Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2025 i Soundings

I’ll admit it: I haven’t spent much time trailering boats. Most of my cruising starts from our slip in Connecticut, where tide charts matter more than traffic reports. But over the years, thanks to conversations with boaters on docks and in chandleries, I’ve developed great respect for those who travel by land and sea to throttle up in new places. And I’ve learned that trailering takes planning, patience and precision. The payoff? The freedom to explore just about anywhere. Some of the best boating conversations I’ve had start with: “You know where you really need to go?” Then someone pulls out their phone and shows me a ramp tucked into a state park or a shot of a sunset over a still stretch of water. Some of the places that…

Tiara Yachts, with the announcement of its new dayboat, is looking forward while paying homage to the past. The 39 LS is the sixth model in the Michigan yard’s Luxury Sport (LS) series of outboard-powered yachts from 34 to 56 feet length overall. It brings together some of the best features in the lineup, giving owners options to help maximize whatever kind of fun they like to have on the water. Gabe Rose, design manager at Tiara Yachts, says the impetus for building the 39 was the builder’s first-ever outboard-powered boat, the 38 LS. “That boat really started us on this,” Rose says. “Coming at that segment of the market with a new 39 just makes a lot of sense because it allows us to now refresh our oldest product…

Full disclosure: I love custom Carolina boats. So when I was invited to attend the introduction of the 45-foot Albemarle Carolinian, I was expecting a lot. I was not disappointed. The boat is breathtaking. Watching it slowly emerge from the showroom door into the midday sun at the new South Jersey Yacht Sales facility in Somers Point, New Jersey left quite a few of us oohing and aahing. Founded 48 years ago, Albemarle Boats is best known for its pocketexpress sportfishing boats, most of them inboard-powered. The company endured an on-again, off-again relationship between Scotty Harrell and Mack Privott, who worked together on early designs. Privott left to start Carolina Classic, a direct competitor, but the two companies in more recent years are one with new ownership, branded as Albemarle–The…

Peter Bailey sits across the salon table, deep in the bowels of Moccasin, a 1977 Cape George pilothouse cutter built for cruising and trolling salmon. The 78-year-old, while prepping the boat for a summer cruise, recites his three essential rules for sailing. “One: Don’t be stupid,” he says. “Be well prepared, well equipped, well trained and educated Two: Shit happens, especially if you violate rule number one. And three: Bring beer.” Bailey was born in San Francisco and grew up in Laguna Beach, California. He didn’t come from wealth, but instead learned the ways of the sea during his days in the U.S. Coast Guard. He had remote postings in the Pacific during the Vietnam War, and later was one of the “body snatchers” who recovered suicide jumpers under the…

Boaters visiting the Bahamas are now paying significantly higher cruising fees. Bahamian government officials unexpectedly rolled out the country’s second major fee increase in two years, and it took effect on July 1. The fees put the Bahamas at or near the top of the list of most expensive Caribbean countries to visit by boat. Spread over 5,300 square miles with the closest point, Bimini, just 49 nautical miles from Florida, the archipelago of 700 picturesque islands has historically offered an accessible base for fishing and a winter cruising ground for sailors and powerboaters. Social media is expressing angst and betrayal because of the changes. Some boaters are vowing not to return while others say the Bahamas are worth the expense. “Dismayed” describes Chuck and Heidi Pittman, Colorado residents who…

Capt. Terry Sullivan has a lifetime of experience trailering boats. Since the 1980s, he has owned a Mako BayShark, a Contender 25T and his latest ride, a Pathfinder 2200 TRS. He has never had a slip, instead opting to keep his boats on trailers in his yard. Sullivan has trailered boats from Florida to New England and has more than 2,500 launches under his belt. During his years as a light tackle guide, he fished with clients about 150 days a year. Even now, after retiring from the charter business, he still fishes more than 100 days a year for personal enjoyment. Every day on the water requires a boat launch and retrieval, and at least some preventive maintenance. At the ramp, this wizard of launching and retrieval uses a…

When Kim Holman joined forces with Don Pye in 1964 to create the design firm Holman and Pye, they could hardly have known that their talents would give birth to some of the most beautiful yachts ever built, including the Oyster 61. Both had backgrounds in traditional wooden vessels. Holman penned good-looking, seaworthy sailboats, while Pye led the company in the transition to fiberglass construction. Their design for the Oyster 61 was first built in 1995 under the watchful eye of Richard Matthews, founder of Oyster Marine. It was the sixth Holman and Pye design built by the yard; the collaboration began in 1978. During the 5 years the design was in production, 14 yachts were built and equipped to be handled by owneroperators with family as crew or with…

