Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2018 i Soundings

ROUND AND ROUND HE GOES Australia native Jon Sanders completed a record 10th circumnavigation on Dec. 21, 2017, aboard his 39-foot Sparkman & Stephens Perie Banou II. The 78-year-old arrived in Carnarvon, Western Australia, 14 months after departing Fremantle. Sanders completed his first solo circumnavigation in 1970, cruising east to west, mostly through the tropics. He finished a double nonstop solo circumnavigation west to east through the Southern Ocean between 1981 and ’82. An honorary member of the Ocean Cruising Club, Sanders took his sailing to a new extreme in 1988, when he spent 358 days, 21 hours and 18 minutes at sea, completing three solo circumnavigations. Guinness World Records recorded the journey as the longest distance, at 71,023 nautical miles, ever sailed continuously by any vessel. LIGHTHOUSE ON THE…

When Boston Whaler moved from Rockland, Massachusetts, to Florida in 1991, Paul Hureau stayed behind. The Massachusetts Maritime Academy graduate had spent 18 years with the pioneering builder of foam-filled unsinkable boats. His experience in the Coast Guard as chief of a district boating safety branch — he earned a commendation for his work — had served him well. At Whaler, he’d created the commercial products division, which produced boats for police, fire, military and rescue organizations. Hureau and his wife, Bev Brown, saw a chance to design and build their own boats. In 1992, the couple established Maritime Skiff. The mission was to build a line of small, fuel-efficient, stable center console boats that were wide-beamed, foam-filled and unsinkable, easy to rig and service, and powered with a small…

Crafted in Cape Town, South Africa, by well-known builder Robertson and Caine, the Moorings 433PC features a three-cabin layout with two guest staterooms in the port hull and a master in the starboard hull. The master has a spacious head/enclosed shower, while the guest cabins share a single head with enclosed shower. The main deck has an L-shaped galley forward and an L-shaped dinette abaft it, to port. A roomy flybridge is accessed via a staircase from the cockpit and has a C-shaped lounge set around a large table, a mini galley with a sink, grill and refrigeration, and the helm. A pair of 260-hp Yanmar diesels push the 433PC to a top end of around 20 knots. She cruises efficiently at 13 to 15 knots. SPECIFICATIONS LOA: 42 feet,…

Nantucket Harbor, Massachusetts. We’re looking across the main channel toward Brant Point Light; the Coatue Wildlife Refuge is behind and to the right of this iconic island symbol, with Wauwinet in the distance. “This is a great spot to sit and watch a parade of vessels heading into or out of the inner harbor, as they all must pass very close to the light itself,” says the artist, David Bareford. “In this painting, it’s late afternoon, and long shadows spread across the beach, focusing our attention on the lighthouse. Often, a subject which has little interest for the artist at one time of day becomes a thing of beauty as the sun begins to set.” The scene is done in oils, although the 71-year-old artist worked in watercolors early in…

In 2013, I retired as a maritime accident investigator for the Coast Guard. Prior to that, I was a helicopter rescue swimmer, and before that I worked aboard a patrol boat. Responding to boating mishaps, in one way or another, has consumed the better part of my adult life, so you’d think what I’m about to say couldn’t be true. In all that time — responding to mayday calls, searching for overdue boaters, investigating why they didn’t come home — no one ever handed me a float plan. Not once. If there is one big difference between those who call for help and those who don’t, it’s this: Boaters who don’t call for help make plans to need help. Having a good day on the water is, in part, about…

Without overgeneralizing, Florida’s citizenry and I generally don’t mix well. Whether it’s the drivers who blast down Interstate 95 at 100 mph, the people who show up at Chipotle in their pajamas to pick up dinner, or the owners of quad-engine center consoles who seem intent on running me over on my way out of the inlet, the Sunshine State’s way of doing things sometimes is more than my grumpy disposition can handle. But then, there’s the fishing. As bitter cold set in earlier this year and the Chesapeake iced over, I traveled to Miami to run Pursuit’s DC 365 dual console (look for a feature in the May issue of Soundings). On tap for the day was fishing over a complex of wreck sites and slow-trolling live baits for…

