Soundings is the news and feature publication for recreational boaters. Award-winning coverage of the people, issues, events -- and the fun -- of recreational boating. Check out our generous boats-for-sale section and our gunkholing destinations.
There’s no doubt that some of the most interesting boating adventures come about through meticulous preparation. Take the run to Alaska that’s featured in this issue. Deputy Editor Pim Van Hemmen writes about his time aboard a 47-foot trawler skippered by Sam Devlin, a boat designer and builder who helped lead a flotilla from Anacortes, Washington, to Southeast Alaska. Pim’s reporting makes it clear that trip planning required a serious level of detail. There was the preparation of the boat itself, logistics around crew recruitment, and navigation particulars to work out in advance, among other things. And once the flotilla was under way, there was the daily work of retrieving weather reports, making repairs and ensuring provisions were sufficient—that included coffee, and it seems there was a hot cup for…
A GREAT LITTLE BOAT I just came across your story on the Rosborough RF-18 (Underway, June) owned by the Gallos family on Cape Cod. I couldn’t resist sharing this photo of my 1985 sistership ByeGone, which hails from Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard. I bought her as the quintessential “project boat” in 2020. She’d been lobstered hard out of Newburyport, Massachusetts, and was as barebones as a boat could be back in those days. After taking ownership, I put a good deal of money into her restoration (more than twice the purchase price). Today, she’s pretty as a picture on her mooring in Eel Pond. She is ideal for moderate-weather trips to Muskeget Island, where her shoal draft allows anchoring right along the shore. While I like to call her “the…
Ginger Henry Kuenzel grew up spending summers on New York’s Lake George, at a time when powerboat racing was nothing less than an absolute craze. “I was born in 1949, so I got to experience it as a kid,” she says. “I have two brothers—one older, one younger. My older brother started racing when he was 12. I always wondered about what my mother was thinking, letting him do this, but he was about the same age that my father was when he started racing.” Kuenzel’s new book, The Buzz on Lake George: Speedboat Racing 1900-1964, documents not only the racing heyday that her family enjoyed, but also the prior years that led up to her father and his friends creating all the commotion. “I’ve gotten in touch with a…
Think about every decades-old war movie where the guys on submarines send out sonar pings. They then listen intently for a single echo to come back, using their ears to locate enemy targets they can’t see with their eyes. Now, think about layering the power of modern machine learning atop that technology, and then using it to protect and rebuild the world’s coral reefs. That’s the essence of what marine researchers are doing right now—and they hope that boaters will help them do a whole lot more of it in the future. Marine researchers are working with citizen scientists all around the planet to combine what we know about underwater life with the capabilities of Google Research and DeepMind. The work is creating an unprecedented understanding of how to protect…
Trailering a boat to a local launch ramp is a lot different from trailering long distances. The farther you travel and the larger the boat is, the more challenges you face. I have learned this through experience. I ordered a Pathfinder 2700 Open toward the tail end of the pandemic. Not only was construction delayed, but delivery to the New Jersey dealer was also a problem. My new baby was sitting on its Amera Trail trailer at the Maverick Boat Group facility in Fort Pierce, Florida, just as fall fishing in the Northeast was heating up. So, I inquired about trailering the boat home myself. Charlie Johnson, the group’s marketing manager, got wind of the situation and called with a proposition. He needed a Pathfinder with Yamaha’s Helm Master EX…
First built in 1975 by Chuck Paine to his own design, the Frances 26 is a small, shoal draft double-ended boat with rounded bilges and a transom-attached rudder. Measuring 26 feet LOA with an 8-foot, 2-inch beam, and drawing 3 feet, 10 inches, the Frances 26 displaced close to 7,000 pounds, roughly half of which was lead ballast. Paine built the first hull as a one-off for his own use, but then his shop burned down with the boat and all his tools inside it. Fortunately, by then, Maine boatbuilder Tom Morris had already taken a mold off Paine’s hull. That mold would be used to produce about 35 of the 200 Frances sailboats that would eventually be built around the world. Paine and his twin brother built a second…
