Innehållsförteckning för July 2025 från Practical Boat Owner

WITH THE EDITOR Hurrah for small boats! Looking at the mainstream marine market, and particularly the new boats being launched, you might be forgiven for thinking that small boats and cruising dinghies were falling out of fashion. It is 45ft-plus monohulls and multihulls packed to the gunwales with the latest tech and creature comforts that seem to be the order of the day, with few sub-30ft yachts being launched, let alone cruising dinghies. So, I was so heartened to read that membership to the Dinghy Cruising Association (DCA), which celebrates its platinum anniversary this year (see page 44), has tripled recently. As the DCA’s president, Roger Barnes points out, those who dinghy cruise are traditionally seen as “weird people” who would rather camp than sail a “proper yacht”, but it…

Easier check-in and check-out will continue in some marinas in France. The Cruising Association (CA), which collates information provided by French officials, French marinas, CA volunteers and local representatives, has welcomed confirmation of National Protocol of Cooperation ports for 2025. European Union (EU) regulations require those arriving in France from non-EU/Schengen countries such as the UK and the Channel Islands to check-in and then check-out when departing at a Port of Entry such as Dunkirk, Calais, Dieppe, Le Havre, Honfleur, Caen-Ouistreham, Cherbourg, Carteret, Granville, St Malo, St Brieuc and Roscoff. Last year, the French Government approved a ‘protocol’ that enabled several marinas around France to offer a service for checking boat crews in and out using emailed forms. Confirmed protocol ports for 2025 include: Dives-sur-Mer, Courselles-sur-Mer, Port-en-Bessin, Grandcamp-Maisy, Isigny, Dielette,…

A new joint industry-standard Sale and Purchase Agreement for professional yacht brokers has been launched by the Association of Brokers and Yacht Agents (ABYA) and the British Marine Boat Retailers and Brokers Association (BRBA). For boat buyers and vendors, the new agreement should provide ‘greater protection, clarity and confidence when buying or selling a yacht through a professional yacht broker’. By creating a legally robust and industry-standard contract, the collaboration aims to ensure transparency, reduce risk, and help to prevent disputes so buyers and vendors can trust that their transactions follow best practice, making the process smoother, fairer, and more secure. The contract will be reviewed annually to ensure it remains aligned with industry best practices and regulatory developments, and both organisations strongly recommend its adoption by their members. Alastair…

Following a 1,200-mile opening Leg 1 from Antigua to Panama, 15 “proud, happy and hot builder sailors” faced their first major logistic challenge: transport overland from the Atlantic to the Pacific. This marked the first time a racing fleet has attempted such an overland manoeuvre during a circumnavigation event. Founder of the McIntyre Mini Globe Race (MGR) Don McIntyre said: “The 580s were simply too slow to use the Panama Canal and not able to consider a €55,000 maritime tow fee. “The entire fleet of 15 Alma Globe 580 minis were successfully trucked across Panama from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean in 10 days.” Leg 2 will involve pitstops in Marquesas, Papeete, and Tonga before ending in Vuda Marina, Fiji, in late June, for a three-week break before the…

The definition of insanity, according to Einstein, is repeating the same action over and over again and expecting different results, which, as it so happens, also perfectly describes the utter futility of varnishing. Every year the varnish work on Snipe, my pert, wooden 1953 Blackwater Sloop, needs a touch-up; every second year, it needs a refresh, then refurbishment in the third, followed by a complete strip of what’s left in the fourth. By then it’s looking like a breakout of teenage eczema erupting with acne and it’s time to start the process all over again, scraping everything back, then slapping on five coats of expensive stuff, sanding most of it off between coats, then finally standing back – preferably at least 30 yards on a moonless night – to admire…

Rupert Holmes looks at a selection of desirable 31ft and 32ft designs from the late 1990s and early 2000s By the early 2000s, cruising yacht design had moved on enormously compared to 15 years earlier. Low centre of gravity keels that offered both useful weight reduction along with improved stability were now the norm. Equally, designers had figured out how to make a fast hull shape with high internal volume without sacrificing sailing characteristics. As a result, many of the 31ft and 32ft cruisers of this era offer as much comfort and space as many 36-footers did in the 1980s. At this time, Jeanneau tended to offer slightly more performance-oriented cruising designs than sister brand Beneteau’s Oceanis range, but without as much compromise on interior space as the latter’s First…

Furuno Furuno’s NAVNet TZtouch 3 range is available in 10in and 13in screens. An ‘XL’ version is available in 16, 22 and 24in all-glass MFDs. ‘Hybrid control’ means you can edge-swipe and tap for the menu, or use buttons in rough sea conditions. The TZ Cloud app means you can plan routes at home, which are then automatically saved to the MFD, or you can buy and update charts directly from the MFD as long as you have internet access. The TZtouch 3 comes with a built-in fish finder with side scan. It can be linked with autopilots, AIS, GPS, sat compasses, and transducers for depth speed and temperature, and you can monitor engine data and other custom instrument data. Raymarine The Element S is Raymarine’s entry-level model, and the…

