Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2019 i SAIL

A convoy of snowbirds bound for Florida and other points south gets underway on a cold bright November morning. The cruisers were headed down North Carolina’s Alligator River-Pungo River Canal, part of the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, after spending the night at an anchorage just off the ICW. A 1,088-mile channel stretching from Norfolk, Virginia, to Miami, Florida, the ICW is a popular alternative to sailing offshore for the hundreds of power and sail cruisers fleeing the Northeastern winter each year.…

Even more than a year and half later, the scars from Hurricane Irma are still all too visible on the island of St. Maarten. But if Irma couldn’t prevent the famed Heineken from taking place in the winter of 2017, you can bet it’s not going to put a crimp in either the racing or the parties in the winter of 2019. On the contrary, now in its 39th year, the regatta continues to evolve, adding a new double-handed class to its regular series of buoy and coastal races. As a further testament to the strength and commitment of the racing community, more than 100 boats are also expected to take part this year, with teams from over 30 countries competing aboard everything from maxis to performance multihulls to chartered…

After years of quiescence in the wake of the Great Recession, iconic Island Packet is back with its new 349, a re-boot of the old Estero that not only looks great, but takes the Island Packet style of sailing performance to a new level. DESIGN & CONSTRUCTION First among the many changes made to the 349 is the fact that the mast step has been moved aft, which in turn makes it possible for Island Packet to offer a Solent rig option in addition to the standard IP cutter configuration. The Solent rig features a self-tacking headsail trimmed with a Hoyt jib boom flying on an inner stay up in the bow and a Code Zero tacked to the anchor roller/sprit. The cutter rig dispenses with the Code Zero in…

Blow, blow, thou winter windThou art not so unkindAs man’s ingratitude;Thy tooth is not so keen,Because thou art not seen,Although thy breath be rude.—William Shakespeare, As You Like It A number of sailors have cruised Labrador, Greenland, Patagonia, South Georgia, Antarctica, Alaska and the Northwest Passage. Some have wintered-over in high latitudes. But fewer have deliberately undertaken winter cruises in high latitudes simply for the pleasures the season can offer. My wife, Nancy, and I were fortunate to enjoy an extensive winter cruise aboard our 44ft steel ketch, Tamara, in extreme southern Chilean Patagonia, and in 2012 I took Tamara on a solo cruise to Alaska’s Prince William Sound late in a winter that saw record snowfall. I was subsequently honored with the Cruising Club of America (CCA) Royal Cruising…

While your chartplotter will (hopefully) show you where the land and sea should be, only radar can show you where everything actually is. The invention of AIS has certainly made navigation simpler and a lot safer for small craft, especially now that many of the major marker buoys and beacons out there have real or virtual (more likely) AIS transmitters to indicate their position. Still, there are many vessels out there that either don’t have an AIS transmitter fitted or that switch it off at sensitive times (fishing and military craft, in particular), which can be a threat to safe navigation, especially in poor visibility. While expensive and often underused, radar really should be the #1 must-have safety device for coastal and offshore navigation. Even when your collision risk is…

When we acquired our new project boat, a 1987 Pearson 39-2, it was evident that she was in need of much TLC. Not only had she been sitting forlorn and unloved in a boatyard for a couple of years, but those of her systems that were not original were a couple of decades old. Virtually everything was in need of overhaul or replacement, including her elderly suite of Autohelm sailing instruments dating back to the early 1990s, connected by the original Seatalk network. The speed and depth seemed to work fine, as did the autopilot—as far as I could tell—but the wind transducer at the masthead was frozen and the C80 chartplotter at the nav station was not only in the wrong place but a good 10 years old—a museum…

My first exposure to Nigel Calder, same as most people, was through reading his great marine technical bible, The Boatowner’s Mechanical and Electrical Manual. I studied it constantly during the years I spent as a liveaboard cruiser during the 1990s and referred to it simply as “Nigel Calder’s How to Fix Everything Book.” The first time I actually met the man, at a boat show in 1997, where I pestered him about a problem I was having with my marine toilet, I was immediately struck by how down-to-earth he was. Talking boats with him was just like talking boats with any other cruising sailor. In the years since then—having worked with Nigel as an editor for this magazine, having sailed with him, having gotten to know him as a friend—I’ve…

