Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2018 i Soundings

It was called the Bug. George “Pop” Corry’s little one-design sailboat, which had come off New York designer William Gardner’s drawing board in 1906, was fun to race, gave skippers an even chance to win and was inexpensive at $140. But the 17-footer was a little too small, a little too wet — on the right track, yes, but not quite the boat that Corry, commodore of New York’s Larchmont Yacht Club, wanted. In 1910, he went back to Gardner for a bigger version. Draftsman Francis Sweisguth came up with a keelboat just over 22 feet overall, with graceful overhangs and an enormous gaff rig whose boom hung out over the transom. Port Washington, New York, boatbuilder Ike Smith turned out 22 of them for Corry and his supporters, and…

Yachtsmen typically know Maine from the water, as Camden, Brooklin and Jonesport beckon with gunkholing adventures. But driving through these places along Route 1 affords a different view, especially in Rockport, where a turn onto Main Street leads inland to rolling, rural countryside. It’s no surprise to see barns and scrubby fields, hill and dale swelling to the horizon. What is surprising, a mile along, is to find a gem of a boat shop called Artisan Boatworks. Owner Alec Brainerd and his crew are passionate about restoring, and producing replicas of designs by such legendary naval architects as Nathanael and L. Francis Herreshoff, B.B. Crowninshield, Aage Nielsen, William Fife, Starling Burgess, John Alden, Olin Stephens and Joel White. Brainerd is a serious person, almost grave, and yet welcoming in tan…

Gazing out over the ocean, I take a deep breath. A low fog bank hovers just beyond Nova Scotia’s Mahone Bay islands — a tangible if not impenetrable barrier between the land and the blue sea beyond. There is magic here, and sometimes on days like this, as I look out over the bay, I swear I can see the ghost of a tall Atlantic schooner racing across the ocean. I see her topmasts bending under a press of sail, and I hear the whistle of the wind in her rigging. Her huge, white bow wave rolls gracefully away to leeward, and I can almost hear the creak of block and tackle. But this is no dream or fancy of my imagination; it is a memory. Looking over to the…

Steve Ehrler and Jan Murphy wanted to try the liveaboard lifestyle. They were looking for a good boat, about 10 years old, well equipped and well maintained, says Ehrler, 63, a former Navy submarine officer. “It also had to feel like home,” he says. “I’ve always loved the water and lived on a river on the Eastern Shore for a while,” Ehrler says. “So we bought a [Nimble Nomad] mini-trawler that we could use to explore the rivers and Chesapeake Bay, and trailer to Florida for vacations. I loved being able to live on a boat for a while — go place to place while enjoying a sense of adventure and mornings on anchor. It was the people we met that lived boating, however, that first gave us a sense…

Torqeedo Kayak Outboard Designed for fishing kayaks, Torqeedo’s Ultralight 403 A electric outboard produces the equivalent of 1 hp, weighs 16 pounds (including its lithium-ion battery), hits 6.2 mph and has a maximum range of 25 miles, depending on the kayak’s type and weight. The motor comes with a battery, charger, remote throttle, on-board computer and emergency magnetic stop key. Built-in GPS calculates the battery’s remaining range. The 403 A tilts, kicks up when it strikes an object and integrates with a kayak’s footoperated steering. $1,799. torqeedo.com Remote-Control Trailer Dolly Parkit360’s Transformer 15K trailer dolly lets one person move a 15,000-pound fifth wheel, tagalong, gooseneck or traditional trailer with a wireless remote control. The muscle comes from two 1½-hp Bosch electric motors driving planetary gearing. A user-supplied 12-volt deep-cycle battery…

SPECIFICATIONS LOA: 60 feet • BEAM: 16 feet, 7 inches • WEIGHT: 48,500 pounds • DRAFT: 5 feet • HULL TYPE: modified-vee • POWER: twin 725-hp Volvo Penta D8s • SPEED: 29 knots top, 25 knots cruise • TANKAGE: 725 gallons fuel, 260 gallons water, 60 gallons waste • PRICE: $1.575 million • CONTACT: Vicem Yachts Americas, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, (954) 462-8828. vicemyachts.net The new edition of the Vicem 58 Classic is an evolution of a design that the Turkish builder introduced in 2010. Vicem took the wraps off the boat at the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show in November. Below you’ll find the traditional good looks and craftsmanship for which Vicem is known. Teak and mahogany blend with off-white upholstery, stone and painted woodwork to create a Down East…

