Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2024 i SAIL

Maybe you’ll remember back in 2014 when the Volvo 65 Team Vestas Wind, racing in the Volvo Ocean Race, slammed into the Cargados Carajos Shoals in the Indian Ocean in the middle of the night. Miraculously no one was killed or injured, but the boat was a total wreck, and the reef didn’t fare much better. The team of highly qualified, professional sailors had already sailed together from Alicante, Spain, to Cape Town, in leg 1 of the round-the-world race when the accident happened about 10 days into leg 2. “What the hell?” I remember thinking at the time. “How on earth did they do that?” A report into the accident found several causes, not least that in the days leading up to the leg 2 start, the team’s navigator…

I lay in my suspended bunk and waited for the next wave to lift me up and slam me down onto the hard bench below. It was the middle of the night and about 12 hours into what would turn out to be a 36-hour low pressure system. The winds from the northeast were testing me and the boat on our way to Bermuda. I was glad that I could not see the walls of waves that the Gulf Stream slammed into the hull. The forecasted 30 knots of breeze had been true and then some, as I flew off of waves at speeds of up to 21 knots even with reefs in the jib and mainsail. This was my first season onboard Fearless, a 2020 Jeanneau Sunfast 3300. I…

When I showed up for the sea trial of the Seawind 1170 right after the U.S. Sailboat Show in Annapolis last fall, I was in for three surprises. One, they already had a passel of potential buyers onboard—a passel meaning 18 other humans in this case—which is hardly a typical sea trial arrangement. I wasn’t at all sure how the catamaran would respond with all the extra ballast. But my worry led to surprise number two: No worries! The heavy load turned out to be a rounding error, and this 39-footer performed remarkably well in the flat water of the South River, slipping along at 6.8 knots in just 10-12 knots of true breeze on a beam reach with a full-hoist mainsail and the screecher on a continuous furler. Surprise…

As the Croatian fuel dock attendant flung the dockline back at our boat, I let out a memorable string of salty language. The bow thruster they kept wanting me to use was in a box, uninstalled on our Dufour sailboat that still had that new yacht smell. It was chaos trying to refuel on the last day of charter with everyone else, worse than any racing start line. And yet, here we were, going around again for another high visibility try. In the U.S., we’re generally blissfully ignorant about Mediterranean mooring. As the name implies, this is primarily a European phenomenon, but it becomes our problem when we charter in the Med and sometimes in the Caribbean. The basics are straightforward. You line up two to three boatlengths ahead of…

The year is 1966, in the heart of Orange County, California, when White Seal is laid up in fiberglass, by hand, at the Jansen Marine Yacht Yard. Fresh off the production line at the height of a booming marine industry, the boat’s gelcoat and varnish shine under the Costa Mesa sun. The company is performance sailboat builder’s Cal Yachts. The boat is Cal 36 hull No. 27, designed by Bill Lapworth—the slightly smaller sister ship to the venerable Cal 40, the cutting-edge ocean race boat of the era. With its spade rudder and relatively light construction, the design is nothing short of revolutionary. Three thousand miles across the country, Charlie Langworthy is 13 years old and skipping rocks on the shores of Shelburne Shipyard in Vermont’s Champlain Valley. The long…

Confession: I am a polar exploration nut. Unsurprisingly, I have read much about Sir Ernest Shackleton, the destruction of his ship Endurance in November 1915 in the unforgiving ice of Antarctica’s Weddell Sea, and the open boat voyage to South Georgia that ultimately led to the salvation of all of his men. So I jumped into The Ship Beneath the Ice, Mensun Bound’s lively account of the two expeditions he helped lead “to find the greatest shipwreck of them all: the Endurance.” Bound and team did indeed find the Endurance, on March 5, 2022, upright on the seabed some 10,000 feet down, remarkably preserved in the frigid water. Bound was director of exploration for both expeditions. The first, in 2019, failed when a critical, multi-million-dollar AUV (autonomous underwater vehicle) went…

“Why didn’t he point the boat into the wind to raise/lower the main to avoid tangling in the lazyjacks?” Ah, the comments section on YouTube. Normally maybe not the most productive place to spend an afternoon, but today it’s inspired me. James the Sailor Man, solo Alberg 30 sailor of YouTube fame, joined me on our passage to Greenland last summer, and in January 2024 his five-part video series, which wonderfully documents sailing on our Farr 65 Falken, went live on his channel. The comment came in response to a challenging moment in the wind and fog as we were reefing the mainsail. We were broad reaching on port tack, the boom eased well to starboard and secured with a preventer led through a fairlead at the bow and aft…

Olivia Wyatt let go of the shore in the summer of 2019, a decision slow to arrive that was part obsession, part dare, and part promise to herself. She readied herself and her sailboat, a 34-foot Ta Shing Panda named Juniper, for a solo Pacific crossing from San Diego to Honolulu. She was a relatively new boatowner—the 30-year-old, full-keel cutter was her first (if you don’t count her Sunfish, which she named Queequeg) and remains her only. Back then she was a relatively experienced sailor as something one studies, less so as something one does. She had sailed alone before, but only a sum of 36 nautical miles and six hours. She was admittedly afraid to sail alone, which is in large part why she finally let go of that…

Don’t Get Beam-On In these days of electronic routes, the obvious option is to steer for the shortest distance between two points. In heavy seas, however, particularly if they are on the beam, sticking slavishly to this doctrine can be uncomfortable or worse. Put simply, when the course lays you beam-on to a steep sea, the boat is at risk. A breaking 12-foot wave can flatten a 35-foot boat with ease if it doesn’t capsize her completely. Avoiding this horror often lies in steering by hand. When you see, or feel, a nasty one coming, steer briefly either upwind to take it on the shoulder, or downwind to run off to ensure the safety of all on board. Beam-on is the road to ruin, and ploughing on regardless is its…

A 20- to 30-knot northerly wind and temps hovering around 39°F on the edge of the Baltic Sea in November are not generally considered prime sailing conditions. But bundled underneath my four layers and winter hat, I couldn’t stop smiling. We’d left the slip in Haderslev, Denmark, in hull No. 1 of X-Yachts’ Xc 47, and already—after spending a few days at the X-Yachts factory and talking with the people who’d designed and built this boat—I was excited to sail her. Billed as “the ultimate cruiser,” the Xc 47 is phenomenal—innovative, comfortable, elegant, and fast on and off the wind, pointing like a race boat. She is built to be sailed around the world but still delivers on an afternoon cruise; I’d even be concerned to have her as a…

When we decided to add windvane steering coupled with a hydrogenerator to our sailboat, our focus was on the practical aspects: conserving battery power, adding rudder redundancy, and enhancing our off-grid capabilities. It wasn’t until we sailed with the vane overnight for the first time that we came to appreciate the transcendent thrill the devices also deliver. When the wind is both powering and steering the boat, a satisfying synergy of motion is achieved. Steering in the before times had always been a fight where constant correction was required to maintain course, and the electric autopilot was always on the back foot trying to catch up. The windvane, in contrast, is a peacemaker that provides equilibrium using pure physics, freeing the boat to go where we need her to go…