Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2018 i Soundings

Seaway, the Slovenian builder of 33- to 65-foot hybrid yachts, plans to debut its flybridge—the Greenline 45 Fly—at the Miami International Boat Show in February. The 45 Fly joins the 48 and 65 in the builder’s flybridge range. It has a pair of 220-hp Volvo Penta D3 diesels with conventional shafts and propellers. The shafts also have inline, clutched electric motors that spin the shafts under electric-only propulsion and charge the lithium-ion battery bank, which also recharges by shore power or via the topside solar panels. Top electric-only speed is 6 knots, with a cruise around 4 knots. The electric-only range should be 15 to 20 nautical miles at 4 knots. Top speed with the Volvo Pentas is 25 knots. The 45 Fly’s hard-edged, sporty styling is by J&J Design…

In 1999, the National Park Service moved the 1870 Cape Hatteras Lighthouse in North Carolina 1,500 feet inland to protect it from the encroaching ocean. Even though the beacon had been built 1,500 feet from the seashore, some 129 years of erosion and sea level rise had closed that gap to as little as 50 feet. While park officials insisted on the move for fear that the building would topple, officials from Dare County tried to prevent the relocation. They worried that the 198-foot structure—the tallest brick lighthouse in the nation—would crumble in the process. The Park Service prevailed in court, and a contractor spent 23 days using rails to roll the beacon to a wooded lot. Now, almost 20 years later, the lighthouse continues to shine. Its old foundation…

As captain of Aphrodite, a 74-foot Purdy commuter yacht that ties up every summer in Rhode Island’s Watch Hill Harbor, Kirk Reynolds is responsible for one of the most beautifully restored boats in the Northeast. We asked him what it’s like to be the steward of a nautical icon, a yacht that’s as well known in local waters as the ferries and fishing boats that ply Long Island Sound. The boat gets a lot of attention. How do you handle that? It’s humbling, but I understand why people are drawn to Aphrodite. She’s beautiful and maintained to the nines. Is the attention a distraction? I suppose it could be for some people. We’ll come alongside a dock and toss a line, only to watch it drop to the dockhand’s feet…

SPECIFICATIONS LOA: 80 feet LWL: 69 feet, 3 inches Beam: 20 feet, 4 inches Draft: 10 feet, 6 inches Weight: Approx. 80 tons Power: Caterpillar 3406 diesel In 1962, the Beatles released their first single, “Love Me Do.” John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth. The Telstar satellite beamed the first live television signal across the Atlantic. Also crossing the Atlantic in 1962 was the brand-new yacht Sindbad, making the first passage of a voyage that’s still underway 56 years later. This past summer, Sindbad was relaunched at Front Street Shipyard in Belfast, Maine, after an 18-month refit. Based on the hull of a North Sea trawler and built of steel and aluminum in Norway to endure icy conditions in the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans, Sindbad…

I’ve danced this dance hundreds of times, yet it never fails to make my pulse race. “Throw it steady off the port side,” the captain’s voice crackles over the loudspeaker. The deckhand pitches one or two live sardines at a time over the side as the boat turns to intersect an unseen quarry. “Here they come, boys—let ’em have it!” A few nets full of live anchovies and sardines are launched off the stern, followed by a synchronized volley of casts lobbing hooked live baits into the fray. The water erupts with boils as frenzied tuna crash through the chum with open maws. Anglers whoop and holler, first at the sight and sound of the boils, then as tuna slam their baits and bend their rods into heavy arcs. My…

Capt. Lee Sykes started getting the Mayday calls as soon as Hurricane Florence hit. Despite days’ worth of evacuation notices, weather forecasters begging viewers to take warnings seriously, and officials urging millions of people to get the heck away from the Carolina coastline, some boaters decided to stay and take their chances against an approaching storm as big as the state of Michigan. They didn’t last long. Sykes, who operates the TowboatUS franchise in Morehead City, North Carolina, says people aboard sailboats in Beaufort were calling for help from the waterfront. He heard commercial fishing boats issuing Maydays. There were about a dozen calls in all. “Some of them were right after it started, and some waited until it was up over 100- mph winds,” Sykes says. “We actually could…

