Innehållsförteckning för March 2016 från Yachting

Weather on the water can change in an instant. It was early summer, and our six-man crew was headed off shore on board my friend Tom’s Viking 50. The Atlantic was unusually calm on this morning. Greasy calm. Thick clouds hung low in the sky, like a light-gray comforter blanketing the water, but nothing severe was predicted, and the sun was trying to poke its head out. Our hopes were high for a storm-free, beautiful bluewater day. About an hour offshore, we noticed rain streaking toward the sea surface in the distance. A sizable squall was approaching, rapidly. Looking at the now fully green radar, we tried to weave the Viking’s way through the rain bands. There would be intense, blinding downpours — the kind of rain that gets you…

Bill oyster thought his life was going to be about bicycles. Fly-fishing was a hobby he pursued when he wasn’t training for the 1996 Olympic trials. Then there was a crash, a lot of pain and an unwelcome abundance of free time. He hunkered down in his basement and read books about carving bamboo fly-fishing rods, which he thought were gorgeous. The first one took him six months. It was hideous and left him bloodied, but his skills improved. “Since rod number 2 came out, I’ve never not had a waiting list,” he says. “I was as surprised as everyone else.” Today, Oyster’s shop in Blue Ridge, Georgia, turns out 35 to 50 rods a year. Basic models start just below $2,400, and his intricate custom rods — including hand-engraved…

A amy wachmann was a perfectly happy 16-year-old when her father announced he was moving the family from Texas to Alaska. She remembers being packed into the family truckster, pounding along the Alaska-Canadian Highway before it was paved. There weren’t potholes; there were craters. “We lost windshields. We lost tires. The rocks were just flying,” she says. After a year of refusing to speak to her dad, she came to love her adopted home. Now she works in Florida, but she goes back as often as she can to enjoy Alaska’s grandeur and scenery. How did you get into yachting? I spent summers in Juneau working on a day-cruise catamaran. We took cruise-ship passengers to see glaciers. And now you manage the three largest charter yachts based each summer in…

T here are times when i am able to count the number of yachts down there that I designed,” Jack Hargrave told Yachting’s then-associate editor Charles Barthold nearly 27 years ago, some 25 stories above a collection of marinas in West Palm Beach, Florida. “Usually it’s anywhere between seven and 12.” “There is nothing smug about Hargrave as he says this,” Barthold wrote in the March 1989 issue of Yachting. “In fact, he is a rather reserved man, modest as he looks out over the water. But it is clear that Hargrave relishes the fact that his accomplishments can be so easily viewed and counted.” Easily viewed and counted might be an understatement. In 1989, Hargrave had already created 75 powerboat designs for Hatteras Yachts and close to 30 more…

“IN NEWPORT, I CAN HAVE MORE FUN THAN IN THE CARIBBEAN. I CAN EASILY GET MICRO-GREENS, ORGANIC FRUITS AND VEGETABLES, EDIBLE FLOWERS, HERBS AND CHIVES AND THINGS. CHEF SUE FICKEN, SAILING YACHT MARAE “ SUE FICKEN HAS BEEN the chef aboard Marae for a while now, and her expertise has become undeniable. The first time I ate aboard about three years ago, she prepared a crab salad wrapped in cucumber. It was lovely, but it was far from unique. My second meal aboard was perfectly cooked fresh fish on a bed of flavorful vegetables: a level up, for sure. My third meal aboard a few months ago included her take on seafood ceviche: huge chunks of tuna, shrimp and scallops served on a chilled Himalayan salt block with handmade condiments…

Ssafety briefings, Capt. Bruno Herregods knew, didn’t usually go this way before the tender ride ashore. He had anchored the yacht off Vanuatu, an archipelago surrounded by miles of Pacific Ocean between Australia and Fiji. The guests had gathered around for what, in other charter destinations, would have been a quick talk about whether the tender was going to land at a beach or a dock — the most pressing result being whether or not to bring sandals. This time, the instructions needed to be, well, different. “We warned them that the guy running around with a banana leaf wrapped around his penis is perfectly normal,” he says. Vanuatu is in a part of the Pacific Ocean where most charter yachts don’t travel — but where Herregods will return with…

HAWAIIAN SUNSHINE FLOODED MY EYES AS I popped my head out of the bathtub-warm waters off Maui’s Makena Landing Park, where my wife and I were investigating the local green sea turtle population. Suddenly, a faint, strange buzzing caught my ear. I scanned the horizon for a helicopter, but I came up shy. Then a flash of sunlight glinted off a tiny aircraft hovering 20 feet above the brine, officially marking my first in-the-wild drone sighting. I watched the drone make a few passes along the surf break and realized the art of shooting imagery of boats — and the boating lifestyle — had changed forever. Remote-controlled (RC) aircraft have existed for decades, but they were simply designed to fly, not to perform GPS-aided tasks like shooting video, autonomously hovering…

