Innehållsförteckning för December 2015 från Yachting

MY SON, KEVIN, HAD BEEN ASKING FOR WEEKS: “Can we go to pirate island, Daddy?” Pirate island is a little spit of beach about 15 minutes from our boat’s slip, and it’s a great spot to take a dip, look for seashells and just be for a few hours on a sunny weekend day. But to Kevin, it’s another planet with an infinite world of possibilities. It’s a place filled with buccaneers and treasure. Sometimes the treasure is a scallop shell. Sometimes it’s a shiny coin found in the sand, likely dropped from a father’s board shorts while running around collecting scallop shells with his son. Always, it’s an epic adventure. In early August, we made plans to voyage to pirate island for the afternoon. Kevin was sure we packed…

HISTORIANS QUESTION the tale’s veracity, but as the man himself told it, the pseudonym Mark Twain was stolen — not from a Mississippi River term, but from a cranky captain. Young Samuel Clemens claimed to have been frustrated reading the river reports from a long-in-the-tooth skipper who embellished his basic information with sidebars intended to make him sound erudite. An aspiring writer at the time, Clemens mocked his elder in print, penning a feature-length river notation with endless parenthetical references. The captain, enraged, never wrote again, and Clemens stole the pen name for himself. Whether the story is true is debatable, but that was the genius of Twain’s tales: One never knew which bend they might follow next. Clemens spent years on the Mississippi River, where “twain” was a common…

IF CHARLES DARWIN’S theory is right, we soon won’t exist. You remember Darwin from high school, right? His “Survival of the Fittest” said creatures who adapt best to their environment will survive, while their less-fortunate rivals become extinct. Based on what I’ve seen aboard recently, we’re about to follow the dinosaurs right off this rock. Stopping to see a friend at a new boat dealership, I found him inside a yacht, surrounded by pieces of paper. I watched while he peeled little yellow stickers and plastered them around the cabin. They were warning labels — of the most banal kind, frankly. Next to the cooktop: “Warning: May Be Hot.” By a locker: “Warning: Do Not Pinch Fingers.” It seems the dealership had sold another new yacht recently. All was well…

BETTER SPORT FISHING The Rybovich family was blessed with a curious mix of passion, timing and location. EASIER NAVIGATING Find your position at the flip of a switch? It was unthinkable, but not to Giuseppe Carnevali. RELIABLE POWER Ole Evinrude was the man behind the engine, but it was his wife who really made it go. SMOOTHER CRUISING Frank Pembroke Huckins couldn’t change sea conditions, so he took the next best step. FASTER BOATS People were fooled by the quiet architect known as Capt. Nat. He’d do anything to win.…

Ole Evinrude THE STORY GOES LIKE THIS: A 29-year-old machinist, Ole Evinrude, asks a lady friend, Bess, to go on an island picnic with him in the summer of 1906. The island is a mile out on a big Wisconsin lake. The only way to it is by rowboat, and Ole is more than happy to do the oar work to impress his date. Once on the island, Bess says she’d really like some ice cream, which means Ole has to row back to shore in the heat. It also means he returns to Bess with a dish of ice-cream soup. Ole was as much an opportunist as he was a gentleman. Not only did he get the girl — he and Bess married three months later — but he…

THE FIRST TIME I WENT boating with an iPhone was an epiphany. I was running a cartography app that used the smartphone’s GPS — not the boat’s network — to provide my own private navigation data, including position, speed and course information. Forty-eight hours later, however, I cruised into the downside of smartphone-based navigation: My last reception bar slipped astern. I spent the next few days pondering ways to access the boat’s data via my phone, but back then, doing so was a pipe dream. Today, Signal K is poised to solve this problem while offering other advantages to tech-savvy boaters. To understand Signal K, it helps to think of your yacht as a floating, closedloop information platform. All sensors, instrumentation and autopilots are networked via NMEA 0183, NMEA 2000…