Rough tidal conditions and stiff winds did not deter the wooden-boat sailors at the 46th Opera House Cup Regatta off Nantucket, Massachusetts. A heavy chop and winds of 18 knots kept some competitors at the dock, but six 26-foot Alerion Class Sloops joined 35 larger boats—and then swept the top five spots. It took the Alerions three hours or more to get around the 19.8-mile course, making them slower than most other boats but fast enough to win on corrected time. It was a good day for Sanford Boat Company of Nantucket, which revived the Alerion Class in the late 1970s and earlier this year licensed building rights to Brooklin Boat Yard in Brooklin, Maine. Donald Tofias’ 76-foot W-Class, Wild Horses, had the best elapsed time, finishing in 2 hours,…

During World War I, British painter Norman Wilkinson designed bold, high-contrast paint patterns to camouflage Allied ships and confuse enemy submarines. Now, a similar paint scheme has turned a retired New York City fireboat into a floating art project that was created to commemorate the end of the World War I centennial on November 11, 2018. Two public arts groups, Public Art Fund and 14-18 NOW, funded “Flow Separation,” an exhibition by New York-based artist Tauba Auerbach. Inspired by Wilkinson, Auerbach painted the 1931 fireboat John J. Harvey in a contemporary “dazzle camouflage” pattern. AkzoNobel, a global paints and coatings company, supplied the paint. During the summer and fall, the fireboat provided rides from docks around New York Harbor. This winter and spring, the boat is expected to dock at…

Formula 400 SSC SPECIFICATIONS LOA: 40 feet Beam: 12 feet Weight: 23,700 pounds Draft: 3 feet, 4 inches Hull: Modified-V Power: 4/350-hp Mercury Verado 4-strokes Tankage: 400 gals. fuel, 56 gals. water Price: $983,120 Contact: Formula Boats, formulaboats.com Alarm at 6 a.m. Shower. Make breakfast. Take the kids to school. Commute to work. Save the world in the office. Commute home. Cook dinner. Do homework with kids. Put kids to sleep. Collapse on the couch. Go to bed. Wash, rinse, repeat. It’s no wonder that when the weekend comes around, we have precious little leftover energy—much less time—to think about boating. The good news is that the pace of our lives is influencing the design of new boats. Historically, people sought out boats for a specific activity: center consoles for…

In the 1870s, Capt. Nathanael Greene Herreshoff was having a bit of a wrestling match in his mind as he worked on a new monohull design. He wanted to reduce the wetted surface area imposed by the deep keel of most sailing yachts from the era. A long, narrow hull needed a deep ballast keel to counteract the force of her tall rig, he reasoned. Increasing the beam and reducing the draft gained him form stability, but neither solution made a significant difference in speed. A canting keel was a worthy alternative in theory, but the materials to make it light and the hydraulics to actuate it didn’t exist in the late 1800s. So, instead of placing ballast to windward, Herreshoff put another idea out there. He substituted another hull…

“Available for Charter: Mayflower, of 180 tons, owners Robert Childe, Thomas Short, Christopher Jones and Christopher Nichols. Of three masts and three decks, 100 feet in length with a 24-foot beam and a 12-foot draft. Mayflower has made successful voyages transporting lumber, fish and tar, wine, cognac and vinegar. She is inured to the rigors of the North Sea and the Atlantic. Apply to the captain, Christopher Jones, in London.” The advertisement might not have read quite that way, but a group of religious separatists responded, hiring the 11-year-old vessel in the late 1620s. Granted permission to raise a colony in North America, the pilgrims needed the transportation to make their dream come true. Approximately 35 of the separatists sailed on the Mayflower in mid-September with Capt. Jones in command.…

There’s a lot to see at a classic boat show, but the real fun is in talking to the owners. At this year’s Antique & Classic Boat Festival in Salem, Massachusetts, owners of three award-winning craft shared stories of how they found their diamonds in the rough and got them to shine. Mark Grady of Braintree, Massachusetts, already owned a classic wooden boat—a 35-foot 1951 Vinny Cavanaugh Downeast-style cruiser—but he wanted a trawler. A good friend owned a Penbo and Grady liked the lines, so when he found a 1965 model online, he and his daughter drove to Long Island, New York, to check it out. He bought the 37-foot wooden sardine carrier from its 95-year-old owner in May 2017. Grady spent the next month painting the interior while the…