No matter how much time Charles Yarish spends aboard his 23-foot Boston Whaler Dauntless, he can’t stop thinking about what’s happening beneath the hull. “I fish principally in Long Island Sound, but I’ll fish anyplace in the world when I have a chance,” he says. “I’ll go after bluefish and striped bass. I like sport fish. I’ll go after fluke in the summer months.” And it’s far more than the fish that preoccupy his mind. Yarish is a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut. He has also spent decades thinking about what’s possible underwater with kelp — which types grow best, how they should be planted, ideal ways to cultivate the plants and how to harvest them for everything from food to biofuel. Yarish got…

Scout 355 LXF LOA: 34 feet, 11 inches BEAM: 10 feet, 9 inches WEIGHT: 8,800 pounds (dry, no engines) DRAFT: 2 feet HULL TYPE: deep-vee POWER: triple Yamaha F300s SPEED: 54 knots top, 31 knots cruise TANKAGE: 310 gallons fuel, 23 gallons water, 9 gallons waste PRICE: $394,882 CONTACT: Scout Boats, scoutboats.com Big boats, little boats, beamy boats, tall boats, fast boats, slow boats: If it floats, there’s a good chance you can get a look at it during the Miami International Boat Show. Under the tents and in the water will be more than 2,000 boats — all on sunny, warm Virginia Key, a great place to be in the dead of winter. The show runs Feb. 15-19. Among the fresh entries are a couple of interesting power cats,…

The Nespresso coffee machine hisses in the background as Linda makes a change-of-watch latte. The faint glow under the eastern clouds heralds another beautiful morning at sea. We have 25 to 30 knots of quartering breeze, seas are 8 to 10 feet, and Cochise is loving it. The little diesels turn 1,600 rpm, and Cochise, our FPB 78, averages 11.5 knots while surfs accelerate us into the 15-knot range. We stand close together in the galley, touching shoulders and thighs, at ease in our lives together and with the sea. There is something special about this morning, and we both sense it. It is not just the extreme comfort in which we are now running down the Nova Scotia coast so late in the cruising season. There is something more.…

Many of us don’t cruise in large trawlers with stabilizers, vast stowage lockers and workshops, yet we do cruise with provisions, spare parts, gear, tools and consumables. And when we add a dinghy (or paddleboard or surfboard) on deck, there is potential for chafing, shifting or breakage during a passage. Thus, when preparing a modest boat for sea, it’s best to anticipate Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. A superior seaman uses superior intelligence to avoid superior circumstances, which means we can outsmart Mr. Murphy by imagining the worst-case scenarios. We can address any void or empty space to maximize capacity and prevent damage while underway. Packing properly is certainly easier said than done, but avoiding last-minute preparations before departure is a good place to start.…

The campus of Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michaels, Maryland, is typically quiet and serene. Things were much different on this morning. As I walked the grounds, the high-pitched whines of chain saws and power planers filled the air. Shipwrights were responsible for the cacophony of woodcutting sounds. As I rounded the boatbuilding shed, I could see a museum crewmember prepping the topsides and decks of the bugeye Edna E. Lockwood to mesh with her newly crafted log bottom. The scene looked like a large-scale boatbuilding jigsaw puzzle. I’ve tracked the restoration of the Edna E. Lockwood — a traditional Chesapeake sailing craft used for oystering — since the museum started looking to replace her original 1889 log bottom about five or six years ago. The search for new…

Cobia Boats has been on a tear the past four years, improving and expanding its offshore center console lineup. The builder continued the trend late last year when it launched the 320CC, which fills the gap between its 301CC and 344CC. The 320CC has features aimed toward serious anglers, including two 55-gallon indeck fishboxes with macerated discharges, twin 35-gallon transom live wells, a starboard tuna door, 11 gunwale rod holders and under-gunwale rod stowage. An optional hardtop adds nine more rod holders. Outriggers and kingfish rod mounts also are options. Between the gunwales are a pair of bucket seats with flip-up bolsters and flip-down stainless footrests at the well-appointed helm. In the bow, a powered table creates a U-shaped dining and entertaining area. The table lowers halfway to function as…

