Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2019 i Cruising World

“I discovered a whole new way to spend pleasurable evenings surrounded by the great outdoors: Sit back and watch it get dark.” You’ve got to be flexible. One of my favorite pastimes used to be sitting out in the cockpit on a summer evening listening to the Red Sox. For one thing, baseball is played at a pace that can be enjoyed without a screen staring you in the face. You can drift in and out of the game, chat with pals, enjoy the scenery, and know you’ll be immediately back in it a pitch or two later, alerted by the play-by-play banter or the roar of the crowd. And, I might add, a radio is equally well-suited for life away from the dock. An AM/FM set is easy on…

With a fully loaded sail, bear off slowly, smoothly easing the sheet as fast as you can without collapsing the sail. Use the sheet pressure to get the sail out in front of the boat to keep it from collapsing into the headstay. As you pass through dead downwind, release the old sheet and take up on the new one. Do not stop in the middle of the turn or the sail may get wrapped around the headstay. Make sure the clew has reached the headstay and is pulled around to the new side before completing the turn. 1 SET First, attach both sheets to the clew and run the lazy sheet around the front of the headstay. Next, if you have a bowsprit, lead the tackline over the sheets (inside jibes)…

The year was 2000, the location was Ship Channel Cay in the Exumas, and the issue was what it always is in the Bahamas in winter: weather. Like so many new cruisers, Chris Parker and his partner, Michael Zidziunas, in their Cheoy Lee 30 Dragon Lady, had expected cruising in paradise to be, well, paradise. Except on this particular morning, it wasn’t. “The weather forecast was for the wind to be southeast when we got up in the morning and to come around to the southwest during the day, and a cold front was coming through,” Parker says. “So we wake up, and it’s blowing southwest at 20, and we’re on a lee shore on the wrong side of the island. Not a good situation.” It didn’t improve. Eventually, they…

A good anchor and windlass are high on the priority list. There’s good information online for what type of anchor is recommended in Svalbard. Aboard Barba, I use 100 feet of 8-millimeter chain (I limit it to this length because of weight) and an additional 300 feet of 18-millimeter line. Since that trip to Svalbard, I have upgraded to a Lofrans windlass and a 20-kilogram Spade anchor. I also carry a 3.2-kilogram Fortress anchor that I can attach in series with the spade anchor. And I have acquired an anchor sail to keep the bow to the wind. Undoubtedly the best guidebook for the area is The Norwegian Los, which is available for free online (kartverket.no/dnl/dennorske-los-7-english.pdf). The best ports of call not mentioned in the guidebook were found by studying…

DESIGN On any cruising sailboat, one of the best indicators of the designer’s priorities is in the boat’s most private spaces: the head and the shower. Early brochures for Bob Perry’s 1978 Passport 40 design touted that boat’s novel approach. “Interior space was prioritized and allocated according to use: How much time does one spend in the head compared to the saloon area?” Perry extended the forward end of the cabin trunk and placed the head in the forepeak, “an area not generally suited for other functions.” This allowed crew to sleep farther aft, with the diminished pitching we find back near the mast, and left plenty of room in the main saloon for a spacious nav station and galley. While some owners still love that layout, Perry’s innovation was…

Cruisers see firsthand the devastation of plastic pollution, both in the water and on beaches. Many do what they can, picking up trash and taking it somewhere for disposal, but cruisers Angela Burns and Bill Atherholt decided to go a step further. They formed the nonprofit Fishing for Plastic (F4P), with a goal of empowering fishermen and others to collect shoreline plastic as part of their catch. Their unique idea is to coordinate collection of plastic by cruisers, who have the time and energy to do it, with local subsistence fishermen who will simply pick up the full reusable bags and bring them back to port to be exchanged for cash. The kickoff event was a faux fishing derby, complete with weigh-in, held in Marsh Harbour, Bahamas, at the end…

