Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2016 i SAIL

Fluky wind made for some interesting racing last October during the Marseille One Design—the finale of the 2015 Bullitt GC32 Racing Tour. And while Alinghi (above left) edged out Sultanate of Oman (above right) during the event in France, it wasn’t enough to knock Sultanate of Oman off the top of the podium, as they still came in first in the overall rankings, with Alinghi right on their heels in second. First introduced in 2012, the 40ft foiling cats look to bring highperformance racing to both professional teams and private owners.…

The bad luck plaguing British off shore sailor Alex Thomson struck yet again when he and co-skipper Guillermo Altadill had to first drop out of the doublehanded Transat Jacques Vabre due to structural damage to their Open 60 Hugo Boss and then had to abandon ship completely aft er being struck by a rogue wave while hove-to off the coast of Spain. According to Thomson, the wave completely inverted the boat, but he and Guillermo managed to save her by first securing all hatches to keep her from sinking and then canting over the keel to pop her upright again. After they were airlift ed by the Spanish coast guard, Thomson’s shore team managed to tow the wreck to Coruna, Spain, where they immediately set to work trying to get…

Size matters—and when you’re working with small boats, creativity matters even more. The Leopard 40 feels like a much larger catamaran because its South African builder, Robertson and Caine, incorporated various owner and charter company feedback during the design process with an eye toward optimizing space aboard. DESIGN & CONSTRUCTION As a first step toward making the most of a relatively compact “canvas,” naval architects Simonis Voogd created a pair of hulls with increased volume throughout. It also leveraged the same forward cockpit concept found aboard the Leopard 40’s larger siblings, the 44 and the 48. Similarly, the bows are plumb to both maximize sailing length and further increase interior volume; blunt transoms make it easy to board from astern; and the cockpit sole is on the same level as…

FLIR OCEAN SCOUT 640 The Ocean Scout 640 is the latest addition to FLIR’s Ocean Scout line of handheld thermal marine cameras. It generates thermal images that reveal floating debris, boats, buoys and, most importantly, any people in the water at distances of up to 1,200 yards. Whether you’re hunting for channel markers or working your way through a mooring field late at night, the Ocean Scout 640 makes navigating in low visibility easier than ever. Additionally, the camera’s InstAlert mode highlights the hottest objects in your field of view, making them easy to spot. $3,499. FLIR, flir.com SIRIUS SIGNAL SOS DISTRESS LIGHT If you’re looking for an alternative to traditional pyrotechnic flares, you’ll like the new SOS Distress Signal from Sirius Signal. This is an LED visual distress light…

Never sail to a schedule if you can possibly avoid it. Thus speaks conventional wisdom, and it is not wrong when applied to conventional off shore cruising. The pressure of a timescale can lead to decisions that might, in retrospect, be considered rash. In the context of a delivery voyage, though, you have to bend the rules some, as long as you don’t knowingly put your boat and crew in harm’s way. There are precious few guarantees in sailing, and fair winds and benign seas are not among them. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst, and set sail—which is what we did in mid-October. The mission was clear-cut: deliver our Norlin 34 project boat from Marblehead, Massachusetts, to Hampton, Virginia, in time for the start of SAIL’s Snowbird…

In planning for the upcoming 2016 Pacific Cup—a race that takes sailors from San Francisco to Oahu, Hawaii—I was interested in tools for predicting the optimal route. Depending on the location of the Pacific high-pressure system and El Niño, sailing the rhumb line may not be the fastest course. The old rule of thumb is to sail with the trade winds and then head toward Hawaii. This is an oversimplification of a challenging navigation problem. With laptop computers and tablets, you have sophisticated tools to plan an optimal course. Proper routing can save hours, if not days, on long-distance passages and—more importantly—adds to the safety or comfort of the trip. WEATHER FORECASTING MODELS The key component of weather routing is the forecast data, which is available from several sources, including…

