Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2020 i Soundings

What do you do when you have to run a boat north from Florida to Connecticut and your three teenage sons are on an extended break from school due to the coronavirus? You bring them along and spend some time bonding.” That was the Facebook post I read on March 23, the day my home state of Connecticut went on partial lockdown in an effort to slow the spread of COVID-19. It was written by Tom Caruso, a friend and marine industry professional who owns Total Marine, a boat dealership and service shop headquartered in Norwalk. I’ve known Tom and his wife, Robin, for years and have spent time with the couple and their three boys TJ, Michael and Nicholas in anchorages around Long Island Sound. They are an adventurous…

When I ran a charter boat in Brielle, New Jersey, my marina was just past a railroad bridge with a four-foot vertical clearance at high tide. I went through it twice a day. The bridge usually remained open unless a train was due or the operators were changing shifts. I knew the train schedule and would leave the dock before 6 a.m. If I left later, I’d have to suffer a long wait for the commuter trains heading to New York. Inbound was a different story, because the afternoon boat traffic was always heavier. If the bridge was down awaiting the train, boats would collect on both sides until it opened. There was the potential for all hell to break loose, particularly on weekends or when someone was in a…

Jupiter is an attractive, upscale community on Florida’s Atlantic coast, home to a number of celebrities in the sports and entertainment fields. Sitting in its slip in front of Down East Yachting, the Jupiter-based dealer for Sabre Yachts, the new Sabre 58 Salon Express fits right in. With its traditional lines, wide teak decks and exquisite cherry interior woodwork, the 58 SE rivaled many of the town’s finer coastal homes both in appearance and architectural detail. I would have been happy to spend the day chilling out on board at the dock. But it was a beautiful morning, and we were here for a sea trial. In fact, Capt. Thomas Freeman had arrived early to switch on the boat’s optional Seakeeper 18 so it would be spooled up and ready…

At first, the conversation went way worse than poorly. It was 2012, and Rob and Deanna Piwowarczyk were newlyweds. They’d met in Colorado and were living in the mountains, where Deanna had horses and dogs. She was in her early 40s, working in software; he was five years older and owned a tire shop. Between them, a canoe was the only boat they’d ever owned. “Shortly after we got married, Rob sprung it on me that he wanted to live on a boat someday,” Deanna recalls. “I said, ‘I’m going to have to die or you have to divorce me, because I have no desire to live on a boat.’” But then, in 2015, Deanna had a good year at work and sprang for a vacation. Along with Rob’s two…

MEMORY COVE I was excited to see Aucoot Cove depicted in a painting by John Stobart and described by writer Steven Knauth (Just Yesterday, May). I have been on those shores near Buzzards Bay in Massachusetts many times. Seeing it again in Soundings reminded me why I loved this location so much. Aucoot Cove is where Edey & Duff launched the first Stone Horse sailboat, of which 150 were built. I bought Hull No. 1 in May 1999 from an estate in North Carolina. I was looking to upgrade from my Cape Dory Typhoon. I had heard about the Stone Horse design from a colleague, who gave me a brochure with driving directions to the yard included. One April, on the way home to Malden from Newport, Rhode Island, with…

Imagine you are fishing offshore when your friend slips climbing up to the flybridge. A bone has pierced the skin, and he is bleeding. You grab that $29 “first aid kit” you bought and open it to find gauze and bandages for small cuts and antiseptic ointment. Here is what I know about medical emergencies at sea: If Neosporin can solve your problem, then you aren’t experiencing a medical emergency. If you spend any amount of time more than 30 minutes from shore, you should consider owning a proper offshore medical kit and know how to use it. The difference between offshore and your house is that you can’t always get an ambulance to your boat in under 15 minutes. Distance offshore equals time, so you’ll want to have the…

About 20 years go, Tom Niles was just out of college and spending the day fishing in his 15-foot Boston Whaler off the coast of Massachusetts, out near Boston Light. His motor died, and he couldn’t get it restarted. It was September and a little chilly. The tide was going out, and the sun was starting to set in the distance. He grabbed his handheld VHF radio and called the U.S. Coast Guard for help. A Coast Guard vessel was on its way toward him anyway, bound for Quincy; it stopped, the guardsmen tied his Whaler on, and they towed him to shore. “I said to the guys, as they dropped me off, ‘Someday I’m going to pay you back, when I can,’” Niles says. That day arrived in a…