Long considered ‘a bit bizarre’ for sailing small boats into creeks and estuaries for adventurous nights of wild camping on board, the Dinghy Cruising Association (DCA) members now find their sport ‘increasingly fashionable’. As the association celebrates its 70th anniversary year, membership numbers have tripled to over 1,500 and branches are holding rallies in nine countries, including Ireland, Poland, France, the USA, Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden. The association’s Facebook group has 21,000 followers and DCA president Roger Barnes’ small-boat cruising videos on YouTube have had millions of views. “It has taken us all by surprise that people now think it’s really interesting, instead of being weird people who sail in dinghies when they should have proper yachts. It’s like the world has caught up with us,” said Roger. “We used…

Equipment used to anchor our boats is constantly under development as new materials and designs appear, and as new gear is adapted from other technologies or existing items are simply improved. Old ideas are constantly questioned by rigorous testing and field experience. Secure anchoring isn’t just about the anchor itself, however. The whole rode that connects the anchor to the boat, made up of a number of different parts, is arguably at least as important, if not more so, than the specifics of the anchor. If you get your ground tackle set up correctly, with an understanding of its abilities and limitations, you can be confident that the much-maligned ‘weakest link’, is not going to let you down in challenging conditions. First, some clarification, what is meant by a rode?…

Boats powered by petrol or diesel engines have one thing in common – high fuel costs, with some of the larger planing motor cruisers burning a gallon a mile. On the upside, that same planing boat will only average 50 engine hours a year, about the same as a heavy goods vehicle will clock in a fortnight. As a result, standing faults and corrosion from lack of use are a bigger killer of marine engines than excessive mileage. Incidentally, and in a complete reverse of automotive thinking, when looking to buy a used motorboat, high engine hours are usually seen as an asset. They suggest the owner enjoys using their boat and so keeps the engines in good condition. With energy efficiency a buzzword in all sectors of mobility, from…

I live in Cartagena in Spain, a region where it only rains 30 days a year. I noticed some water on the saloon table of my Bavaria 38 after some heavy rain so decided to do something about it. I have done many other repairs on my previous 1980 Furia 33 and on my current boat, a 2004 Bavaria 38. It’s a very easy repair – it took just a couple of hours – but I’ve not seen it anywhere else. Here’s how I did the job:…

The sailing community is being urged to participate in an anonymous global survey to document collisions at sea between yachts and marine life. Unlike the shipping sector, there is no requirement for the systematic reporting of strikes at sea within the sailing world, so interactions with orcas, whales and other marine life only make the news in extreme cases. The marine strike log maintained by the Marine Mammal Advisory Group (MMAG), is collated from reports by sources such as the International Whale Commission, media reports, and one-to-one surveys from the sailing community. It currently shows more than 50% of collisions result in damage to vessel or crew, injury or death to marine life. In 2008, Ritter published the first comprehensive paper on collisions between sailing vessels and marine life. Now, the…

The RYA has launched its first nationwide inclusivity campaign. A representative of 100,000-plus individual members, more than 2,400 RYA-recognised training centres, and 1,500-plus affiliated clubs, the national governing body for sailing and windsurfing is dedicated to making boating and water sports accessible. In 2019, global World Sailing research found that 80% of women and 56% of men believe gender balance is an issue in the sport. RYA training instructor data shows that men significantly outnumber women in many disciplines. Junior participation in RYA-coached groups has dropped by 24% since 2015, with those from non-sailing backgrounds needing greater support. The ‘Reflections on Water’ year-long campaign will include announcements, activations, research and inspiring stories from across the UK “to shine a light on the people and communities who make our waters so…

Solo sailing tip I enjoyed the online article by Andrew Blyth at pbo.co.uk about Solo sailing tips – anchoring and berthing. I find that if picking up a mooring single-handed the stern is somewhat closer for me to get to, so I go in stern first, secure the lines, lie stern to the wind then take a line forward. Derek Buchanan Reconstituted teak On the PBO website, ‘10 low cost solutions for non-slip decks on boats’ helpfully has a product directory at the end of the article, but sadly this does not include a supplier of the reconstituted teak which is mentioned in the article. Could you direct me to a supplier? Kevin McBride Jake Kavanagh replies: It is my pleasure to steer you to a supplier of the (rather…

Readers of PBO will have noticed that there is plenty of expensive stuff happening these days. This has led to a renewed interest in open-boat cruising, which allows the sailor averse to yacht ownership to build and maintain a boat and keep it in the garage rather than eating its head off in a marina all season. There are, however, those who claim they do not wish to get cold and wet and become undesirably intimate with an all-purpose bucket. So they plan to bask in the total luxury of a cruise. A proper cruise. On a cruise ship. The Stinkadelic. This is of course ridiculous. On a properly equipped open boat, luxury levels far exceed those experienced on El Stinko. Sleeping, as long as you do it on the…

