Innehållsförteckning för April 2020 från Cruising World

My 5-year-old grandson, Connor, just killed an hour on this gloomy day by poring over my latest issue of Cruising World. He hit me with lots of questions about everything he saw: dinghy covers, bow thrusters, deck designs, rudders, booms, pulleys and masts. He looked at every page from cover to cover, including the classified section, where he saw a “friendly pirate ship” (the ad for Windjammer cruises). Then he left to go home and took my magazine with him. He is really looking forward to sailing on our Catalina 380, Bonnie Christine, this summer, as am I. Thanks for keeping him so entertained on this blustery day. So funny because he can’t even read! —Linda Evans, Marshfield, Mass. HOW WOULD STEVE DO IT? As a frequent singlehanded sailor on…

Worried about having glass bottles on your boat? Quickly and easily create an upright wine rack from PVC pipe to safely store bottles of wine, liquor, olive oil, vinegar, olives, barbecue sauce, hot sauce and anything else that comes in glass. I use the same technique to create safe storage for glassware as well, including stemmed wineglasses. For wine bottles and glasses, cut 4-inch PVC pipe to fit up-right into a locker or storage bin. Use smaller or larger diameter pipe for other bottles, as necessary. The lengths of pipe do not have to come to the top of the locker, or even the top of the bottle, because the space between the necks of bottles can be used to store soft items such as bags of nuts, tea, coffee…

Over the past six years, Scarlet, our 47-foot Warwick cruiser/racer from the mid-’80s, sailed east with a rotating crew from Martinique to the Mediterranean. During that time, Scarlet’s longtime owner, Spencer Smith, and I visited Portugal, Morocco, Spain, France and Italy, which left us wondering, what’s next? Do we turn around now? Had we reached the end of the popular part of the Med? If we had turned around before we reached the Dalmatian coast, we would have missed what we now consider the best cruising ground in the entire Med. If you want islands, warm water, protected bays with snug harbors, modern marinas, and unfamiliar—even exotic—towns and cities steeped in ancient history, well, Croatia is the place. Small, ancient harbors are everywhere. They have sheltered sailors since earliest maritime…

The first ankle biter struck while we were a couple of miles offshore, sailing past the twin lighthouses on Thatcher Island, off Rockport, Massachusetts. One moment, shipmates Herb McCormick and Tom Famulari and I were all chill, enjoying a lazy reach along Cape Ann. The next, we were boarded by a horde of flies with fangs. We swatted with ball caps, slapped with rolls of paper, but they kept on coming in an attack that raged until sunset—and resumed at dawn on the other side of the Gulf of Maine. Who knew battling bugs would the hardest part of a Down East passage? The actual sailing? Pure delight: All it took were 25 hours and a southerly breeze for us to be snug on a mooring in pretty Tenants Harbor,…

FITTING OUT Major mast failures usually begin as minor hardware problems. At least that’s what scrap-bin forensics seems to confirm. So, instead of dreading a dismasting, prevent it with a sensible approach to rig maintenance. Some sailors inspect their masts and rigging with the spar stepped, but most recognize how much will remain unseen. Riggers recommend that the mast come out every few years and be placed on a pair of sturdy sawhorses ready for close-up scrutiny. My DIY approach focuses on hardware junctions and points where load paths intersect. Packed in my rigger’s bag are the usual hand tools, plus a Scotch pad, a quality magnifying glass and a small digital camera to record the findings. The old rule of thumb is that standing rigging has a decade’s, or…

FITTING OUT You turn the wheel and your boat turns. It’s simple and fun on calm days, and exhilarating when the breeze builds. But have you ever turned the wheel and found that it just keeps spinning? Your heart jumps into your throat, and that sense of enjoyment, well, it evaporates. Your sailboat is out of control. Based on the conditions, this could mean an accidental jibe, roundup or collision with another vessel or obstruction. Your crew, your boat and near-by vessels are all at risk. When analyzing a vessel for seaworthiness, the hull, hardware and associated systems can be broken down into tiers: essential, supporting and luxury. Essential items are vital for immediate continuance of a journey and the safety of those on board. While the equipment in each…

