Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2024 i SAIL

SAIL magazine took home 11 awards at the annual Boating Writers International (BWI) writing contest, winning first place in five of the 16 categories for stories that cover the range of the sailing life, from racing, chartering, and cruising to safety and sustainability. The winners were announced at the start of the Miami International Boat Show in February. “I am just so proud of all of our writers and editors and so happy their hard work and terrific writing has been recognized by their peers,” said SAIL Editor-in-Chief Wendy Mitman Clarke, who won three categories. “I’m grateful for the contest sponsors and the hard work of the judges and organizers, and it’s always a great feeling when your work comes out on top.” This year’s BWI Awards (presented now for…

Let’s be honest: Transducers aren’t as sexy as the cool graphics and touchscreen capabilities of today’s navigation and electronics packages. But the information that those packages deliver, like speed and depth, is only as good as the instrument that’s gathering it—and that’s where the Airmar DST810 Smart Multisensor comes in. The DST810 (DST equals depth, speed, temperature) features a new paddlewheel design that delivers quicker, smoother speed data. An accompanying free app, called CAST, lets you easily calibrate speed, depth, and transducer offset, and most significantly, it enables these calibrations at different angles of heel. The Gen2 paddlewheel, integral to the DST810 Smart Multisensor, senses speed as low as 0.3 knots and becomes linear at 0.6 knots, outperforming other wheels that need more speed to begin delivering data. If you’re…

Sailing hasn’t been a sport of the masses during Cole Brauer’s lifetime. In fact, there’s a full generation of young adults who grew up after the United States’ America’s Cup golden age, after the era when non-sailors and national media followed the sport. Solo ocean racing in particular has always been the purview of the French, and with a few notable exceptions rarely has showcased Americans, let alone as front runners gaining celebrity status. So, it was a surprise to many of us when Cole’s Instagram account rocketed from 10,000 to nearly half a million followers over a handful of months in late 2023 and early 2024. She was competing in the Global Solo Challenge, a solo, nonstop, round-the-world race, and her daily updates quickly captured the attention of the…

“Charles, are you OK?” A pause. “Charles?!” Although a stranger to us, the person’s panic was universal. Something’s wrong, said the look my partner, Phillip, and I shared before darting our eyes to the splashing in the water by the power cat next to us. “Is he? OK?” Phillip and I implored, as we watched one diver shake the shoulders of the other. His strangled shout answered our inquiry. “I NEED HELP!” the diver cried. We knocked over our coffee tumblers launching the dink off of Ubiquitous faster than ever and raced over to find Charles’ head lolling, his words garbled, before he lost consciousness altogether and his dive buddy struggled to keep him afloat. While pulling his limp body from the water, the cat’s owner grabbed my shoulder. He…

Patience B. Wales, former editor of SAIL magazine and two-time circumnavigator, died on February 16, 2024, of colon cancer. She was 89. A native of Massachusetts, she lived in Ipswich for 34 years. Born in Brockton, Massachusetts, to Ralph and Retha Bens, she was raised in Randolph with older brothers Richard, David, and Ralph. She loved animals, poetry, and writing and was an excellent student. Accepted into Tufts University, she earned a bachelor’s degree in English and learned small boat sailing at that time. Following a stint at Houghton-Mifflin in New York City, Patience moved back to Boston in 1957 and married Jim Wales of Marblehead. Inspired by a lecture on circumnavigation, the couple, along with Patience’s college roommate, Dr. Bebe Wunderlich and her husband, Kenneth, bought a double-ended, 42-foot,…

Grizzly bears? Check. Tidal currents at up to 15 knots? Check. Wild weather? Check. This is the Race to Alaska (R2AK), 750 nautical miles of unsupported racing through Canadian wilderness from Port Townsend, Washington, to Ketchikan, Alaska. Oh, and you can’t have an engine…at all, even if it’s disabled. Instead of studying the Gulf Stream for another Bermuda race, I’m preparing for a different challenge this summer. Offshore racing is a blast, and there is nothing like seeing land emerge from the horizon after being at sea with an endless horizon for days or even weeks. But I’ve always found coastal racing to be more challenging. There are simply more variables, more traffic, and the looming threat of land. Most coastal races are over within a day, though, and don’t…

Yacht design is an evolutionary process, built on the successes and failures of previous designs. Those that plied the trade before us provided guidance through formulas and reference charts, and these have held true as the fluids we design against have remained unchanged. Advances are generally incremental. However, on occasion, a giant leap forward takes place. In modern cruising yacht design, monohulls have followed one path and multihulls another, each aiming to satisfy a set of performance and comfort desires. Yet, today’s sailors do not necessarily fall into just one camp. Is it too ambitious to want the deck space of a catamaran yet the upwind performance of a monohull? The Jeanneau team believed it was time to change the status quo with a new look at monohull design. This…

Fun fact: The island of Newfoundland is home to zero snakes, zero ticks, and zero skunks. Like a dog, I do best when kept clear of this trio of critters, and that was reason enough for me to sail up and pay a visit. For my wife, Alex, the idea of sailing our 36-foot boat to Atlantic Canada sounded foreboding, damp, and unpleasantly untropical. In her mind, critters, or lack thereof, didn’t justify subjecting ourselves to such a rigorous coast. More research was needed, so we set ourselves to reading. We learned about the history, climate, and geography of the place easily enough, and then we stumbled upon Canadian author Farley Mowat. His portrayal of life on Newfoundland and in the waters that surround it captivated us. The more we read,…

They call themselves the Vagabonds. A psychologist, a healing arts practitioner, a traveling millwright, a widowed restaurateur—this is only a fraction of the colorful characters that make up Watauga Lake Sailing Club. Just west of the North Carolina border in Tennessee, nestled in the heart of the Appalachian Mountains and surrounded by the Cherokee National Forest, Watauga Lake is a man-made reservoir turned recreational paradise. The clubhouse is an open-air pavilion surrounded by old growth taller than any mast and host to sailing-related talks and workshops. But the real magic happens out there, on the 16-mile-long, half-milewide, 50- to 250-foot-deep Watauga Lake. Here, a series of short tacks thread the needle through a glaciated water valley to the world’s edge—300-foot-tall defunct Watauga Dam—before it’s time to turn around and do…

I am sailing with Robin Lee Graham, but there is no wind. It’s a hot day in July and Montana’s Flathead Lake is glass. The mountains around us are blurred by haze. A wildfire burns to our east. Robin’s blue eyes light up—he’s spotted catspaws ahead. The little puff fills our sails just briefly and we glide on the momentum. We are sailing Magnolia, a 20-foot mahogany knockabout that Robin meticulously restored. Robin is used to sailing alone. We know him from National Geographic covers in the ’70s, or The Boy Who Sailed Around the World Alone on childhood book-shelves, or Dove, the memoir and the movie. In 1965, when he was 16 years old, Robin Lee Graham left southern California to sail around the world alone. On that voyage,…

Sixteen years ago, I installed solar panels on my boat. At the time, the peak efficiency at converting sunlight to electricity was around 16%. Today’s panel technologies enable substantially more energy to be harvested from a given surface area, boosting efficiency as high as 24%—a 50% increase. Taken with other advances, notably how panel output is managed, we have a qualitative improvement in the benefits solar can bring to a boat’s energy systems. Traditional Panel Technologies One thing that hasn’t changed is the use of one of three silicon-based technologies: monocrystalline, polycrystalline, and thin-film. Monocrystalline cells are created by placing a silicon crystal “seed” in a vat of molten silicon and then slowly withdrawing the seed. The molten silicon forms a solid single crystal cylinder around the seed. The cylinder…