LIVING THE SAILING LIFE Here is a shot from the deck of my boat Intuition taken during a sunset sail on San Diego bay the other night.—Douglas Carrell, San Diego, CA Pets NO BOARD MAN’S BEST FRIEND This is Puppers, a rescue dog we just got one month ago—this is his first time on the boat! He’s helping me fold the sail, protecting the dinghy from seagulls and looking for fish. Next weekend we’re off to Angel Island for his first sleepover on the boat—wish us luck! —Michael DiSandro, Oakland, CA @SAILfeed In his story “To wear or not to wear— that’s the question” (posted on SAILFeed on October 29), Brian Hancock took to task the idea of wearing lifejackets at all times when onboard. “I have seen grown men…

Before it all went haywire, it seemed like such a simple and straightforward situation: my wife, Patti, and I are sneaking up on our 80s, and our Cape Dory 30 cutter was more boat than we wanted to wrestle with by ourselves. Time to downsize. I’ve long admired the Nonsuch boats, with the simplicity of a single sail and all the control lines managed from the security of the cockpit. I always hoped I’d own one someday and even joined the owners’ association years ago to learn all I could about them. And so at this point, a Nonsuch 22 seemed the perfect little craft to enable us to continue our gunkholing around Penobscot Bay without the aid of our strong and agile kids or grandkids to haul in heavily…

U.S. SCORES 470 BRONZE IN ABU DHABI For the second consecutive year, the US Sailing Team Sperry’s Stuart McNay and David Hughes won bronze at the ISAF Sailing World Cup Final in Abu Dhabi, UAE, this past November. The strong finish at yet another Olympicclass regatta capped an impressive string of results for the pair in 2015, highlighted by victories at ISAF Sailing World Cup Weymouth and Portland, and the 470 European Championships. In Abu Dhabi, the Americans finished behind Australians Mathew Belcher and William Ryan, and Anton Dahlberg and Fredrik Bergström of Sweden. NEW CLASS-LEGAL LASER SAIL The International Laser Class Association (ILCA) has unveiled a completely new classlegal design for the Laser standard rig sail, the first time in 40 years that the design has been substantially updated.…

It’s been written before that sailboats are the stuff of dreams, and few designs support that contention better than the Jeanneau Sun Fast 3600. With its plumb bow and stern, twin rudders, low profile and powerful, wedge-shaped hull, this boat clearly has a healthy dose of Euro grand prix racer in its DNA. However, it also includes more than adequate accommodations and headroom to make life aboard far less of a trial than it is aboard a pure raceboat. Think a scaled-down Open 60 or Class 40 sloop without all that stooping and head banging as you’re preparing dinner, relaxing belowdecks or hitting the rack. The boat is also surprisingly friendly topside. On the eve of a delivery from Newport, Rhode Island, to Martha’s Vineyard for the Around Island race,…

There are only a handful of villages scattered across the more than 360 islands, islets and sandbars that make up the Exuma archipelago in the Bahamas. Cruising there you’ll have no trouble finding plenty of beaches and bays to explore. Most likely you’ll only have to share them with iguanas, palm trees and, perhaps, some swimming pigs. My partner, Michaela, and I recently explored this magical chain of islands, which runs 130 miles from Great Exuma Island in the south to Norman’s Cay in the north. We chartered with Navtours, pretty much the only charter outfit in the region, starting out from the company’s base in Great Exuma and sailing one-way to its other base in Nassau. The Exumas run along the eastern edge of the Grand Bahamas Bank. As…

Cold, wet and tired, we had finally arrived in Charleston in late November, five weeks aft er leaving the Chesapeake. The ebb current in the Ashley River was running against the building easterly wind, and the harbor was a seething mass of waves and whitecaps. We were lucky to get a slip at all without a reservation this time of year. The marina asked if a 50-amp receptacle would be okay—it was all they had available and we were in no position to turn it down. Besides, we had a 50-amp adapter onboard. We pulled into our assigned slip, took the adapter to the power pedestal, flipped open the receptacle lid and were greeted by a power receptacle that had clearly suff ered from heat damage (Photo 1). There was…