If viral videos had a smell, this one would’ve reeked like an out-of-control frat party at 3 a.m. Millions of Americans watched it. Most wanted to retch. Now the boaters who made the video are facing felony charges and prison time in an animal-cruelty case that is being called an outlier even among officials and activists who regularly see serious abuse cases. “It is unusual,” Don Anthony, communications director for the Animal Rights Foundation of Florida, says about the extent of the charges. “It was a surprising move that these actions were taken so seriously.” The video was shot in June 2017 and went viral in July. It showed a group of men dragging a shark by its tail behind a powerboat at a high rate of speed off Florida.…

When Capt. Jim Greer finished a 7,200-mile cruise this past winter, he acknowledged that he’d done something most boaters might consider crazy: completed the Great Loop without using fossil fuels or connecting to marina shore power. Everything aboard his 48-foot trihull, Ra, was powered by Torqeedo solar panels, batteries and an electric propulsion system. “We could easily run all day on solar power when the weather was good,” Greer says. “We could also run on the batteries for extended periods of time without sunlight. Our longest single run was 142 miles in 42 hours nonstop, day and night, crossing the Gulf of Mexico.” Solar power and its boating applications have evolved faster during the past few years than during the past few decades, experts say. What used to be an…

The first signs that things were not exactly back to normal appeared at the Aeropuerto Luis Muñoz Marin in San Juan, Puerto Rico. I was awaiting my connecting flight to Tortola, in the British Virgin Islands, at the sports bar near the gate. The atmosphere was strangely inert. No mofongo to savor. No reggaeton songs playing. I looked up at the bar’s array of flat-screen televisions. Each showed only a DirecTV logo bouncing against a black background. A half-hour later, walking across the tarmac to a Seaborne Airlines prop plane, I saw that a corner of Terminal D had been ripped away. There was only mangled rebar across an open wound. It was astounding to imagine the force of a wind that could strip concrete from a structure as solid…

LOA: 69 feet, 6 inches o BEAM: 17 feet, 6 inches o DRAFT: 4 feet, 2 inches • DISPLACEMENT: 78,000 pounds TANKAGE: 1,000 gallons fuel, 300 gallons water • POWER: twin 1,200-hp Volvo Penta IPS • TOP SPEED: 26 knots cruise, 31 knots top • CONTACT: Hunt Yachts, Portsmouth, Rhode Island, (401) 324-4201. huntyachts.com Trends in design, especially those we perceive as radical departures, always risk becoming clichés. A trend becomes the norm and then, over time, fails to excite us. I suspect that’s why the best designers never rest on their laurels. On the other hand, some motifs endure beyond reason. One is the classic New England powerboat, which evolved from the workboats favored along the East Coast from New York to Maine and the Canadian Maritimes. Another steadfast…

B&G Vulcan B&G’s Vulcan family of sailing-specific chart plotters — a refreshed 7-inch and 9-inch, and a new 12-inch — have built-in Wi-Fi, broadband radar compatibility, SailSteer and SailingTime, and combine data on one screen. The SailSteer chart overlay shows lay lines and wind shifts, PredictWind helps with weather forecasting and route planning, and Startline provides a countdown timer and racecourse-building tool. B&G’s broadband 3G or 4G radar lets users track targets 36 miles away, see close obstacles in poor visibility and keep an eye on distant storm cells. $699 to $2,199. bandg.com CrewWatcher MOB The Weems & Plath CrewWatcher man overboard system is an app-based alarm that works like a virtual lifeline. It’s made up of a smartphone app and a small beacon that’s worn by each crewmember. The…

SPECIFICATIONS LOA: 51 feet, 9 inches • BEAM: 14 feet, 4 inches • WEIGHT: 30,063 pounds • DRAFT: 3 feet, 5 inches HULL TYPE: modified-vee • POWER: twin 435-hp Volvo Penta D6 diesels, IPS600 pod drives • SPEED: 29 knots top, 25 knots cruise • TANKAGE: 344 gallons fuel, 106 gallons water • PRICE: $1.1 million CONTACT: Beneteau America, Annapolis, Maryland, (410) 990-0270. beneteaulife.com If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. That mantra may serve plenty of boatbuilders well, but not Beneteau. The company is resisting complacency by replacing its best-selling Gran Turismo 49 with the Gran Turismo 50. Officially launched at the Miami International Boat Show in February, the sport cruiser has a more angular and aggressive exterior than the 49’s and is more Mediterranean in feeling. Two below-deck…