Among my favourite low-cost pocket cruisers are the Robert Tucker-designed Silhouette Mk3 and the Corribee Mk2, both bilge keelers. All yachts designed by Robert Tucker are good looking and I have owned three of them, two built by Hurley Marine and one by Newbridge, both excellent boat builders. These little yachts are now classics and I’d be pleased to own one again should the opportunity arise. The bilge keel versions are ideal for coastal and estuary sailing although some have been much farther afield. It was Dame Ellen MacArthur who cut her teeth, when a youngster, sailing a fin-keeled Corribee all around the coast of Britain. When Dame Ellen first saw her Corribee-to-be she said it was ‘love at first sight’. And that is just how I felt when I…

When I took delivery of PBO Project Boat Maximus, I used electronic charts for the first time, but only in combination with paper charts. It had been two decades since I’d studied my RYA Yachtmaster theory, and I wanted to be sure I could adequately read a paper chart before getting to grips with electronic plotting! For the voyage from Chichester to Poole, the first thing I did was work out the total distance and our average boat speed for the Maxi 84. This would give me the rough time it would take (tides would come later). Using Imray charts and a pair of dividers I counted 47 miles, which I sense-checked against the distance tables in the Almanac. With a winter passage and dwindling daylight hours, I decided to…

Sailing around a headland in the British Isles will nearly always involve an encounter with overfalls, a ‘commotion of the sea’, best visualised as broken or disturbed water. The first thing to do when considering tackling a headland and an associated tidal race is to look for the overfall symbols on a chart. Imray charts mark them with ‘curling waves’. Garmin’s Navionics have grey ‘shark fins’. Admiralty publications have a single peak ‘mountains’. This is similar to the insignia for ‘sand waves’. There are several of these, for instance, in Mount’s Bay off south-western Cornwall. These denote an underwater feature, not a surface one we are concerned with here. Small-scale charts can denote overfalls with two parallel wiggly blue lines. Eddies (disturbed water) are identified by a whirlpool symbol. For…

Got a question? Email pbo@futurenet.com METALS What has caused my prop to lose a blade? Q When my Offshore 8M, Karima S was lifted out, I discovered why she’d been hard to handle across the marina – half of her prop had been ‘eaten away’.I presumed this prop damage was from having the dehumidifier attached to shore power all winter and I vowed not to do that again! The boat’s wiring wasn’t involved – I simply ran a heavy-duty cable from the marina power, with a circuit breaker. I wasn’t sure if it was electrolysis from that, or the neighbouring boat in some way, but you can see from the photo why she wasn’t handling properly! Gave me quite a turn when she was lifted out. Marsali Taylor Expert metallurgist…

Route options A one-month voyage from the UK’s East Coast to the West Baltic is possible, but it is better to allow two months for the 1,300-mile trip. Choices for the route east to the Baltic islands include the Northern Skagerrak passage, or more sheltered middle Limfjord route from Thyboron. But the Kiel Canal route, entering the South Baltic, is better for small weather windows and daysailing. We’ve done the passage between the East Coast and Kiel Canal in one 300-mile hop but this is not the easiest or most enjoyable method. The inner passage between the Frisian or Wadden Islands, a North Sea archipelago off the coast of the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark is far more sheltered, scenic, safe and enjoyable if you have shallow draught and an ability…

The importance of keeping a good lookout has been highlighted in an interim report into a fatal collision between an oil tanker and cargo ship off the coast of East Yorkshire. Neither the Portuguese-registered container ship Solong nor the USA-registered tanker Stena Immaculate, which was anchored, ‘had a dedicated lookout on the bridge’ when the crash occurred 14 miles north-east of Spurn Head at the entrance to the Humber Estuary on 10 March. A Marine Accident and Investigation Branch (MAIB) interim report, which cautions that ‘new evidence may become available’, describes how Stena Immaculate, with a cargo of over 220,000 barrels of aviation fuel, had departed Greece bound for Killingholme, England, while Solong with cargo including ‘some designated as dangerous goods’ left Scotland, bound for Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Stena…

Leading publisher of nautical information for leisure sailors Imray Laurie Norie & Wilson Ltd (Imray) and Austrian cartographic specialist freytag & berndt (FB) have pledged to ‘ensure the continued availability and development’ of Imray’s nautical paper charts and books. The two companies have signed a letter of intent to form FB Imray Laurie Norie & Wilson GmbH (FB Imray), based in Vienna. Bookharbour (Stanfords) will continue as the main UK-based distributor of Imray charts and books. The joint venture is set to launch in the summer, with further details to be announced in due course. The focus will be on producing high-quality nautical charts and publications under the Imray brand, while also developing new products tailored to the needs of sailors and advancing digital navigation. There will be no interruption…

