Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2020 i Soundings

When two prominent features appear in a line, one behind the other as seen from your boat, it forms a line of position, or a range line. Before electronic position fixing, the use of ranges was the tried-and-true method of staying in the center of a channel and knowing when to make a course change. Even if your boat is equipped with a suite of modern electronics, a range line can come in handy. The use of ranges is especially valuable when you want to increase situational awareness without taking your eyes off the horizon. Monitoring a range line is one of the best ways to assess the set of the current or to distinguish safe from hazardous water. Man-made range markers, lit or unlit, are built in many areas…

News came in mid-September that the British Virgin Islands would reopen for tourism December 1, after a months-long Covid-19 shutdown. Yes, winter is still coming—and it’s likely to be a doozy thanks to the U.S. election, the continuing pandemic and the world economy’s historic swings—but the BVI reopening means the season will at least include a chance to get aboard a boat in one of the world’s most popular charter destinations. “We’re back. We’re open,” said Raul Bermudez, vice president of MarineMax Vacations. “What’s a better place to be than the salt water? It cures everything.” MarineMax Vacations, which has 45 boats in its BVI fleet—and a new five-stateroom 545 arriving in February—is among numerous companies that offer bareboat and skippered BVI charters, and that is now gearing up to…

When Bert ter Hart raised Rarotonga after four months alone at sea since leaving the Falkland Islands, he was, of course, elated. After worrying about running out of food he was going to receive emergency provisions. He had finally put behind him the gales of the Roaring Forties, and he discovered his navigation was spot on. But there was something else, too, and it had everything to do with a deeper sense of purpose that compelled the 61-year-old from Gabriola, British Columbia, to become the first documented North American sailor to solo circumnavigate via the five great capes nonstop using only celestial navigation, and one of only a handful ever to do it. “I’ve always been fascinated by the early explorers. How do you possibly experience what Bligh might have…

Déjà vu. That’s the feeling I got when my husband, Gary, and I jumped aboard the Formula 380 Super Sport Crossover (SSC) Outboard at Keystone Point Marina in Miami. A year earlier, we had come to the same marina to sea-trial a boat that was nearly identical to this one in every way—from bow to transom, that is. Where that 380 SSC culminated in a huge swim platform that hid twin 520-hp Mercury Racing sterndrives underneath, this one carried its brawny propulsion package above the waterline: triple supercharged 450-hp Mercury Racing 450R outboard engines. As we pulled away from the dock, Vic Spellberg, a longtime Formula captain who had served as the guide for our 380 SSC Sterndrive adventure, was back at the helm. (Déjà vu again.) That day, under…

EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED I enjoyed reading “Homeward Bound” by Kim Kavin (September), about the Salty Dawg Sailing Association’s efforts to help almost 200 boat owners get back home after the Caribbean shut down in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. The story is very good. I particularly liked the way Kavin chose to tell the story through the eyes of the participants who lived through the experience. That approach made the feature all the more interesting and engaging. The Salty Dawg Association appreciates the exposure that Soundings has provided for the organization. We also appreciate the fact that your story highlights the way cruising can be heavily affected by things happening in the wider world. For that reason, cruisers need to be prepared, at least mentally, to take on…

It was easy to spot the Grand Banks 54 in a crowded marina in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. The latest addition to the builder’s Family Series was one of the few new boats on the dock, yet it had telltale marks of a classic Grand Banks, including flawless teak in the cockpit and salty planking lines on the hull. This was Hull No. 1, a prototype that had left Florida the week before en route to Rhode Island. As the boat headed north, it made stops along the way so interested buyers could get a close look at what the company calls an ideal motoryacht for an owner/operator. “It’s an evolution of our line. It maintains the same level of craftsmanship we’re known for, but it’s modern in performance,” said Ed…

Imagine a place where you can haul in a recordsize snook in the morning, drop baits for a number of reef species after lunch and then raise a trophy sailfish in the late afternoon, all within a 15-mile boat ride. You might think this sounds like a piscatorial fantasyland cooked up inside some angler’s scale-riddled brain, but this place is real. Welcome to Florida, fishing lovers. This 500-mile-long uber-peninsula has sprouted many storied fishboat builders over the decades, including Bertram Yachts, Merritt’s Boat & Engine Works and John Rybovich & Sons. These days, boatbuilders abound from coast to coast and it’s difficult to find one that doesn’t offer at least one fishing machine. Among the companies that make reputable boats today are the manufacturers featured here, each building on Florida’s…