WORD OF MOUTH IS the only marketing tool used on this tiny island 10 nautical miles from the megayacht hub of Hvar. When a friend tells me I should eat dinner on Vis with a man known only as “Darko,” directions are understandably vague. Off the narrow main road and swallowed by vines, Darko’s restaurant is also the old home where he grew up. The stone and mortar blend into the surroundings so perfectly that I pass it four times on the way from the ferry landing. Inside, Darko is willing, if not ready, to cook. THERE IS NO TELLING from night to night if someone will show up for dinner. Sometimes there is no one, and sometimes there are 20 people. It doesn’t matter. If you come, I cook.…

I RECALL GOING to Pershing’s office in Fort Lauderdale around 2007 and seeing an array of aggressively styled vessels from 46 to 88 feet long. That quay was a powerful sight. There’s nothing understated about the serious performance cruisers for which Pershing is renowned. Smack in the middle was the 62. Like many Pershing vessels of the period, she had a silver and white finish that shimmered in the sun, set off by a broad, black stripe that accentuated her pugnacious profile. A teak swim platform, cockpit and side decks provided a warm contrast. Docked stern-to, she had a Besenzoni hydraulic passerelle beckoning guests and doubling as a hoist for the tender, stowed beneath a hydraulic hatch under the cockpit’s sun pad. A section of the sun pad could be…

IT WAS A SEA-CHANGE moment for motoryachts: the internal combustion engine. In 1910, steam was still powering most vessels plying the waters. So these words just five years later in the December 1915 issue of Yachting put a stamp on a new era: “We cannot recall a steam vessel built for yacht purposes under 175 feet in length that has been turned out in the last five years.” How did this technology improve life on the water? Engines became more efficient and less bulky: “The principal advantages being a saving of room, thus giving greater accommodations on a given length, cleanliness, ease of operation and economy of crew.” This new technology increased the demand for beamy motoryachts with large, square windows — referred to as power houseboats in 1915 —…

Rybovich Family NIGHT IS FALLING AS Michael Rybovich looks out the window of his boat workshop on Florida’s Atlantic coast. Michael, 60, is the third generation of a family who pioneered the modern sport-fisherman. A truck in the parking lot represents the fourth generation. It belongs to his son, Dusty, who is supposed to be celebrating his 28th birthday tonight. “I guess he has the Rybovich work ethic,” Michael says, laughing. It’s an ethic that started with the family’s boatbuilding patriarch, John Rybovich, who opened a boatyard in south Florida in 1919. For the next 20-plus years, he, and eventually his three sons, spent long hours refitting pleasure boats into fishing boats. “Oddly enough, World War II was a turning point for what we see now,” says Michael. Uncle Tommy…

Frank Pembroke Huckins SMOOTH CRUISING: HE DID THE NEXT BEST THING TO TAMING THE SEAS Four cones! Seen in a ship line drawing by Frank Pembroke Huckins (left, above), the idea behind the Quadraconic hull couldn’t be clearer. Four hollow shapes following semi-conical radii work together to create a hydrodynamic shape in forward hull sections. The result? Diminished pounding at cruising speeds. Seems simple, but it was quite a breakthrough in 1928, decades before C. Raymond Hunt’s deep-V hull. That it was achieved in triple- mahogany planked hulls, working in concert with a builder that tallied every ounce of materials, helped make Huckins a desirable brand for those who wanted to tackle the sea efficiently and comfortably. THE INSPIRATION STILL HERE The presence of Reliance (below) at the 1903 America’s…

FLOATABLE FRIEND Icom’s 7.8-ounce IC-M25 handheld VHF radio ($245) offers positive buoyancy, 550 milliwatts of audio output and IPX7 waterproof performance (30 minutes of water exposure to a depth of 1 meter). Its Float’n Flash feature triggers a flashing LED light for easy retrieval if the unit hits the drink. The IC-M25 sports a 1,500 mAh battery for up to 11 hours of service before needing a recharge. Icom America Inc., icomamerica.com SMART DISPLAY Argonaut Computer’s M7 ($699) marine display serves as a repeater and a controller for your Samsung Galaxy smartphone/tablet, so you can use and enjoy your favorite Android boating apps with no smartphone-meetswater worries. The M7 has a sunlight-readable, touchscreen-enabled, 7-inch LED display, plus the ability to show Navionics+ cartography (and bundled features) and Vexilar’s SonarPhone app.…

