag are allowed access to a front-row view of the race course adjacent to the electronically defined boundary during the events. The Louis Vuitton series runs May 26 to June 16, and the America’s Cup runs from June 17 to June 27. The Nicholson-managed Savarona, a 95-foot custom CNB; Marae, a 108-foot Alloy pilothouse sloop; Bonnie Lynn, a 72-foot schooner; and Emily Morgan, a 60-foot Bowman ketch,…

THE GAMBIER ARCHIPELAGO Shorter days, longer shadows, hiking and big, hearty meals: To me this is what fall is all about. Even in French Polynesia — or at least in the southern Gambier Archipelago, arguably the most remote of French Polynesia’s fi ve major island groups. The Gambiers are where I fi rst experienced the onset of a subtropical winter. We’d arrived from the relatively touristic Galápagos Islands on the equator, where the sun rises and sets at the same time all year, and seasonal changes are measured in rainfall and swell rather than daylight hours and temperature. Suddenly (well, 18 days and 2,700 nautical miles later) we were in a farfl ung archipelago with a dry climate, dreamy 5 o’clock shadows, cool, clear water, no hotel in sight, and…

To some, I’m known as the Peanut Butter Princess. (My mother swears I wouldn’t have made it through school without it.) Aboard Kate, our Newport 41, I keep it stashed in places with varying degrees of easy access so I always have a jar on hand. I even keep a small jar in our ditch bag. Back in 2008, when my partner, Steve, and I were fi nally ready to untie the dock lines in San Diego, I ducked out for a fi nal provisioning run. We already had enough stores on board to survive the zombie apocalypse, but I wasn’t going to start this crazy, scary adventure without my security food: I arrived at the checkout counter cradling 10 jars of all-natural peanut butter. I fi gured if I…

CARDOZA. Sil via. DaCosta. Dutra. Mello. Borges. Growing up in Middletown, Rhode Island, back in the day, those were just a few of the names of kids I went to school with who shared a common ancestry: Their dads — and in many cases, their dads’ dads — were fishermen. Farmers. Landscapers. Boatbuilders. Mill workers. Masons. Family men. They’d come to America seeking the vast opportunities it presented, and they epitomized the title of that great old Rolling Stones tune, “Salt of the Earth.” Dashing through their kitchens, on the way from one baseball or basketball game to another, the stories around the table of the “old country” were all about the Azores, their homeland, an archipelago of nine rugged islands in the middle of the Atlantic where it was…

Back in February 2005, former CW colleague Nim Marsh wrote a story called “The New Sailing Machines” and explored the emerging genre of daysailers. It opened with a quote from L. Francis Herreshoff’s 1946 book, The Common Sense of Yacht Design, describing sailing friends who were tired of ocean racing: “What they want is to sail in the daytime … and sail fast enough to get the sensation of sailing. The only thing that will satiate the desire of these men is the sailing machine, and they should be allowed to have it.” Each in its own way, the three sailboats Marsh went on to review — the Morris M36, Hinckley’s DS 42 and the Friendship 40 — were indeed sailing machines, from their carbon-fiber rigs to the cuttingedge foils…

Over the past 20 years, I have mastered four diff erent sailing vessels and made multiple transits on various commercial and military ships in both the Atlantic and Pacifi c oceans. The type of boat I am aboard matters little. Each and every morning, I rise before dawn and go on deck for one of the most spiritual experiences I have ever had the privilege in which to partake. It begins with stars so plentiful that any city dweller would think I was telling a sea story if I tried to relate the quantity of them that one can see. As the dark fades to light, the stars one by one disappear into the now-graying sky. On the horizon, I begin to see the fi rst signs of a new…

N E W T E C H N O L O G Y, R E V I EWS a n d P R O D U C T S f o r t h e C R U I S I N G S A I L O R In recent years, more and more builders who forged their reputations on solid, aff ordable, midsize production sailboats have begun to expand their lines — fi guratively and literally — into ever-larger, ever-rangier vessels that combine considerable comfort with greater seakeeping ability. Beneteau, Dufour and Hanse are just three examples of companies that were once ensconced in the roughly 35- to 45-foot range of wholesome cruisers but now produce big, powerful 50- to 60-foot (or larger) craft capable of long-range, long-term voyaging adventures. It might…

Sai ling lore is rife with colorful yarns, but one of the all-time classics belongs to Joshua Slocum, the Nova Scotia-born American sailor and writer who was the fi rst person to circumnavigate singlehandedly. In Slocum’s legendary account of his adventures, Sailing Alone Around the World, he recounts an incident when Spray attracted the unwanted interests of unsavory locals one evening while anchored near Thieves Bay, en route to the Strait of Magellan. Slocum wisely scattered upturned carpet tacks on his decks before retiring to his berth. “I had no need of a dog,” he wrote of his uninvited guests’ reaction. “They howled like a pack of hounds.” The ruse worked, the thieves scattered, and Slocum and Spray continued sailing. While this tale of preparation trumping thievery has a humorous…