A re you like me? Do you like taking a yacht and heading for points unknown? In that case, the Kadey-Krogen 48 North Sea is a fine choice to live aboard and travel to far-flung destinations. “The [48] embodies our tag line, ‘At home on any sea.’ She’s a go-anywhere vessel,” said Larry Polster, Kadey-Krogen’s vice president. Polster gave impressive numbers to support his statement. Powered by a single 210 hp Caterpillar diesel (later models have a 200 hp John Deere), the 48 is good for more than 4,600 nautical miles at 6 knots. At 8 knots, it’ll take about 2,000 nautical miles to burn through her 1,000-gallon fuel capacity. Bluewater performance and cruising safety are paramount in the 48’s build. Her full-displacement hull is solid fiberglass below the waterline…

GRAMMY AWARD-WINNER Derek Trucks’ office is the stage, where he makes his guitar sing, laugh, cry and scream for legions of fans as part of the Tedeschi Trucks Band. But in his downtime, this avid angler is often on board his Hatteras 63 Convertible off the Florida coast, chasing wahoo, mahimahi and marlin. He calls time off shore a “slate cleaner.” How did you start fishing? “My earliest memories on the water are waking up long before sunrise and hitting the bait shop, then the boat ramp, with my grandfather. He’s a great river fisherman.” Do you have a favorite angling memory? “One that sticks out is a Costa Rica trip about 10 years ago. I was fishing with a good friend of mine, Jimmy Herring, in the 2nd Annual Taj…

I recently ran into an old friend who told me about a cruise his son had taken. The son has a modern cruiser with all the usual goodies — including, of course, electronics from VHF radio to GPS. With his wife and two kiddies, he set off on a weekend trip to an offshore island. Without stretching this story, he got caught midway by one of those storm fronts that are now being blamed on atomic testing or something, but that actually have been dropping onto mariners for centuries. Suddenly he’s punching into gray-bearded seas and increasing winds, with driving rain reducing visibility to a few hundred feet. Not to worry, he thought, because he had already programmed his GPS with the location of his planned anchorage. The GPS would…

CAPT. DOUG MEIER saw the look on the grandparents’ faces, and he knew he’d made the right purchase for the yacht’s toy box. The 116-foot Hargrave Renaissance — now launched and open for charter this summer — was still under construction at the time, so Meier was aboard the owner’s previous yacht in the Bahamas, testing his new tech. He watched as the grandparents stood on the aft deck, grinning at the LCD images a remote-operated vehicle was transmitting from beneath the boat. “The grandparents on the aft deck can see what the grandkids see when they’re snorkeling,” Meier says. “And the high-powered lights at night are amazing. We had adults playing with it for hours. Just hour after hour.” The toy is called a Deep Trekker DTG2 Smart ROV,…

WORTH THE WAIT About a year ago, Riva gathered marine-industry journalists in Miami and showed a video of an elegant-looking open yacht with a hardtop that rose from the foredeck. Jaws dropped, and “wow ” was heard in all directions. That vision is now reality. THE WORLD’S BIGGEST ‘OPEN’ When it comes to open yachts, this Riva 88 Florida takes the crown, offering sun, speed and style scaled up to the max. What constitutes an open yacht as opposed to an open cruiser? To me, an open yacht has an open cockpit and not only proper staterooms, but also dedicated crew berths. The next-biggest available on the market is at least 8 feet shorter, which might not sound like a lot, but it translates to a huge amount of extra…

“IF IT’S SUPPOSED TO MOVE AND IT DOESN’T, WD-40.IF IT’S NOT SUPPOSED TO MOVE AND IT DOES, DUCT TAPE.” T hey’re like old friends. Actually, a few are progeny. I had hand-fabricated the wrench for reaching the injection pumps on Anhinga’s, our late 37 Bertram, Caterpillar 3208 diesels. Same for the odd-looking socket extension I used for screwing her old-school oil burners into the bowels. Like my old dwell meter, vacuum gauge and spark-plug wrench, these tools had been indispensable. Now they belonged in a museum! The housecleaning began when my car refused to start. Normally, I pushed the button (keys are obsolete) and the computer greeted me with a lively image of the vehicle (on a good day). And then — nothing. In two years of ownership, I’d never…