Cruising World November/December 2023

Leaving the SHALLOWS I describe my home port of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, as the unofficial waterway capital of the world. In fact, many of the boaters with whom I belly up to bars here are fair-weather cruisers like me, quite content hanging around the shallows, where boating tends to be more comfortable, safe and manageable for our children. Great pleasure can be had with that type of boating, which is vastly different from the bold offshore endeavors some of our readers undertake. I’m basically playing in the kiddie pool, which is fine, though sometimes it feels like a waste of a perfectly good ocean. Sure, I’ve also enjoyed every salty drip of several offshore passages. They’ve made for some of my most vivid and fulfilling memories on the water. Still,…

Shadowed by the majesty of Mount Rainier, the lively sea town of Gig Harbor, Washington, has several marinas, a fishing fleet, and one of the most competitive rowing and paddling fleets in the United States. It also drips with maritime history. Its namesake dates back to 1840, when Capt. Charles Wilkes and crew, looking for safe haven during a heavy storm, entered the perfectly protected harbor’s narrow entrance in a longboat called a “captain’s gig.” Today the location is home to an upscale community with museums, great restaurants, hiking and biking trails, and a variety of stores and options for provisioning, as CW contributor Tor Johnson discovered on a recent winter expedition through the Pacific Northwest. Story on page 36…

I first visited Lahaina from the south. After 13 days on an unleashed reach out of French Polynesia, I clung to the mast top, my legs wrapped in a death grip. We swung west into Alenuihaha Channel, known to Hawaiians as the river of laughing waters. The sun blazed and the trades howled as 20-foot rollers raced up our stern and frothed over the rails. Flying our heaviest chute was risky because the channel boiled with towering whitecaps, but the Beach Boys blared from the deck speakers, and Maui loomed ahead in all its verdant glory. Cobalt-blue waves cascaded on the approaching lava rocks of Kaupo. Hana stood lush to the east, with the Big Island’s Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea silhouetted to the south. I hadn’t been back to…

Talking Trade Winds With JIMMY CORNELL When Jimmy Cornell set off with his young family in the 1970s on his first world voyage, there were no reference books for world cruisers. World Cruising Routes—which Cornell first published in 1987—was the type of book he wished he’d had. The only electronic navigation device he carried on board was a battery-operated depth sounder. Offshore cruising was done by celestial navigation, with time signals obtained by shortwave radio. GPS was decades in coming. But pilot charts have been an essential planning tool for sailors since the middle of the 19th century. Cornell’s Ocean Atlas, by Jimmy and Ivan Cornell, was first published in 2011 as a way to provide hundreds of pages of information drawn and updated from traditional pilot charts, and to…

A Rocky START I upgraded from Second Wind, a 35-foot Bavaria Cruiser, to Beckon, a 39-foot Jeanneau Sun Odyssey 39i Performance, in anticipation of cruising the Caribbean for a year or more. My home base is Puerto Rico, and Beckon was in Southwest Harbor, almost as far north in Maine for sailing as you can get. My friend and Jeanneau broker, Francis Shiman-Hackett of Bluenose Yachts, enticed me to sail the coast of New England for the summer, then head south in November after the hurricane season. Little did I know that I wouldn’t even get out of Maine before learning some important lessons about being careful and resourceful as a singlehanded cruiser. I departed just after Memorial Day under an unusually bold, sunny sky, with flat seas and scant…

Plot a Course for CAPTAIN CREDENTIALS It was early afternoon on Day One of a weeklong course to prepare for the US Coast Guard’s captain’s exam, and besides my head feeling like a balloon about to pop, already several pages of my notebook were filled with hastily scribbled notes, including this gem: 1.169 x square root of light height = geographical range. Who knew I’d have to know that? During the course of the morning, we’ d slogged our way through license requirements, calculating days underway inshore and seaward of the boundary line that wraps like a string around the offshore points along America’s coasts. We’d touched on license endorsements, required publications when carrying passengers, and a list of additional things we’d need to procure before applying for any license. Things…