Any young teenager whose life has been upended when parents sell up and buy a boat will identify with Lydia, the narrator in Mud, Emily Thomas’ novel based on her own real-life experiences. Lydia’s father buys a sailing barge on the coast of England and moves his family from London on board to save money. Lady Beatrice stays moored to the seawall except for occasional overnight trips, but Lydia has to deal with a new school, making new friends, and generally coming to understand herself while dealing with people’s reaction to her strange lifestyle and the embarrassment of mildewed school uniforms and blouses that are rust-stained from hanging in leaky lockers. She relates her initial reaction when her brother shows her some of the necessities—“You mean you can’t flush the…

Cruising sailors are, perhaps, the most interactive people on our planet. The reason for this is our extreme and continuous mobility. Not only do we sail, but we do so to the four corners of Earth. This means in our present age of electronics, we constantly exchange information and rumors (for better or worse) at nearly the speed of light. For example, about 20 years ago, a bored sailing nerd hacked a computer file and rowed it over to the boat anchored on his portside. “Don’t give this to anyone,” he said. Inside was a short note repeating this advice and addressing the recipient by his first name. This digital exchange—the first pirated C-Map software in the wild—is now aboard almost every cruising boat in the world. (Note to angry…

You’ve finally dropped the hook in that lovely little anchorage. Dinner is done, the sun is setting, a sun-downer is in your hand, and you’re ready for a quiet night. Then the noises begin: knocks, toots, clicks. Could it be the water tank burping? Is stray current attacking your through-hulls? What the heck is that noise? As marine biologists, we are often asked these questions. The ocean is surprisingly noisy. Fish, marine mammals and countless invertebrates make sounds. In a world where visibility is limited, sound helps animals find food, attract mates, avoid predators and stay connected with their own kind. Sound is particularly useful in water, where it travels more than four times faster than in air. In a way, your boat’s hull can act as a speaker, allowing…

Just as the boat cleared the headland, it slammed hard into 15- and 16-foot waves. These were the Force 7 conditions that the Windy app had predicted earlier that morning. The new captain of this traditional Cornish lugger, Happy Return, looked to the seasoned mate who had a tight grip on the tiller; the mate glanced over at his pal, the second mate, who’d had the bright (if poor) idea of setting the large foresail. These luggers don’t like windward work. They’re in their glory on long reaches, and one long tack to France, to which we were sailing from England across the English Channel, would have suited Happy Return just fine. If the new captain didn’t know this previously, he was learning it pretty quick. Happy Return is a…

CHARTER COMPANIES Annapolis Bay Charters 800-991-1776 p. 126-127 Barefoot Yacht Charters 784-456-9526 p. 134 Bluenose Yacht Charters 401-300-2988 p. 136 Catamaran Company 800-262-0308 p. 124-125 Conch Charters 877-521-8939 p. 138 Cruise Abaco 321-473-4223 p. 136 Cruise Annapolis 443-949-9481 p. 135 CYOA Yacht Charters 800-944-2962 p. 128 GoCats Catamaran 800-592-1254 p. 138 Horizon Yacht Charters 284-494-8787 p. 137 Kiriacoulis 800-714-3411 p. 107 Island Yacht Charters 340-344-2143 p. 138 North Sardinia Charter +39 0587 59124 p. 135 Sail Caribe 866-866-4874 p. 134 Southwest Florida Yachts 800-262-7939 p. 138 Sunsail 800-437-7880 p. 122-123 Tortola Marine Management Ltd. 800-633-0155 p. 119 Waypoints 443-225-4355 p. 120-121 BROKERS Ed Hamilton & Co. 800-621-7855 p. 130 SAILING SCHOOLS American Sailing Association 310-822-7171 p. 129, 133 Blue Water Sailing School 800-255-1840 p. 137 Offshore Sailing School 888-454-7015 p.…