There’s no bad time to charter in the British Virgin Islands. You’ll get your dose of sun, sea and breeze whatever time of year you visit. To me, though, the BVI are at their best around the end of March—just about when the Northeast, where I live, is emerging yawning and stretching from its blanket of winter snow. There is nothing that gets you in the mood for a new season’s sailing at home more than taking part in the BVI Spring Regatta. The BVISR isn’t just for high-ticket raceboats crewed by pros and semi-pros, though there are plenty of those around. It also has a thriving bareboat class, where everyday sailors can charter a boat for a week and indulge in some warm-weather racing around the islands. Bareboat racing…

Ba-boom, boom, boom! The report was deafening, bone-shaking, as though it came from inside of a thunder cloud. I practically jumped out of the V-berth on my Catalina 34 as she lay just south of the Atlantis Resort on Paradise Island in the Bahamas. “Well, hell’s bells!” I yelled into the dark saloon. “What is it now?” The crossing from Florida had been a rough one. My brother Dan and I had been in a rush to meet our families for Christmas and took on an angry Gulf Stream—not a smart idea, I know. We struggled upwind through large waves, past giant ships, the two of us seasick and regretting our decision. Halfway across the VHF shorted out, after which we began receiving electric shocks when touching any metal part…

Marlow-Hunter has long been a pioneer in the marine industry, creating such innovations as its trademark stainless steel cockpit arch and the easy-to-use backstay-free B&R rig. However, what really surprised me about the new Marlow-Hunter 31 was its plain-old sailing ability. At the beginning of a sail trial on Chesapeake Bay, the boat had no trouble maintaining a very respectable 6 knots on a close reach in 8 to 10 knots of wind. It also came about crisply in the light seas, so much so that I had to be careful not to bring the boat around too quickly, thanks to its powerful high-aspect rudder. Then it got windy, and the next thing we knew, we were bombing around doing 7.0, 7.5 and ultimately, 7.8 knots on that same close…

I was born lucky. This is important if you’re sailing to the Faroe Islands, which lie between 61°21'N and 62°21'N, firmly in the Icelandic low-pressure zone, the primary Atlantic gale incubator. The Gulf Stream ensures that the weather is never really cold—it rarely drops below freezing—but it is consistently miserable, with abundant fog and drizzle, and gales are common even in the summertime. The only other sailors we know who have been there arrived in 40 knots of wind and never saw less than 25, which severely limited their explorations. The weather problems are compounded by geography: the islands are separated by narrow, glacier-carved sounds, which form a series of slots through which tidal currents sluice, oft en at 5 or 6 knots and sometimes as high as 12 knots.…

I suspect most sailors don’t really think much about liferafts, until the time comes when they are about to step up into one from the deck of their sinking boat. At that moment, there is no more interesting topic on this earth. Did I get the right type of raft? Is it big enough? What is packed inside? Too late. What you see is all you’ve got. When it comes to abandon-ship situations, the typical sailor’s thoughts run somewhere along the lines of “that will never happen to me,” or “I never sail very far offshore, so I don’t need a raft.” And frankly, both of those statements are almost always true. Liferaft deployments and rescues are indeed rare. But ask yourself, how much risk you are willing to accept…

? Got your own tips? Send them to us at sailmail@sailmagazine.com Nothing makes a boat look more tired than cracked and yellowed lifelines. But replacing them can cost thousands of dollars. Here’s another option. All you need are a few aft ernoons, a utility knife, needle-nose pliers, a plastic storage container with latching lid, a gallon of Ospho rust treatment, plastic gloves, wire ties and a toothbrush. Strip Safely & Slowly: Use a sharp utility knife and pliers to cut and peel back the old plastic. This task takes hand strength and concentration. It’s a 10ft -a-day, 3in-at-a-time battle. You’ll know when it’s time to take a break. If you start to slip, you’re done for the day! Soak in Batches: Once all the lifelines are stripped, set up your…