When Jim Siders, a longtime sailor taking delivery of his first powerboat, spec’d out his Kadey-Krogen 44, he knew he wanted active stabilization. He wouldn’t have sails to dampen the roll like he did on his Amazon 44 cutter, and he didn’t want to take any chances. But rather than going with conventional fins, Siders ordered MagnusMaster stabilizers built by DMS Holland. A demo ride convinced him that the sales pitch was true: Their cylindrical rotors create lift thanks to the Magnus effect, allowing better performance at low speed and more versatility in posi tioning the stabilizers, but without the complication of hydraulics. The MagnusMaster was the best option for him, but with so many other options out there these days, there’s pretty much a system for every boat. Naiad,…

The Erie Canal is a manmade superhighway of sorts: a long, narrow waterway that winds through towns, marinas and lakes, and that put New York State on the map as “The Granary of the World.” Before the canal, mules were the best mode of bulk-goods transportation that early European settlers could muster. The pack animals would carry about 250 pounds apiece through challenging terrain, and then draw a barge along a towpath in a 60,000-pound-per-mule ratio. The first talk of a far more efficient canal was around the turn of the 18th century, and plans were set in motion in the early 19th century. Even then, people balked at the idea. With a 571-foot elevation change along a winding route, building a canal seemed downright impossible. President Jefferson wrote off…

The J Class yachts were thoroughbreds on the water. They emerged from Nathanael Herreshoff’s Universal Rule, introduced in 1903 to create parity among racing yachts by calculating a time correction factor based on length, sail area and deadweight. From 1914 to 1937, the rule governed America’s Cup eligibility, and the J Class yachts became the de facto America’s Cup class from 1930 to 1937. In this 1934 photograph, five of the J Class yachts race downwind in formation (from left to right): Velsheda, Candida, Shamrock V, Astra and Britannia. Velsheda, designed by Charles E. Nicholson and built in 1933 by Camper & Nicholsons for Woolworth’s Chairman William Lawrence Stephenson, was the only J Class not built for an America’s Cup. Even so, she was a dominant racer for three seasons,…

Foldable RIBs are not a new concept. The trick is finding one that combines durability and performance. That’s what the new Fore Runner line of foldable RIBs built on fiberglass hulls offers, according to Four Seas, a Santa Ana, Califorinia-based distributor of small watercraft, electric propulsion and marine accessories. The Fore Runner is a reboot of the original F-RIB, which Four Seas President J. Nabs Carlson discovered while searching for a tender for the 1964 Hatteras he was restoring. After a call with the overseas manufacturer, Carlson became a U.S. distributor. “I really wanted to deliver a product that filled this great void,” Carlson says. “It gave people the ease of having a RIB and the ability to put it away like a rollup boat.” He sold the boats for…

It’s been a busy year for machinelearning researchers making strides in the world of weather forecasting. Back in December, Google unveiled GenCast, an AI model used to predict day-to-day weather as well as extreme events. Google’s announcement said GenCast’s forecasts were better than what’s commonly known as “the European model,” which has been heralded ever since it accurately predicted the unusual path of Superstorm Sandy. Then in May, Microsoft announced Aurora, an AI system the company said can also predict hurricanes faster and better than traditional forecasting tools. And in July, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts—the place that creates “the European model” forecasts—announced that its Artificial Intelligence Forecasting System had gone into operation. That system is now running side by side with the traditional, physics-based Integrated Forecasting…

Jim and Lisa Favors are pretty sure they coined the term boaterhoming. As Jim tells the story, it all started after they picked up Kismet, their Ranger Tug 27, in Anacortes, Washington. They hung out with their fellow Ranger owners at a rendezvous in Roche Harbor, the way so many other boaters might do in the stunning San Juan Islands. But after that, the Favors did something most boaters never do. They made a beeline for, ahem, dry land. “We trailered to a casino where they had motorhomes parked out back,” Jim says. “We pulled in with our boat, trailer and truck, and we backed in to camp out for the night. We were walking around talking to other people, and one guy said, ‘What are you boater homies doing?’…

It takes an optimistic nature to rebuild a boat and then embark on a 2,900-mile test run from Hobe Sound, Florida, to New York’s Long Island Sound and back. Signing on for such challenges signals deeper currents at work. On its face, it was the test run of a boat, but of course, it was more. I had replaced or refurbished nearly every operating system on my 2009 Grand Banks 47 Classic GiGi, yet she had only run long enough to qualify for the warranties on her new Cummins 8.3 QSC engines. Less than a week later, at the end of June, the forecast was for two consecutive days under 10 knots. Without hesitation, my wife, Giselle, and I headed out Florida’s St. Lucie Inlet to run the outside in…

It’s September in Avalon, New Jersey, and most boaters and beachgoers have departed the shore town for the season. A motorboat carrying a fishing crew jets across the otherwise empty sea, its form and motion in sharp contrast to the calm water and cloudless sky. That fleeting moment inspired Nicole Hammer to snap a photo during a quiet day at the beach and, later, to recreate the scene on canvas in this oil painting titled Boat Day. “This was the only boat I saw go by the entire day,” Hammer says. “I liked how busy the boat looked in contrast to my experience in that moment. I loved the motion of it whizzing by, the colors, the sunlight sparkling on the surface. For me, this painting was about freezing a…