The wind howled out of the east at 25 knots as we plowed through the incoming tide rushing through North Carolina’s Barden Inlet. In the process, our crew learned what a pair of jeans must feel like when going through the wash cycle. Weather be damned, we had serious plans—there were fish to catch. For many people, this is a day to stay home and wait for better weather. But for those with the right craft, such as the North Carolina-built Jones Brothers Marine 23 we used to get out of that angry inlet, it’s all in a day’s work. It’s the tumultuous inlets, unpredictable weather and long runs to the Gulf Stream fishing grounds that led to the creation of the iconic and influential sportfishing boats built in North…

Old boats can suffer when they’re kept on the hard for a number of years. The 40-foot cabin cruiser that David Arch was looking at in 2001 had suffered the usual indignities: It was dirty, it was grimy and its paint was peeling and chipped. But it was a Huckins, which meant that it was just the boat the 70-year-old from Pocasset, Massachusetts, wanted. “I found her in a yard on Popes Island in Fairhaven-New Bedford,” says Arch, who runs a dock and mooring business. “She’d been stored for several years without annual maintenance. You really needed to look through the peeling paint to see her soul.” Arch became the enthusiastic owner of the 1947 Huckins Sportsman, at a price he recalls being about $27,000. The boat reminded him of…

A couple years ago, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) set out on a path to create the world’s best weather model—a tool that could dramatically increase the knowledge and safety of boaters nationwide through better predictions about storms and more. And now, having taken a few sizable strides down that path, NOAA is ready to grab a partner and run. First, NOAA announced partnerships with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft to exponentially expand access to the mountains of data that NOAA already collects. Next, NOAA tripled its supercomputing capacity, bringing that type of technology on par with what other leading forecast centers are using worldwide. After that, NOAA started sharing National Weather Service computer code with members of the scientific community to see how experts outside…

Sailing La Vagabonde is a You-Tube channel that follows the globetrotting journeys of Riley Whitelum, Elayna Carausu and their son, Lennon, aboard their floating home La Vagabonde, an Outremer 45 catamaran. The couple has been cruising together for more than five years, starting with a Beneteau Cyclades sailboat in the Mediterranean. The vlog details their journey from port to port as they explore, dive, fish and handle the sometimes challenging liveaboard life. The couple attained notoriety in 2019 when they sailed climate activist Greta Thunberg from Norfolk, Virginia, to Lisbon, Portugal, for the 2019 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Madrid, Spain.…

From the high blue sky, cobalt water and puffy white clouds, one might mistake these fishing grounds for South America or somewhere in the Caribbean. Miles of open ocean are punctuated with high-powered sportfishing boats trolling for white marlin. It’s not unusual to see anglers standing in the cockpits of multimillion-dollar yachts, watching the spread of baits off transoms. These boats often travel the world in search of billfish, but they also troll waters here in the Northeast. Why are more big-game anglers heading to this part of the world? In recent years, warm water has moved farther up the coast, carrying with it world-class billfish, including marlin. A fleet of boats owned by die-hard, no-holds-barred anglers follow the fish wherever they go, even into New England. These anglers consider…

During the 1960s, the fiberglass sailboat was at the height of its popularity. Marinas and yacht clubs were filled with cruising sailboats, racing sailboats and combinations of the two. The big names included Pearson and Columbia, Irwin and Cal; even the motorboat maker Chris-Craft built 11 sailboat models. In 1965, a new entry was designer Taylor Newell’s 27-foot Cadet. Today, more than 50 years later, it still stands as a good example of the multipurpose sailboats of its time. Newell, with an office in Rowayton, Connecticut, was well-known for his sailboats. He produced a host of successful designs during his career, including the 40-foot sloop Musketeer and the 38-foot Duchess, built by Norge Boats in Scandinavia. The Newell Cadet, also known as the Offshore 27, was built in Hong Kong…

In the late 1950s, wood was still the way to go for bigger boatbuilders such as Pacemaker, Owens and Trojan. At the same time, smaller companies were experimenting with plywood, aluminum and fiberglass. Chris-Craft, the biggest builder of them all (159 models produced at 11 different plants), decided to join the little guys. It first used fiberglass for the fins on the 18- and 21-foot Cobra runabouts introduced in 1955. In 1957, however, Chris-Craft went for steel. The Pompano Beach, Florida-based builder bought the Roamer Boat Co., which built steel boats in Holland, Michigan. That operation became Chris-Craft’s Roamer Steel Boats Division. The Chris-Craft Roamer boat line had modified-V hulls built of electronic resistance welded steel plates with corrosion-resistant alloy attached to steel frames. The 1959 fleet of a dozen…