For nearly two decades, Umberto Felci has been the designer behind Dufour Yachts’ Grand Large sailboats. In practical terms, this means that new elements get added from model to model, but overall, there’s a good deal of continuity to the range. Current attributes across the fleet include plumb bows and transoms, lots of beam carried aft, hard chines, ports in the hull, and low-profile cabin tops that carry forward just past the mast and then curve to the deck. This past spring, the company introduced two new models here in the United States, the 390 and 430, and getting to visit and sail them both in the same day was a good chance to see how details aboard each can vary, while overall, the boats look very much the same.…

2012 PASSPORT VISTA 545 CENTER COCKPIT “BLUE SKY” Blue Sky is possibly the best equipped and maintained example of the award-winning Passport 545 center cockpit available today. Her list of equipment is impressively long and extremely well done. The list is extensive and includes everything needed for extended self-sufficient cruising to long comfortable stays aboard. With a roller furling mainsail, roller furling Code Zero, self-tacking roller furling working jib, electric winches and bow thruster, she is easily and safely single-handed. Blue Sky’s shoal draft and ICW friendly Solent sail plan make her both a capable offshore and a thin water cruiser. Her interior is open and airy, boasting loads of storage and tankage. There are two king-sized berths in two palatial cabins each with its own head, and even a…

When our team of experts select the raw ingredients for WEST SYSTEM® Epoxy products, we strive to achieve excellent physical properties with the lowest possible risk to human and environmental health. There is a safe exposure level for most substances. The more toxic the substance, the lower that level will be. Overexposure occurs when the safe exposure level is exceeded. When this happens, the substance can impact your health. Hazardous substances can enter the body through skin absorption, ingestion, or inhalation. The route for a particular substance depends on its physical characteristics and how it is being used. This article will focus on a less common route of overexposure, inhalation. We’ll discuss how to prevent inhaling epoxy vapors and reduce your risk of respiratory issues when working with epoxy products.…

Finding a way to finance your lifestyle while cruising in remote places is one of the many challenges faced by sailors. Adrian Cartier Millon, a French kitesurf instructor, had a unique idea in mind when he set off from France six years ago aboard his Laurin Koster 28, Eureka. He was headed for New Caledonia in the South Pacific, where he’d heard the conditions were perfect to start a kite school, which he wanted to run from his boat. Originally from Marseille, Millon set sail from the south of France and headed west across the Atlantic to the Caribbean, transited the Panama Canal, and entered Pacific waters for the first time, teaching kiteboarding as he went. He never made it to New Caledonia however. Instead he stumbled across a lesser-known…

As I wearily awoke from sleep in preparation for my next watch, a strange flapping sound brought me to an instant state of awareness. Located 400 miles east of Bermuda, my family and I were six days into our first ocean crossing, sailing from the Caribbean island of St. Maarten to the Atlantic archipelago of the Azores. Our 1984 Moody 47, Roam, had been performing admirably, and I instinctively knew that this new sound was cause for alarm. Rushing to the companionway, I clambered up the stairs to find that our newly purchased, albeit secondhand, carbon-fiber headsail had completely delaminated through the night, causing a gaping hole the size of a double bed and allowing black carbon-fiber strands to wrap tightly around the forestay. While this wasn’t ideal, the main…

Many simple meals that are easy to prepare in the ship’s galley come from the generation before mine and were handed down from beloved family and friends. I’ve updated and reengineered many of these recipes from their original form. In recent years aboard Scaramouche, our Tayana 58, I made my husband’s aunt’s recipe for Chicken Noel, a recipe that many people seem to have acquired the same way. The earlier-era recipe called for boneless, skinless chicken breasts, canned mushrooms, and a can of cream of mushroom soup as the base for the sauce, and specified baking in a roasting pan. To kick it up a notch, I use skin-on, bone-in chicken breast, which delivers a tastier and moister version than its boneless, skinless cousins, not to mention being easier on…

VOYAGING For modern voyagers, when it comes to routing, there seems to be a consensus in the cruising community: Cruisers can’t and shouldn’t travel upwind against the trades. It’s the wrong way! That’s certainly the advice in bibles such as Jimmy Cornell’s World Cruising Routes and in most, if not all, the popular seminars about crossing oceans. Or maybe it’s just because even seasoned sailors admit that following seas look pretty threatening when going downwind in the trades. Hundreds of cruising yachts sail across the Pacific westward each year, but only a handful go the other way. We were one of them, sailing east from Tonga to Tahiti aboard our 41-foot cutter Pitufa a few years back. It turned out to be an interesting and even quite pleasant journey. A…