Are you out there sailing, cruising and living the sailing life? Share your experiences with other readers. Send your photos to sailmail@sailmagazine.com And don’t forget to sign up for our free eNewsletter, Under Sail, via our website sailmagazine.com Thanks to late November lows lingering across the Atlantic, our delivery of a Beneteau 473 from City Island to the USVI was re-routed to Charleston, South Carolina. However, the sunset view off our stern overlooking Charleston Harbor made it all worthwhile—Daniel S. Torchio, Greenport Harbor, NY I have been a member of the Wayzata Yacht Club for more than 30 years and love the splendor of the seasons. I dread each haulout, but am pumped for launch day!—Pat Foy, Wayzata, MN We caught this sunset off Catalina Island in California aboard our…

It seems that we all struggle to make our start in life, searching for something that we would enjoy doing, something that not only challenges us today, but will stay that way year after year, all the time giving great rewards along the way. Most things we are introduced to early on in life don’t meet those prerequisites. For me in the early days, it was just finding a way to earn an income sufficient to put a roof over my head and food on the table. I tried many different lines of work for the first eight years of my working life, finally becoming a power company lineman, a trade that provided my family and me with a decent and secure income. Nothing I did, though, made me feel…

It was a memorable year for the quadrennial solo Route du Rhum race from Saint Malo, France, to Guadeloupe, with everything from storm conditions to plenty of disabled boats and nail-biting finishes at the end to mark the event’s 40th anniversary. The 11th running of the 3,542-mile classic, which has been won over the years by a who’s who of the world’s solo-sailing elite, began with ideal conditions for the 123 solo sailors at the start. But it then quickly descended into controlled chaos as the notorious Bay of Biscay lashed the fleet with gale force winds and towering seas, prompting many skippers to take shelter along the nearby coast of Europe. Ironically, among the earliest victims of the weather were those in the oversized Ultime multihull class, with Sébastien…

When I boarded Fountaine Pajot’s new flagship, the Alegria 67, at the Cannes boat show last September, the first thing I noticed was that several groups of people were carrying on private conversations in separate lounging and seating areas in the saloon—that’s how big this boat is. The Berret-Racoupeau design is intended to serve as either a luxurious bluewater cruising platform for a family, or as a high-end skippered charter boat. Of the seven layout options, a private owner would no doubt choose the Maestro version with its opulent master suite that occupies most of one hull. A charter operator might go for the maximum of six double cabins, each with an ensuite heads/shower, with two crew cabins in the bows. Either can specify galley-up or galley-down versions. Even with…

"Jib alone is never a good idea,” our sailing guru Jerry told me. (Everyone should have a sailing guru). “Why’s that?” I asked. “It’s so much easier than putting up the main.” “You can only sail off the wind,” he said. “No upwind capability. What happens if someone falls overboard?” “I guess you roll up the jib and start the motor,” I offered. “Catastrophic failures seldom occur at the dock,” Jerry replied. He has a habit of spouting sailing platitudes. Jerry has been sailing for 70 years, racing, cruising, resurrecting old boats. He’s a very conservative sailor. He didn’t put a roller furler on his bow for 40 years. “I don’t trust mechanical work-arounds when a simpler, proven device is functional. Jib hanks are better than friction-filled slots, and gravity…

Suhaili Sir Robin Knox-Johnston’s 32ft ketch, Suhaili, is one of the most famous small sailboats in the world. Built in India for the fateful 1968-69 Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, she was the first boat to complete a single-handed, nonstop voyage around the world. Suhaili was the only one of the nine entrants to make it to the finish, thus winning both first place and fastest circumnavigation. Knox-Johnston gave his prize money to the family of fellow competitor Donald Crowhurst, who died during the race. Suhaili was for a time retired to the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England, where she remained for five years. The controlled conditions of the museum warped her teak planking and in 2002, Knox-Johnston removed her from the museum and began repairing the damage. Since…