To fight barnacles, the maritime industry has used careening, copper bottoms, lead paint, tar and modern chemical compositions. Some methods have worked better than others, but the most effective ones—poisonous paints—also have a habit of killing desirable marine creatures, including oysters. Now, scientists believe they have found a solution that might save the shipping industry billions of dollars per year in lost time, causes no harm to other marine organisms and cures the longtime headache of recreational boaters. Barnacles secrete a liquid glue and attach themselves to boats in ways that make them tough to remove. Researchers at Kiel University in Germany believe that putting texture on hulls may prevent barnacles from cementing themselves to ship bottoms in the first place. Apparently, barnacles can’t get a firm grip on microscopic…

Few boating regions inspire more mystery and speculation than the Bermuda Triangle. Since the days of Christopher Columbus, stories of everything from strange fires and the lost city of Atlantis to sunken ships and vanishing planes have come out of the 500,000-square-mile patch of water bordered by southeast Florida, Puerto Rico and Bermuda. Now, with some help from a three-part British TV documentary called “The Bermuda Triangle Enigma,” a researcher with the National Oceanography Centre at the University of Southampton is putting forth a theory: Rogue waves may account for at least some of the unsolved boating mysteries. “These things do occur,” Simon Boxall told Soundings, “and they can explain some of these disappearances.” Here in the United States, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says rogue waves were…

The True North 38 made its debut in 2001. Seventeen years later, it’s still turning heads. It was built by US Watercraft in Warren, Rhode Island, which began as TPI Composites, the pioneering fiberglass boatbuilder that Everett Pearson founded. The builder used the Seemann Composites Resin Infusion Molding Process, better known as SCRIMP, which drew the resin into the fiberglass using a vacuum. The boat’s Downeast style was evident in its plumb bow, even sheer and trunk cabin. But its lines were flavored with elements not always associated with that style, including a reverse transom, noticeable bow flare and a swept-back profile, all of which gave the True North 38 a distinctive appearance and a personality all its own. An instant hit, the boat was dubbed a “sport utility” because…

Zane Grey is often credited with pioneering the concept of cruising to far-flung fishing holes on a big ship. He pushed off from a California dock in the 1920s aboard a 190-foot schooner with several small craft on deck. Since then, owners and crew have continuously evolved the mothership experience, going to great lengths to battle gamefish in remote places. Some of the most audacious have chased exotic creatures from motherships built solely to reach the edges of weed lines that everyday anglers rarely prowl, either hauling, towing or running fishboats in tandem. Recently, one crew took the concept to the next level. They embraced the idea that when it comes to trolling the globe, you can take a lot with you, including a tender that is nothing short of…

The storm clouds and a veil of rain move off over dark water, taking the violence of the tropical hurricane with them. Left in their wake, a sailor and the pieces of his shattered boat are on the beach. Waves of light blue-water surge up to the coast while just offshore whitecaps break over a bar. “After the Hurricane” is Winslow Homer at his best, telling a story of the sea. In 1884, Homer, 48 years old and already renowned, traveled south to paint on a commission from Century magazine. He left the gray-green, rockbound coast of Maine for the turquoise waters of the Bahamas and, later, Key West, Florida, and Cuba. By then, he had already traded his oil paints for watercolors. Inspired by the tropics—the clear blue sea,…

Weathered Look New additions to Gill’s collection of performance gear are the Navigator Jacket —a lightweight, waterproof and breathable piece of outerwear for coastal mariners—and Waterproof Socks, the company’s first waterproof, windproof and breathable socks. The jacket has fully taped seams and non-absorbent, quick-drying synthetic insulation, which makes it a good choice for boating in the colder months. A rollaway hood with adjustable neck, adjustable cuffs and storm-guarded zipper help keep water out and heat in. The reflective detail on the pull cord at the neck makes for good visibility. The Navigator comes in two colors: graphite gray and blue. Pair it with the company’s new waterproof socks, which are thin enough to be worn inside boots and performance footwear. They’re made with a nylon outer shell and breathable membrane…