Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2018 i Soundings

On a damp, gray day in May, I trudged along a country road lined by towering hornbeams, across a short field and past the chicken coop. At the top of the slope behind my brother’s barn, I gave a strong tug on a short chain and propped back two massive loft doors. It took my eyes a minute to adjust to the cavernous dark but there she was — tucked in a far corner, between a stack of wicker furniture and a painted picnic table. Coated in a thick blanket of hay dust, her fine lines were still apparent and more beautiful than I remembered. Seven years earlier, on another damp day in May, my partner and I had gone to the WoodenBoat School in Brooklin, Maine, and in five…

1. INTERNATIONAL RULES: A fishing vessel must give way to which of the following types of vessels? A. Power driven vessel B. Towing vessel C. Sailing vessel D. Vessel Restricted in Ability to Maneuver 2. INTERNATIONAL RULES: What signal would you give when coming to a bend and visibility is blocked by a high bank? A. A short blast, 1 second B. A long blast, 8 to 10 seconds C. A prolonged blast of 4 to 6 seconds D. A prolonged and two short blasts 3. INTERNATIONAL RULES: The minimum visibility of a masthead light on a 10 meter motorboat is: A. 1 mile B. 2 miles C. 3 miles D. 5 miles 4. Under the U.S. Aids to Navigation System, spherical buoys may be: A. Numbered B. Lettered C.…

Dorothy is a lucky lady. Her beauty and personality have kept her afloat for 121 years, and her status as the oldest registered sailboat in Canada ought to add at least another century to her life. “Because she’s pretty, she’s lasted and been looked after,” the late John West, founder of the Victoria Classic Boat Festival, said in “Between Wood and Water,” an upcoming documentary about the boat’s restoration. “Not only is she pretty, but she was structurally extremely well-engineered, and she was built by first-rate craftsmen.” Dorothy is being made new again. “We owe it to her,” West said. “She’s got huge significance on the coast.” Linton Hope, an English naval architect and keen sailor, designed the original Dorothy, a 33-foot keel/centerboard Thames Rater, in 1894. Thames Raters were…

SPECIFICATIONS LOA: 39 feet, 4 inches BEAM: 10 feet, 11 inches DRAFT: 22 inches WEIGHT: approx. 11,115 pounds HULL TYPE: deep-vee PROPULSION: twin 627-hp outboards FUEL CAPACITY: 350 gallons WATER CAPACITY: 31 gallons BUILDER: Regulator Marine, Edenton, North Carolina.; (252) 482-3827. regulator marine.com BOATYARD: MacDougalls’ Cape Cod Marine Service, Falmouth, Massachusetts, (508) 548-3146. macdougalls.com Jon Baker remembers the summers he spent on Cape Cod, learning about boats and the fun of being on the water. “It was the early ‘80s, I was a youngster at the time,” says the 51-year-old financial planner from Winchester, Massachusetts. “We went to the New England Boat Show and came back with a 17-foot Sea Ray and a 24-foot Sea Ray.” Youthful adventures began. More boats followed: a 21-foot Formula, his “go-fast boat”; a 17-foot Whaler that…

I really enjoyed reading Pat Mundus’ “What Makes A Good Captain?” [“Seamanship,” April]. As a senior executive leader in several companies and now a mentor, I believe Mundus could just as easily have substituted “leader” for “captain” and been right on. I will keep her thoughts in mind the next time I am discussing leadership with an early-career enthusiast. Thanks for such a thoughtful article! Dan Pisano Edgewater, MD A SECRET NO MORE Finally, the best kept secret in the trawler world is out! I owned an earlier version of the Helmsman 38E [June, Soundings], taking her single-handed from the Florida Keys to Lake Champlain. Just a great boat. Her 14-foot beam with no outside passages makes it “live” like a much larger boat with a 16-foot beam. And with the…

Ship’s log: May 12, 1989 Ketch High Barbaree At anchor in West End, Tortola Weather: clear, light wind Sent the launch to pick up our charter party The buccaneers and pirates of long ago stashed their loot in the oddest places. Every year, there’s a new story from some faraway shore of treasure found. The history of the British Virgin Islands is steeped in legends of buried treasure. Names here hark back to the days of pieces of eight on the Spanish Main. Deadman’s Bay, Deadchest, Jost van Dyke and Bluebeard’s Castle are all reminiscent of an era when a cutlass in a strong man’s hand was the law. The long stretch of water known as Sir Francis Drake Channel is like an inland sea, offering anchorages where a schooner…

