Innholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2023 i Cruising World

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,…

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…

HOME for the HOLIDAYS As active seasonal cruisers seeking winter warmth, usually in the Bahamas, my husband, Radd, and I have spent many winter holidays aboard our Island Packet 40, Sasha, far away from family and friends back home. We do miss the gatherings and traditions, but no matter where we are, we try to embrace new ways of celebrating—joining local celebrations or attending local services—while preserving a few tried-and-true traditions from our land life. Nassau, on New Providence Island in the Bahamas, was the backdrop for one of our most memorable holidays. We arrived a few days before Christmas, got settled, and then set out to explore. That day’s mission was to visit the Bacardi distillery. In all our cruising destinations, when venturing beyond walking distance of our harbor,…

Maine MAN My old mate Ronnie Simpson was on the phone, having just pulled into Halifax, Nova Scotia, after a short hop from Portland, Maine. It was the first week of September, and he was en route to A Coruña, Spain, aboard his newly renamed Open 50, Shipyard Brewing. On October 28, he would start of Global Solo Challenge—a nonstop, singlehanded round-the-world race with a rolling, pursuit-style start for boats from 32 to 60 feet. “We were seeing a lot of cyclonic activity,” he told me, describing the suddenly bustling North Atlantic tropical-weather picture. “I think it was the right decision.” Knowing Ronnie, he’d definitely given it a lot of considerable thought. Because as I’d come to learn, he basically has one speed: fast forward, with dispatch. I’d last sailed…

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…

THE Movable FEAST The Lesser Antilles, on the eastern rim of the Caribbean Sea, is perhaps the finest watery hideaway for boaters on our planet. It’s impossible to exaggerate the magnificence of this sailors’ paradise. It is as if God and Walt Disney conspired to design the perfect cruising ground: perfect wind, perfect seas and, most of all, perfect harbors. And if all that weren’t enough, these harbors are also inhabited by joyous folks with wide smiles. The Caribbean is especially attractive for sailors who like to party—who desire to spend a decade or two hard aground on the mahogany reef. From a scientific perspective, the key to understanding this area is plates. The plates are tectonic. They bump into each other, stimulating partial melting of the plates above the…

In 1974, Australian journalist Murray Davis assembled a ragtag crew of sailors and scribblers in Newport, Rhode Island, and put out the first issue of Cruising World. The bet Murray made that summer was a big one: 65,000 big ones, if bets are measured in printed magazine copies. Ten years later, he sold the brand to The New York Times Company. Paid circulation had grown to 120,000 copies addressed to high-net-worth individuals (in the parlance of Madison Avenue). Davis retired to a life of ease on Newport’s tony Ocean Drive. In some ways, the joke was on Madison Avenue. Davis’ genius was to tap into a countercultural zeitgeist impelled by skyrocketing oil prices, back-to-the-garden dreams of self-reliance evinced by the Whole Earth Catalog, and a particularly prominent June 1973 Time…

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…

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…