Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2025 i Soundings

We’ve been having a lot of fun with our Instagram page. Carly Sisson has been carefully selecting a fleet of standout boats that qualify as classics, and her selections are going over well with Soundings readers. Which boats are topping your list of favorites? Here are a few. I hope you are enjoying these snapshots of great builds as much as we are. 1. HOLLAND 34 Last Call is the first Holland 34 ever built. She is an extended version of Glen Holland’s popular 32-foot lobster hull, which gained fame in the 1980s and 1990s when Holland’s father’s boat, Red Baron, dominated Maine’s lobster boat races. Holland built more than 180 of the 32s, which were often finished by other Maine yards. Last Call has been dubbed a gentleman’s lobster boat,…

At 71, most of my friends are savoring their golden years with grandchildren, hobbies, travel or pickleball. Not me. Instead of settling into a quiet life, I want to return to the rough-and-tumble world of the offshore life. I first embarked on a marine career more than half a century ago while working in New York Harbor as a tugboat cook, where I was one of the first women employed. Now, decades later, when faced with the possibility of retiring, I ask myself why I should leave my working life behind when I can still take on the waves and new adventures? To prep for my re-entry to the commercial marine job market I secured a freshly minted Merchant Mariner’s Credential and a Transportation Worker Identification Card (TWIC) issued by…

Boat buyers of the early 1980s will remember the energy crisis of the late 1970s. Boat builders were looking for ways to offer models with better fuel efficiency. Some did it with trawlers that had slower-speed, displacement-style hulls that sipped fuel. Others did it with semi-planing hulls that offered better speed and range while retaining optimal seaworthiness. These were often called “fast” or “performance” trawlers. Albin Marine of Greenwich, Connecticut, offered both types and turned to C. Raymond Hunt Associates for the latter option. Winn Willard, president of Ray Hunt Design, remembers the company designing a series of boats for Albin Marine in the 1980s that included a 48, 42, 36 and 31. “While it was first introduced around 1983 as the 48 Palm Beach,” Willard recalls, “the 48-foot design…

In the dark recesses of the lazarette, Bertram Levy is switching between a sharp plane and a scraper to level a piece of Locust on Steve-dore, a stout 20-foot mini-trawler he’s building in his shop behind the Uptown Cinema in Port Townsend, Washington. To make the job easier, he dabs linseed oil onto the surface and waxes the threads of bronze screws before driving them in with a ratchet. “Locust is very hard,” he explains. “It’s terrific wood, because it won’t rot, but when you put in screws, they heat up and can shear off.” Diligence and discipline characterize this energetic 84-year-old with a polymath’s mind who stands not quite 5 feet 2 inches tall. He is fit and can still tackle a long and strenuous project. Levy, always conscious…

When commercial oystering was at its peak in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, an estimated 2,000 skipjacks plied the Chesapeake Bay. The successor to the larger schooner-style bugeye, these wooden sailing vessels were specifically designed for dredging oysters from the Bay’s shallower waters. Today, only about 40 skipjacks remain, fewer than half of which still dredge. These boats comprise the last commercial sailing-powered fishing fleet in North America. In this painting, titled The Kathryn off Thomas Point Lighthouse, maritime artist John Barber depicts one of the few historic skipjacks still in service today. Built in 1901 in Crisfield, Maryland, by James E. “Jimmy” Daugherty, Kathryn is one of the fastest skipjacks on the Bay. She is distinctive for being one of the few skipjacks planked fore and aft…

In 1894, when William Francis Gibbs was 8 years old, his father brought him to see the launch of the SS St. Louis in Philadelphia. William stood with his younger brother, not far from President Grover Cleveland, awestruck by the sight of the 550-foot-long vessel. William became obsessed with great ships, not in the way that little boys grow out of, but with a passion that would change his life, along with the U.S. military itself. “He didn’t graduate from Harvard because he just wanted to sit in his dorm room drawing ships,” says William’s granddaughter, Susan Gibbs. “He was honored with an honorary degree later, so it all worked out.” Like many professional naval architects, amateur yacht designers and bar-napkin doodlers, William became obsessed with the idea of…

I often make the promise to not suck all the fun out of time on the water. So, forgive me as it will seem as if I’m trying to do just that with this column. The truth is, nothing sucks the fun out of boating like the Coast Guard calling off a search for a lost boater, yet that happens every day. If we want to be safe on the water, we need to be clear about one thing: The water can be a very dangerous thing. To manage a risk, we have to understand it. When it comes to the water outside the boat, we have to recognize that it presents hazards—three, to be specific. The combination of those hazards can create one of the most hostile environments on…