After two years of teaching herself to sail – including sextant navigation – it was on 18 May that Ann Davison set sail from Plymouth in her 23ft, four-ton wooden sloop Felicity Ann. She’d been a pilot in the 1930s, and that was how she met her husband, Frank, a keen sailor. After several years of farming, they bought a 70ft ketch, Reliance, to travel the world. Lack of money forced them to set off before their boat was ready; they were caught in rough weather in the English Channel, and Reliance was wrecked on rocks off Portland Bill. They launched their liferaft, but they were washed off it several times, and Frank was drowned. Ann wrote the story in her book Last Voyage, and the proceeds from that book…

Electronic charts have been a game changer in navigation this past decade, so much so that the UK Hydrographic Office (UKHO) announced its withdrawal of Admiralty paper charts to focus on digital products. After concerns were raised by the Royal Institute of Navigation (RIN), this has been delayed until at least 2030. “It has now become clear that more time is needed to address the needs of those specific users who do not yet have viable alternatives to paper chart products,” said the UKHO. Imray also announced it was phasing out its paper charts at the end of the season, although this has now been withdrawn following its collaboration with the Austrian cartographic specialist freytag & berndt (FB) to “ensure the continued availability and development” of Imray’s paper charts and…

Yachts of 30ft or under are exciting – something about their (relatively) diminutive size makes them reminiscent of childhood adventures. They’re also intriguing from a design point of view. The challenges of fitting cockpit, cabin and berths into a confined space mean there is often more variation among the ‘pocket cruisers’ of this world than among boats that are not so dimensionally challenged. Go big, and they all start to look the same to the small-boat enthusiast. Conversely, the small boats launched or planned in the last year or two, such as the Bente 28, Swallow Yachts 32, the GT 325, or the Sunbeam 29.1 and 32.1, are all so different as to be hard to compare. The truth is that this size of boat sits somewhere between a fully…

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Slow down It’s best not to view the overfall entry point as an intimidating ‘wall of water’. You’ll see an often dark-looking line of standing waves, crested with white water. Perhaps you can view these ‘white lines’ across your path as ‘give way’ markings. In the same way as for a motor vehicle, they show the need to ‘slow down and stop’ if necessary, but you’ll need enough speed to steer through the steepest wave crests. Going too fast into short seas will drive the bow under the breaker, stop the boat and swamp the cockpit. Taking off the way will allow the boat to rise to meet the wave as much as possible. Meet each wave Prime consideration – when steering through a tidal race – is to keep…

Since our retirement 16 years ago, our aft cockpit Aquastar Ocean Ranger 33 Lorna Adam has had a hard life, typically sailing about 2,000 miles a year. In between cruising my wife, Chris, and I have been undertaking a steady piecemeal refit. We bought Lorna Adam in March 2000. She’d been fitted out in South Wales by a skilled carpenter whose day job was fitting out pub bars. As a result, the woodwork is very nice indeed, and the internal doors are of very old mahogany! We purchased the boat from a Dublin orthopaedic surgeon who admitted that he was good with a hammer and saw but, in his words, “fek all else”. Since 2013 Lorna Adam has been kept in the Netherlands and since 2016 in Oppenhuizen, Friesland. It…

Easier boarding on the big day An upcoming wedding led Thomas Parker to build a smart step I made a stainless steel boarding step for my Moody 346, Klondike Kate, primarily for my wedding so my wife, Heather, would not have to struggle aboard in an ungainly manner for our wedding photos – she’s much more at home in oilskins than a dress. Since then, the step has been greatly admired, both in my home ground of Strangford Lough, Northern Ireland, and when we went cruising in Western Scotland. Coming alongside a pontoon can be tricky enough at the best of times and more so if entering a strange marina. With concentration firmly focussed on boat speed, wind direction and other boats (plus the unwanted attention of other sailors) the…

Our winter neighbours in Norfolk, the Brent geese, have a spring migration to Scandinavia and the Siberian Arctic Tundra. For 10 years now, we too have followed a north-east route to the Baltic Sea, in search of sheltered waters and the beauty of the archipelagos. In 2024 we decided to sail to Sweden’s Bohuslän islands, an 8,000-island archipelago that starts about 15 miles south of Gothenburg, near Lerkil, and runs all the way to Norway. There are sheltered channels almost all the way north, many anchorages and small harbours, with only occasional detours to the open sea. Island-bound Our outbound route was daysailing: Ijmuiden, through Amsterdam to Enkhuisen, anchoring off Companieshaven for the night, continuing North across the Ijsselmeer, to lock through the Afsluitdjk, at Kornwerderzand sluice, into the Waddenzee,…