"Ready to take the dink ashore?” Never had those words invoked as much anxiety as when my husband, Jeff, and I first moved to the Pacific Coast. Why? Because we had exactly zero experience with dinghy surf landings, and the possibility of being flipped upside down along with our two dogs was very real. And who likes to lose face in front of all their new cruising buds? When Jeff and I had cruised the East Coast, plying the waters from Maine to the Bahamas, taking the dogs ashore for their twice (or thrice!) daily exercise was no big deal. If we weren’t near a marina or in close proximity to a dinghy dock, we were still in a sheltered cove with minimal wave action. It just wasn’t a concern.…

The dark is alive when you are surrounded by water. Black is tinted blue and silver, and sky meets surf with electricity and the lapping sounds of silence. Inside our 36ft catamaran, moored off Cooper Island in the BVI, the raw nature outside, just now settling down from a late afternoon storm, is a stark contrast to the suburban picture of parenthood we’ve created inside our floating home. At 0100 the eight-month-old wakens, and I stumble, exhausted and slightly off balance, to grab the handwashed bottle from the galley counter. A one-butt kitchen, as my mom calls it. “There’s only room for one behind to maneuver in here,” she would say as she danced around my parents’ Hallberg-Rassy 43. (Although she could always still magically prepare a four-course meal for…

Because modern yachting is in many ways an invention of the early to mid 20th century, in recent years sailors have been celebrating any number of milestone anniversaries. Now it’s the biennial Transpac’s turn, as it prepares for its 50th race from Southern California (following the first few starts in San Francisco) to Hawaii’s Diamond Head. Set to begin in mid-July, this year’s 2,225-mile Tanspacific Yacht Race, a fixture of the West Coast racing scene since 1906, is not surprisingly drawing plenty of extra interest, with more than 80 boats signed up at press time (far more than the three boats that took part in race #1). It will also include any number of storied veterans of past races in the fleet, such as the late Roy Disney’s Andrews 70…

Though it’s a modern truism that boatbuilders favor bigger boats because they make more money on them, several production builders have recently begun introducing some smaller models to their product lines so as to attract new and younger sailors to the sport. Among them is Jeanneau with its new Sun Odyssey 319, now the smallest in its storied line of cruising boats and a welcome addition to the market. In fact, it scored a win in SAIL’s 2019 Best Boats competition, in the 31-40ft Cruising Monohull category, due to its all-around handiness and its great use of interior space. DESIGN & CONSTRUCTION Though based in part on the Polish-built Delphia 31, the Sun Odyssey 319 incorporates an all-new hull design featuring a more rounded bow forward above the entry and…

Half a century ago I signed on as a deckhand aboard a 90-ton trading ketch that had recently been sold out of service in the Danish Baltic Sea. She had made her way to the South Coast of England, where I was based, and was refitting for a voyage to the Caribbean. The old girl was in a sorry state, but she still had the sweeping sheer built into her at Fåborg in 1929. My shipmates and I adzed out new masts, rigged her, caulked her, painted her and, against all odds, sailed her away. Her name was Johanne, and she taught me a lot more about the world than the three years I had just completed in college. By the early 20th century the glory days of the Viking…

During the extensive refit of my Pearson 40, I needed to create a significant number of custom-sized plywood drawers and stowage bins, or boxes. These included 10 under-floor storage bins, under-sink organizers, boxes for tools and stores, and even a specially fitted cat litterbox. There are many traditional ways to create the joints to build such boxes, but in the interest of quick build times and the desire to make them waterproof and easy to clean, I chose a method that uses a fillet of epoxy paste. The following photos shows how to easily create boxes of any size or shape. Step 1: Cut the four sides and bottom. This is best accomplished with a table saw, but can also be done with a circular saw. The joints are simple…

So, you want to find a great deal on your next charter vacation? Sure, you can scour the internet, hope for Black Friday deals or ask friends. But an even better way to find good prices on charter boats is to go to a boat show. Not only do charter companies like The Moorings, Dream Yacht Charter and Sunsail offer incentives at the shows, you’ll also find smaller companies like Horizon, CYOA, Sail Caribe, TMM and others that you may not have known about. Here are a few shows where you’ll find good hunting for your next deal. UNITED SAILBOAT SHOW Annapolis holds an annual show the first week of October, and as you might expect for this part of the country, it’s the place to go for all things…