My first visit to this sometimes overlooked part of the New England coast was as a young writer for a regional fishing magazine. I was invited to tag along on a day trip with a local striper fisherman who owned a house on Calef Avenue, barely a mile away from the Point Judith lighthouse. Perched on the bluffs overlooking Narragansett Bay, the view from his living room window was spectacular. We took a short drive down a back road to the port of Galilee, where his SeaCraft center console waited in a slip. That day, we caught live mackerel for bait at the mouth of the breachway, and ran around the tip of the point and up the beach, watching as waves broke on rocks as big as houses. When…

In the early spring of 1893, a seemingly unassuming young man, a clerk who then worked in the British House of Commons, made a fateful decision—he would learn to sail. His name was Erskine Childers. He had a slight build, poor eyesight, a weak chin, and was partly disabled, walking always with a limp to favor his left foot, the result of a hiking injury years earlier. Though he would ultimately lead an eventful and varied life, it was two sailing adventures in particular that made him famous and notorious. Starting out as a sailor, Erskine literally had no idea what he was doing. Though they had no interest in competitive sailing, he and his equally clueless brother, Henry, purchased as their first boat a large racing yacht, Shulah, with…

The new Dometic DG3 gyrostabilizer leverages new technologies and smart engineering to improve many aspects of marine stabilizer performance and it could have the potential to reset our expectations for a stabilizer system. According to Dometic, the DG3 offers faster spin-up and spin-down times, reduced power consumption and less maintenance than its leading competitors. Its predictive technology is reported to deliver refined performance that is almost undetectable to the captain and crew. The Dometic DG3 utilizes gyroscopic stabilization to enhance passenger comfort and security by minimizing the rolling motion of a vessel, especially at rest or low speeds. How does it work? A heavy flywheel spinning at high rpm within a gimbal is actuated to generate stabilizing forces through precession. Gyro stabilization, popularized by the Seakeeper brand introduced in the…

We may never know for sure what really happened in the meeting that led to the largest outboard-powered boat in the world, code-named Project Everest. The way Scout Boats President Steve Potts recalls that day almost three years ago, he was pitching the troops from his R&D and design departments on the idea to build something that didn’t exist: a boat with outboard engines in the 60-foot range. Potts says his chief designer, Jeff Summers, heard him out, then leaned back in his chair and said, “That’s like climbing Mount Everest.” Summers remembers things a bit differently. There’s an inside joke at Scout, he says, that every time they start a new model, they give it a length—but it never sticks. “Maybe we start with a 20-footer. Then it’s a…

When I cross over the causeway onto Mount Desert Island at 7 a.m., the water on both sides of the road is piled up with snow-covered ice floes. My car thermometer says it’s 3 degrees Fahrenheit outside. I brace myself for a very cold boat ride, but when I get to the dock in Northeast Harbor the temperature is already up to 8 degrees and there is little wind. The walk across the marina’s icy parking lot to the M/V Sunbeam is treacherous, but the dock and the boat’s aft deck have been cleared of ice. Douglas Cornman, Maine Seacoast Mission’s director of island services, pops out of the salon to welcome me aboard for the 8-mile ride to Frenchboro, one of the smallest Maine islands that still has a…

For a guy who takes such captivating photos of boats and coastal maritime settings—especially during ferocious storms—Benjamin Williamson has a surprisingly limited amount of experience being out on the water when the waves kick up and there’s a nasty blow. He grew up in Mississippi, where he spent a fair bit of his childhood paddling around a lake in a canoe. When he was 16, his family moved to Maine, where he would go out on his father’s 23-foot catboat about 10 or 20 times a year. The family would mostly sail in and around Brunswick, but never when there was any significant breeze. “My mom was always terrified any time we’d heel over in the wind, so we didn’t get to enjoy it that much,” he says. “But I’ve…

In this scene from 1937, a trap fisherman delivers the day’s catch to a cold storage plant in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Trap fishing is an ancient practice utilized by Indigenous peoples for more than 5,000 years, with early fish traps constructed from tree branches and stone. More contemporary iterations arrived to Cape Cod in the early 1800s and soon transformed the area’s commercial fishing industry. The technique involved setting large, circular traps (weirs) in shallow inshore waters to catch school fish, which instinctually run for deeper water when they encounter an obstacle. These traps were constructed from wooden poles and mesh netting. The poles, up to 75 feet long, were driven six to 10 feet into the ocean ground, allowing them to be fixed in up to 45 feet of water.…