The 360 Offshore is North Carolina builder Tideline’s biggest center console power cat to date, leading the builder’s lineup alongside the 235 Hybrid. “The 360 Offshore offers the future of offshore sportfishing combined with classic style and appeal,” says Tideline Boats co-owner George Stronach. “Our newest catamaran combines the performance, comfort and fishability of the newest highend offshore fishing cats with the classic lines and aesthetics of a traditional, custombuilt sportfishing boat.” Die-hard anglers get two 45-gallon and two 88-gallon live wells, more than 2,300 quarts of fishbox capacity in two 815-quart deck lockers and a 688-quart foredeck coffinstyle cooler, and rod stowage on the hardtop and under the gunwales. The dash can swallow up three multifunction displays to help put 360 Offshore owners on the fish. Deck layouts are…

Everett Pearson was a fiberglass boatbuilding pioneer who co-founded Pearson Yachts and helped to launch the J/Boats sailboat brand. Pearson died Dec. 24, 2017, at the Hope Hospice Center in Providence, Rhode Island. He was 84. Born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1955 at Brown University, where he was captain of the football team. He and a cousin, Clinton Pearson, had a long history in business by then, having delivered groceries, sold Christmas trees and more during their younger entrepreneurial years. By the late 1950s, they were building fiberglass dinghies in a garage at a time when wooden hulls still ruled the day. The pair got their official start in the boating business in 1959, after being approached to build a Carl Alberg…

Elizabeth (Tiedemann) duPont got her first taste of the sea while in her early 20s off Newport, Rhode Island, watching the final race of the 1983 America’s Cup from an 85-foot spectator boat. Today she’s the owner of Seascope Yacht Charters and the caretaker of a fleet of five wooden vessels, including the historic 12 Meters Gleam and Northern Light. DuPont started in the charter business after leaving a hotel career to work as a mate for Seascope aboard the 12 Meter Gleam. Here she met her future husband Bob Tiedemann, who had formed the charter business after buying Gleam in 1975. The couple worked together for a few years, restoring a 62- foot wooden commuter yacht named Pam before tying the knot in 1994. They continued to grow the…

Built by Aquila, the MarineMax 484 is the largest power cat in the company’s fleet. She has a fourcabin layout with two staterooms in each hull. There are four private heads, each with its own enclosed shower. The expansive main deck has an L-shaped galley with adjacent counter space and a Cshaped dinette with companion seating. There’s also outdoor seating just forward of the dinette. The flybridge is accessed from the main deck via a set of easy-toclimb stairs and hosts table with bench seating and a grill and sink. The spacious cockpit provides easy access to the water. A pair of 330-hp Volvo Penta D6 diesels provide a 20-knot top speed and an 8- to 10-knot cruise. SPECIFICATIONS LOA: 48 feet, 3 inches BEAM: 23 feet, 6 inches WEIGHT:…

While many of us like the idea of having a 55- or 60-footer tied up at our dock, the financial and logistical realities of those boats can be daunting. Just wait until you have to belly one of those beasts up to the fuel dock or wiggle it into a tight slip. Something more nimble, efficient and manageable may be a better fit for you. Midsize power cruisers fit the bill. Most are easy to handle, have enough room and features for a couple and perform well without demolishing the fuel budget. Their smaller size makes routine maintenance less of a chore, too. For many, they hit the proverbial sweet spot. These four recent offerings are well worth considering: an unconventional tug, a French builder’s new concept, one speedy Down…

The dream was always there. “For years, I would go past marinas on beautiful summer days, full of boats that no one ever seemed to use,” says Peter Clarke. “I vowed that if I bought a boat, it would not sit tied to a dock each weekend. I liked the idea of the sense of exploration it would give me.” With the kids off to college, it was time for Clarke, 56, and his wife, Jennifer, to make the dream a reality. Two years ago, the Madison, Connecticut, couple stepped up from a 26-foot weekender to a full-fledged cruiser, the Back Cove 37 Downeast, a twin-cabin, single-diesel boat built in Rockland, Maine. They made the voyage home from Portland, Maine, themselves, and they’ve been cruising ever since. “I’ve always admired…