Boat-trailer decouplings that lead to deaths and criminal prosecution are so rare that the Boat Trailer Manufacturers Association doesn’t even have statistics about them, says Darren Envall, the group’s assistant executive director. Still, two fatal incidents serve as reminders about the importance of properly securing boats and trailers. Within a month of a 42-year-old man being sentenced to 60 days in jail for criminally negligent homicide after his boat and trailer broke loose in traffic and killed a woman on Staten Island, New York, police were investigating a fatal trailer decoupling on a highway in Louisiana. The death that led to jail time in New York occurred in 2015 when Michael Khmil was trailering his Trophy behind a Toyota SUV. According to news reports, Khmil had the 4,000-plus-pound boat atop…

Lucky John England. The former master shipwright at Rockport Marine, in Rockport, Maine, England has probably never worked on an ugly boat. The Maryland native saw his path at a young age and attended North Carolina State University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in wood science and technology. After graduation, England worked in the furniture business, managing factories for about 5 years. In 1976 he began his career as a boatbuilder at Lee’s Boat Shop in Rockland, Maine. His first build was the Bruce King-designed Whitehawk. England moved between Maine, North Carolina and Virginia for several decades, building boats and teaching boatbuilding. From 1996 to 2017, he was at Rockport Marine, where he was project manager for the restoration of Bolero (the legendary Sparkman & Stephens racing yawl) and…

Night comes quickly in the tropics. First there was rain, and then there were stars. The sea was running at about 3 feet, enough to knock you off the pontoon if you dozed, enough to keep you clenching at the handles if you were in the water, and enough to make people vomit. Vomiting is problematic at the best of times, but when it starts minutes into a 13-hour ordeal and there is no drinking water, no means of telling time, no way to control the environment and no Nutella, you know it’s going to be a long night. I had gone through ocean survival courses before. Usually they entail a pool, PowerPoint and lunch. This was a full week at Costa Rica’s Coast Guard Academy, culminating in a 2½-mile…

“In my dreams, I am standing a 2 a.m. wheel watch, running down some long, lonely reach of flat water, snow-capped mountains glistening in the moonlight on either side … [cruising] endlessly through the black Alaskan night,” says watercolorist Cooper Hart. “The skipper sleeps in his cabin. An old friend is checking the charts. It is the ancient sailor’s blessing of a good ship and a good crew in a great land.” For Hart, that great land is the Pacific Northwest, from his home port near Seattle up the coast to Canada, Alaska and beyond. It’s a stretch of water that’s bred rugged boats and hard lives, as he learned firsthand on an 800-mile voyage aboard an Alaska salmon gillnetter. Hart also worked as a sign painter in Seattle shipyards…

Lucie, an International 6 Meter racing yacht designed by Clinton Crane and built by Henry B. Nevins in 1931, wears sail No. US55 and is a sight to behold as she slips through the water. Narrow for her 37-foot length overall (6-foot beam), she shares the low profile, sweet sheer line and delicious overhangs of other classic 6 Meter boats, but Lucie has a priceless provenance: She belonged to Briggs Swift Cunningham Jr., a wealthy entrepreneur from Cincinnati, born in 1907 Cunningham established his yacht-racing credentials sailing Stars and, while he attended Yale University, an 8 Meter as a member of the school’s sailing team. Modern sailors likely remember him for skippering the 12 Meter Columbia to victory in the 1958 America’s Cup, the first to be staged following World…

LOD: 46 feet, 8 inches BEAM: 13 feet, 11 inches DRAFT: 5 feet (outboard up) DISPLACEMENT: 42,900 pounds (light) Anyone who knows me is aware of the two women who are the loves of my life: my lovely wife and first mate, Soitza, and the little retired salmon troller Josephine. I have lived with this elderly lady (the troller, that is) for the past two decades. She has — at times with a grumpy demeanor — allowed me some fine adventures and, of course, many weeks of near-slave servitude while I madly try to get her ready to use each season. Part of the work is related to her now 83-year-old hull, and part is simply the caretaking of a traditional wooden boat. This kind of labor is usually technically…

It’s nice to have a place to return to year after year, through thick and thin, from childhood and the teenage years to your single-minded, hard-fishing adult decades and into whatever lies beyond. For me, that place is a mussel bar in southern New England, a piece of a larger topography — a current-swept, surf-smashed mess of sand and glacial rubble that produces terrific, challenging fishing. I have explored the nooks and crannies of this terrain for 50 years, and I am still learning. Not only does the place remain special after hundreds of trips, but it is still a good location to tie into a large striper from late September through November. I fished it as a youngster, surfed it as a teen and got to know the bottom…