Bruce Dowd and his wife, Sherry, own a small flotilla of powerboats, and each of them plays a unique role in the Connecticut family’s boating lifestyle. There’s the big, 45-foot cabin cruiser, a 1973 Chris-Craft Tournament Sportfish that the Dowds and their children, Brian and Rachel, enjoy during the summers. There’s a 10-foot classic that Dowd has owned since he was a youthful water rat spending his summers at Grove Beach in Westbrook. “It was a Glasspar Superlite 100, and I had my 3-hp outboard,” says Dowd, 65, co-owner of the family business, Welder Repair & Rental Service. “Later, I got a 9.5 Evinrude and that boat flew. It went about 22 knots. I still have it, and both my son and daughter grew up using it in Clinton where…

From her homeport on Sanibel Island off Florida’s West Coast, Mary Paige Abbott has been seeing what all experienced boaters have observed this year: countless newcomers on the waterways looking for a socially distanced way to have fun, and many of them with no clue what they’re doing at the helm. “For years, there have been people who should not be out on the water operating their own boats,” she says. “Now, we’re just getting hit with a huge quantity of those people. A lot of them, sadly, are people who have never boated before or who have been exposed to boating, but they’ve erroneously assumed that the sport is easy.” As chief commander of the United States Power Squadrons—America’s Boating Club, Abbott is in a position to do something…

WHAT WE’RE WATCHING SUPER SOLO Sir Robin Knox-Johnston in 1969 became the first person to sail around the world nonstop and singlehanded aboard Suhaili, a 32-foot, teak-planked Bermudan ketch built in Bombay, India. One of nine entrants in the 1968-1969 Golden Globe race, the 29-year-old would be the only one to cross the finish line, taking 313 days to complete the circumnavigation. Since then, the solo skipper has completed many circumnavigations, including sailing in the 1977 Whitbread Round the World Race and winning the Jules Verne Trophy with Kiwi sailor Peter Blake. The story of his life is an interesting tale with twists and turns at every salty segue. The skipper’s story was recently put to film for the documentary Sir Robin-Knox-Johnston: Sailing Legend, a 56-minute documentary that can be…

Not all marine artists are fortunate enough to spend time on the vessels they depict in their works. Shane Couch’s lifelong fascination with the great sailing yachts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, however, has put him on the decks of some of the many classic schooners of the International Schooner Association (ISA), whose member vessels include Puritan and Mariette, both pictured here. The British artist’s paintings show the thoroughbreds of the day, from big racing schooners such as Puritan to J Class yachts past and present. These are the vessels that inspired Couch’s artistic journey. Couch, who taught himself to paint while working in the aircraft industry as an engineer, had his first success as an artist in 1995 when he was commissioned for a series of…

Ask just about any Maine boatbuilder where they get their wood and they’ll tell you about Richard Simon and his business, America’s Wood Company. “It’s a great place,” says Sam Temple, owner of Rockport Marine in Rockport. “Rich accommodates nearly all of our needs from planking stock to interior joinery.” Simon’s millworks sits inland in a small town called Washington, a 25-minute drive from the coast, on a wooded lot off state Route 17. If you blink, you’ll pass it, but inside 15,000 square feet of sheds, over a hundred thousand board feet of lumber are stored. Some boards are more than 20 feet in length, over 3 feet in width and over 6 inches thick. Organized by species, they rise to the rafters. It’s a boatbuilder’s and woodworker’s dream.…

The Bertram 31 Tracy Ann is rigged out for a day of fishing off Cabo San Lucas in this image from the Soundings files. Authors David Patten and Jeffrey Rodengen called this compact convertible “the workhorse of the sportfishing industry” in their book, The Legend of Bertram. By the late 1960s, this revolutionary boat could be found offshore or running inlets near fishing grounds around the world. The boat’s low profile, spacious cockpit and “all-business” look became as familiar in the Mediterranean as it was in Florida and along the Baja coast. Why was this boat the cutting-edge fishing craft of its day? In many ways, it was the right boat at the right time, a modern option during the Space Age 1960s, when approximately 37 million boating Americans turned…