MONTHLY MAINTENANCE Like the clutch in a standard-transmission automobile, you know it’s there; it fulfills a critical role, and you hope to never see it because if you do, it means something has gone wrong. I’m referring to the damper plate, the device that serves as the interconnection between the engine’s output and the transmission’s input. Located at the back of the engine under the bell housing, the damper plate turns with, and is bolted to, the engine’s flywheel. The transmission’s input shaft, which is splined, engages with a similarly splined receiver located at the center of the damper plate, thereby connecting the two. The spline allows for slight fore-and-aft movement of the transmission shaft as it’s shifted into and out of gear. The damper plate has two primary missions:…

On Wednesday, June 20, 1979, while sailing in a qualifying race for the OSTAR (Original Single-Handed Transatlantic Race), Jan Gougeon’s self-designed and built 31’ trimaran FLICKA was capsized by heavy seas in the North Atlantic. Jan survived on the overturned plywood/epoxy multihull for four days before he was rescued by a passing freighter. The following is the transcript of a phone call between Jan, his brothers Meade and Joel, as well as fellow multihull designer/sailor Mike Zuteck. Their discussion takes place on June 26, 1979, just hours after the freighter that rescued Jan delivered him to dry land. FLICKA was never recovered. We’ve divided their lengthy discussion into two parts. In this first installment, Jan discusses FLICKA’s capsize, what it was like surviving in the upside-down trimaran. Jan Gougeon: The…

Many products, especially boats, are now being manufactured with a process called Vacuum Assisted Resin Transfer Molding (VARTM), also frequently referred to as infusion. The main topics of this article are: what infusion is, how to repair an infused part with vacuum bagging vs. infusion, and the results of our study comparing a vacuum-bagged repaired laminate and an infused repaired laminate. What is Infusion? Infusion uses a vacuum to create a pressure differential between the part and a resin bath which pushes the resin into the dry laminate, wetting it out. To make an infused part the reinforcement fabric and coring are laid dry into a mold with vacuum bag, release fabric, flow media, etc. laid on top of the laminate. Then the vacuum bag is sealed and vacuum is…

Small communities benefit when local groups work together to produce results greater than the sum of their individual efforts. Three organizations combined their efforts to create such synergy in a coastal county on Lake Huron. The Iosco County Family Court, local Elks Lodge 2525 and Heritage Coast Sailing and Rowing (HCS&R) combined efforts to develop a positive training program for youthful offenders and provide a staunch safety boat for the new not-for-profit sailing school. The Juvenile Enhanced Accountability Program (JEAP), a Family Court Program, gives youthful offenders a chance to complete their court-ordered community service, in this case, by building a boat while increasing their manual and group skills. Elks Lodge 2525 has a long and laudable community service history. They have worked with the JEAP program for several years…

 EVERY-ONE knows there’s no such thing as a free boat. Just don’t tell Matt Rutherford, who can gaze from the deck of his latest one—which he hopes will take him to the ends of the earth—to the tarnished remains of his former one, which already did. Pretty little St. Brendan lies these days on the hard, at the end of a gravel lane of old-timers that have seen better times and places. Eight years ago, in one of the great sea-voyaging triumphs of all time, Rutherford sailed the donated 27-foot, 40-year-old Albin Vega from Annapolis, Maryland, back to Annapolis—via the Northwest Passage and Cape Horn, some 27,000 nautical miles in 309 days, nonstop and singlehanded at an average rate of 3.5 knots (see “Fortitudine Vincimus,” July 2012). Now St. Brendan, named…

The high season in Croatia is June, July and August, and features mostly easy sailing weather. Light to moderate breezes from the north or south predominate, and they rise in the late morning and decline with the sun. The steep mountains that line the shore of Croatia, however, and the narrow “kanals” between the mainland and islands—and between islands themselves—can cause local weather anomalies that will have you scrambling to shorten sail. If you see a bank of clouds resembling a beard over the mountaintops, particularly the Velebit mountains north and east of Split, be prepared to reef down and find a lee under a nearby island. In the shoulder seasons of April/May and September/ October, the weather might be challenging. The bora can bring high barometric pressure, clear weather and…