It was 1977, only a couple of months before the original Star Wars movie was released, when my elementary school classmates and I shuffled up the steps of the long, yellow school bus. We all sat quietly and clutched our brown-bag lunches as the handwritten name badges our teacher made for us swung back and forth across our chests in cadence with the motions of the creaky old bus. My father had just pushed me to read William W. Warner’s Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs, and the Chesapeake Bay. The text was a little advanced for a second grader, but I soaked it up with abandon. The watermen characters on the pages of that book became my childhood heroes. We were headed for Tangier Island, Virginia, an isolated Chesapeake watermen’s community,…

If a class of boats could be like a dynastic royal family, the 12 Metre Class would qualify. These legendary sailboats have a pedigreed set of designers: Olin Stephens individually and with Drew Sparkman (under the banner S&S), Ray Hunt, and Philip Rhodes. The 12s were helmed by an all-star lineup of skippers: Ted Hood, Emil “Bus” Mosbacher Jr. and Dennis Conner. The builders — Nevins, Camper & Nicholsons, Derecktor — were the royalty of yacht yards. And the honorary chairman of the International 12 Metre Association (ITMA) for most of its history was His Highness the Aga Khan. The 12 metres were the America’s Cup yacht of choice from 1958 to 1987, with 10 Cup challenges in all. Today, the boats are as vibrant and vital as ever. “The…

Common sense and good seamanship frame one of the most important aspects of operating a vessel: maintaining a proper lookout. COLREGS Rule 5 says it all in one sentence: “Every vessel shall at all times maintain a proper lookout by sight and hearing as well as by all available means appropriate in the prevailing circumstances and conditions so as to make a full appraisal of the situation and of the risk of collision.” Although experienced captains do it without even thinking about it, maintaining a proper lookout is a big responsibility. It can be thought of as a management philosophy. After all, “proper” and “appropriate” are meant to apply to any and all situations underway. The captain needs to increase or decrease, habitually, what is needed to maintain a proper…

LENGTH ON DECK: 28 feet, 11 inches BEAM: 10 feet, 2 inches DRAFT: 3 feet, 8 inches DISPLACEMENT: 9,800 pounds In the last SketchBook, I wrote about the Rover, a 29-foot, double-ended design. I drew her as an aft-house, Halibut-profile cruiser, but while working with the hull lines, I realized that several house configurations might be applied to the same hull. Hence, this month’s Cruiser version of the Rover. The Cruiser has a double-ended hull with freeboard that’s modest but not at all the likes of what’s normally found on the high-sided and deep vessels that are becoming more common these days. There is a nice balance to the ends of this boat, with enough bow forward to blunt the waves and the stern low enough to allow easy boarding…

Professional-Grade Breitling Breitling’s Exospace B55 Yachting watch has a quartz electronic movement. It powers a chronograph, which has an analog display plus 12- and 24-hour digital displays. The countdown system has audio, visual and vibrating alarms. The watch stores split times that can be viewed on a synched smartphone, with an app that allows settings to be configured remotely. The notched bidirectional rotating bezel adjusts for calculations of wind direction, sailing angle and starting-line position. Price: $7,170. Breitling SA, Grenchen, Switzerland, +41 32 654 54 54. breitling.com Pelican LED Flashlight Pelican’s 3345 LED flashlight has a sensor that adjusts brightness to match the surroundings. The flashlight’s dual beam delivers a maximum of 280 lumens in spot and flood modes combined, 117 in flood mode alone, and 219 in spot mode…

The Sunny K, a Fairform Flyer Linwood 53, rides majestically across the pages in this advertisement from the late 1950s. The “proud owner has reduced his running time to the fishing grounds by half,” the ad copy states, while still enjoying “accommodations seldom found on a sportfishing yacht.” It’s a combination that has made Huckins Yacht Corp. one of America’s most enduring builders. When this ad came out, the Jacksonville, Florida, yard had been in business for more than a quarter-century. It still is. The company founder was Frank Pembroke Huckins, born in 1886 to a Maine family whose lumber business delivered yellow pine to shipyards up and down the East Coast. Early on, he moved to Florida to sell timber in the burgeoning Sunshine State. Huckins also started building…