For legendary sailor and cruising-guide author Don Street, this past July 26 should’ve been a happy day: his 89th birthday. Instead, it will be a day Street remembers for all the wrong reasons—the day his beloved 46-footer, Iolaire, aboard which he roamed the Atlantic and the Caribbean with his family and friends over a half-century of ownership, was lost in heavy weather under the command of her latest owner off the coast of the Spanish island of Ibiza. The boat’s rich history reads like a riveting maritime novel. What happened off Ibiza was just the sad, final chapter. Street sold Iolaire in 2009. Before that, for five decades, the engineless red yawl was a ubiquitous presence in both Europe and the Eastern Caribbean, on both sides of the Atlantic, which…

DAN Boater Bonus! The American Sailing Association has teamed up with DAN Boater as part of the organization’s ongoing commitment to enhancing sailor safety. With this new partnership, ASA members can now purchase a DAN Boater family membership for $50. DAN Boater offers its members a medical information line, a 24/7 emergency hotline, worldwide medical evacuation and repatriation services, search and rescue expense coverage, and more. Learn more at ASA (asa.com) and DAN Boater (danboater.org). The Winner Is… Congrats to Tiffany Cupp, who won a $250 West Marine gift card in the Cruising World Pets Aboard Photo Contest with her “hatch hound!” View all the adorable entries at cruisingworld.com/petsaboard (and while you’re there, sign up for our weekly enewsletter).…

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In 1985, Tracey Edwards—a young British woman who had been working her way through the international charter-boat business in various positions—signed on as cook in the Whitbread Round the World sailing race. The experience bit her with the ocean racing bug, but it was clear that if she wanted to compete as a sailor, she’d have to do it herself. So she put together an all-female crew, bought a used aluminum racing sloop, and entered the 1989 Whitbread race to prove that women loved sailing as much as men and could do it as well. The new film Maiden is not just an indictment of the barriers that she faced, but also a rousing celebration of Edwards, her boat named Maiden, and her crew who became, as Edwards said, “not…

Places spur the dreams that fill voyagers’ sails. Places like the South Pacific atolls, Sydney Harbor, Alaska, Patagonia and the coast of Ireland beckon like sirens, urging boats away from homeports. But ask any cruiser who’s been out here: Enduring memories are more often about the people we meet than the places in which we meet them. Sadly, until we went cruising, I had a single reference for anticipating the kinds of interactions we’d have with people in the places we would visit. It’s an iconic reference, a cruiser’s image from Panama’s San Blas Islands: a sailor kneeling on the side deck, looking down at the diminutive, costumed Guna woman in the dugout canoe alongside, surveying the molas she’s offering for sale. Fortunately, through dumb luck, advice we’d been given,…

Traditional fishing luggers might have one or two masts, even topsails on each sail, but the fastest of the luggers were the three-masted “smuggling” luggers. These slippery boats often had three sails set on each of their masts. It has been recorded that in a whole-sail breeze (no reefs), the fastest of the three-masted smuggling luggers could make the 100-mile crossing from Cornwall to Brittany in eight hours. That’s an average speed of 12 knots, which is very impressive sailing by today’s standards, let alone 200 years ago. But they’re a handful to sail. Everything about a dipping lug sail is heavy: the spars, the blocks, even the sailcloth. The sheer weight of the thing makes it a challenge to tack; jibing in heavy seas can be a dangerous proposition.…

Unless you plan to sail only in your home country, you’ll need a passport. The application form for a passport includes sections for physical and mailing addresses. If you don’t fill these in, your application will be rejected. Let’s say you got your passport before you relinquished your land dwelling, and it’s valid for 10 years, so that’s covered. But now you’ve reached, say, the Panama Canal and have decided to head to the South Pacific, so you’d like to get that long-stay visa for French Polynesia. Well, one of the requirements for that is a police affidavit from, you guessed it, the town where you “live.” Not many police departments will buy the argument “I’m at anchor here off your town” as proof of residency. (I tried.) If you…