Our journey from Tonga to Tahiti was conducted in five legs: Leg 1: Tongatapu to Niue (320-nautical-mile rhumb line, 322 nautical miles sailed) On August 10, we started out from Tonga in rough weather with SSE wind of 25 to 30 knots. The next two days, the wind shifted to the SE, still blowing 20-plus knots. Pitufa did daily runs of 120 nautical miles, and the windvane took us in a curve northeastward within two and a half days to Niue. We spent five days in Niue exploring parts of the island we had not seen the first time around. Leg 2: Niue to Beveridge Reef (135-nautical-mile rhumb line, 155 nautical miles sailed) On August 16, the wind turned to the ENE (the mooring field in Niue gets uncomfortable with a northerly…

FITTING OUT Bottom paint is intended to keep organics—slime, grass, barnacles and such—from growing on the hull of your sailboat. Growth slows the boat when underway and increases fuel consumption under power. Minimizing it—whether by antifouling paint or regular cleaning or both—is good. In fact, if you run the numbers for a long-distance transit, cleaning by a diver before setting out pays off pretty fast. As Jamestown Distributors will tell you, a clean hull is faster and more fuel efficient. Those numbers add up very quickly. A clean hull can take a day off a coastal passage, say from San Francisco to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, and more on longer voyages, such as a trans-Atlantic hop to Horta in the Azores. The effects of drag add up for daysailors and…

In the parlance of basketball, a game I once played enthusiastically if not particularly well, “length” has become a catchall phrase embodying multiple attributes. A player described as having good length is generally tall, of course, but he (or she) probably has an impressive wingspan; is rangy and athletic; and is very efficient, on offense and defense, and around the boards. Length, in this context, means many things. Curiously, the same term came to me after inspecting the new Bavaria C50 Style during our Boat of the Year testing this past fall at the US Sailboat Show in Annapolis, Maryland. The reason, I think, is because the boat is interesting and effective on several levels. With a 50-plus-foot waterline, it’s certainly long; and with an air draft of more than…

NEW BASES IN LUSH, VIBRANT BRAZIL Dream Yacht Charter and the Moorings have each added Brazil to their global destination offerings. As part of its ongoing 50th anniversary celebration, the Moorings opened a new base with a local partner in the historic coastal town of Paraty, between São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Meanwhile, in addition to opening a bareboat base with a fleet of six in the nearby colonial port city of Angra dos Reis, Dream Yacht Charter has also added a base in Paraty, with bareboat and crewed options. The region features bays peppered with islands and world-famous beaches. Pronounced “par-ah-CHEE,” Paraty is a UNESCO World Heritage Site offering one of the best-preserved 18th-century town centers, with period architecture, cobbled streets and a vibrant culture. The Moorings…

In late 2018 my son and I were given a unique opportunity by the Michigan-based Water Wonderland Chapter of the Antique and Classic Boat Society (ACBS) to build an 8' MiniMax hydroplane based on original plans from the early 1960s. Almost anything from that era seems to be popular again. Maybe it’s nostalgia or maybe the designs of that groundbreaking decade were just ahead of their time. Either way, the MiniMax’s appeal seems as relevant today as it did in 1962. We accepted the challenge without hesitation. The youth-centric building project commenced in February 2019 at the Grand Rapids, Michigan Boat Show. We were in front of a live audience, and ACBS members generously donated wood and fasteners. Sons and daughters participated and even younger siblings got involved. Those initial…

After a few years of racing on the J22 This Little Piggy, the owner was ready to take a step back and gave me the first option to purchase it. I took advantage of the opportunity. As with many boats I’ve owned over the years, the first couple winters I plan on spending money upgrading and doing repairs. Not that a lot has to be done, but a few changes in hardware placement and re-bedding the deck hardware are at the top of my list. The sea hood of the J22 is the control center with mainsail, jib, and spinnaker halyard cleats along with the pole topping lift and cunningham. In the early days of J22 sailing, everyone was sorting out the best placement for hardware on the sea hood.…

Nonskid surfaces may need to be replaced because they are worn down from years of use, or were removed during a deck repair. If you want to match an existing pattern, flexible molds are available for matching a production boat nonskid pattern or for use if a molded appearance is desired. Molded non-skid surfaces are often very open making them easier to clean and they have a more finished appearance (See Epoxyworks 22, “Repair Non-Skid and get Professional Results”). For applications where it is not practical to use molds, or a simple and functional non-skid surface is desired, there are some easy options. It is important to note that when applying a nonskid surface with epoxy, you’ll need to make it pretty rough because epoxy requires a UV-protective topcoat (typically…