Recently, an industry pal surprised me. While he’s an expert at plumbing complex systems on yachts, he’s always grousing that the big boats are “too damn complicated.” I just never thought it would come to this: a vintage 13-foot Whaler. He adopted one from a client! “You can’t turn the clock back,” I counseled. “Sure I can,” he said. “She’s a ’66, the same year as my first.” “We’re not kids anymore, for God’s sake. You’ll look like a Shriner stuffed into one of those little cars at the circus.” “I don’t give a damn,” he answered. “I’m fed up with complicated. The 13’s simple.” I’d gone through a similar regression when I was 40-ish. She was a perfect 13: white hull, light-blue cockpit. She spit out her varnished mahogany…

As the owners of investment-grade sailing yachts continue to demand more from their vessels, the world’s top designers and shipyards are responding with smart designs, technological advancements and enhanced construction methods. It is no longer enough to have a yacht that sails well; today’s owners want to win regattas, cruise in comfort for long stretches and enjoy motoryacht-caliber comforts from their cockpits to their staterooms. Swan’s new flagship, the 115S, offers all of that and more with a new hull design by German Frers. nautorswan.com 1. ROYAL HUISMAN They’re calling her “The Beast,” which is what the owner of the 190-foot Ngoni asked the Dutch yard to create. Due for delivery in spring 2017, this Ed Dubois design has a 233-foot rig for fast, furious sailing. royalhuisman.com 2. DUBOIS No, that isn’t…

Dominator Yachts started 15 years ago and launched its first model, a 65- footer, 2001 . Today, its eight-model line runs from 64 feet to 131 feet. ITALYS ADRIATIC coast, particularly near Fano, is an idyllic place for a sea trial. Not only do the region’s white-sand beaches and rolling hills provide a sublime backdrop, but the shallow depths along that stretch of the Adriatic can create a sizable chop to really test a boat. Running Dominator’s 800S there recently provided an even more interesting angle: Dominator’s executive team was aboard, and so was the boat’s owner, his captain and a small army of technicians to prepare the motoryacht for a two-month shakedown cruise in the southern Mediterranean. I’ve never met an owner during a sea trial — a potentially…

Giuseppe Carnevali FORWARD THINKING: HE CHANGED THE WAY WE VIEW NAVIGATION The next time you glance at the screen of your plotter or multifunction display to confirm your position on an electronic chart, say a quiet “thank you” for the creative mind of Giuseppe Carnevali. Like many of us, Carnevali was born with the water gene, but he was also blessed with an analytical mind. A highly trained naval architect and engineer, Carnevali did a stint with the Italian Navy, where he mastered advanced navigation techniques. In 1984, he brought the first commercially successful chart plotter, the Geonav, to market under the auspices of his company, Navionics. The brand remains a leader in marine electronic charting today.…

Nathanael Herreshoff UNPREDICTABLE. PROFOUND. RADICAL. These were among the characterizations of captain and naval architect Nathanael Greene Herreshoff (or “Capt. Nat”) at the turn of the 20th century. Only one nickname, though, has stood the test of time for the man who brought us high-performance sailing yachts: “The Wizard of Bristol,” Rhode Island. The descriptive comments, some of them bordering on ridicule, were directed not so much at the man as they were at his out-of-the-box boat designs. Some examples: • Capt. Nat’s 33-foot catamaran, one of the first seen in the United States, was considered “odd” when participants saw it at a regatta in 1876. They didn’t take the architectural piece of work seriously until it embarrassed all the large racing yachts. From that point forward, cats were barred…