Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2017 i Yachting Monthly

Most letters are edited for brevity. You can read more correspondence, online, at www.yachtingmonthly.com/letters WIN A bottle of RUM The letter of the month wins a bottle of Pusser’s Rum, produced to Admiralty specification and served daily to every sailor in the Royal Navy for more than 300 years (UK residents only) www.pussers.com LETTER OF THE MONTH Will it be bullets or biscuits? Murder or milk? In July 1986, my crewmate Sue and I were alone in a bleak anchorage in South Yemen, en route from the Red Sea to the Maldives in a Sadler 34. The Gulf of Aden was a renowned haunt of pirates and we had been warned not to stop, but we were exhausted. A bang on the hull at dusk and the rocking of the…

Stepping off the plane at Santiago de Compostela’s shiny new airport, I wasn’t sure what to expect when I arrived to spend a week sailing the Rías Baixas. Their proximity to the fearsome Bay of Biscay and the rather inhospitably-named Costa da Morte may have coloured my view that this might be a difficult place to sail: a ragged, merciless lee shore thrashed by the unfettered might of the raging Atlantic. Swooping coastwards on the 45-minute car journey to the Real Club Náutico Portosín, the yacht club on the Ría de Muros e Noia where my ride awaited, my view began to change. Round each sweeping curve on the pristine motorway, another pleasingly verdant view presented itself. Speckling these rolling hills were vineyards, farmsteads, churches and little villages, with rivers…

WIN CHILGROVE GIN The question of the month wins a bottle of Chilgrove Gin (UK residents only). This super-premium gin, handcrafted by keen sailors in the Sussex Downs, blends the finest botanicals with a neutral grape spirit. www.chilgrovespirits.com QUESTION OF THE MONTH How deep is it really? QLike Tom Cunliffe, (Skipper’s Tips, November 2016), I have the echosounder on my own boat set to the actual water level so that ‘what it reads is what I’ve got’. However, all the sailing school boats I’ve been on, which are also used for charter, have their sounders set to depth below the keel. I know that it is more accurate to have your echosounder set to the waterline, but would it be safer to have it set to the keel, just in…

If I could take my Jack Russell terrier, Pippin, and find a way to keep up my work recording voiceovers, I should be able to sail to Scilly. That was the plan but for many years, for one reason or another, it hadn’t happened. Last summer I was determined to make it, finally, to this intriguing archipelago off the toe of Cornwall. My job involves recording music and voiceovers for TV and radio ads, so I took a portable recording rig and set up a little recording studio and voice booth in the forecabin. This way, in a quiet, calm anchorage I could record any urgent voiceovers or jingles, send them off using a half-decent 3G mobile signal, and avoid losing any really important work or feeling that we had…

The Fournoi archipelago sits just under Samos and Ikaria in the eastern Aegean. It has a reputation as a windy old place when the meltemi is blowing and so it is. Savage bullets of wind gust down the valleys and through the gaps between the islands and turn the surrounding sea into a mass of whitecaps. Ikaria is named after Icarus, he who constructed wings and flew too close to the sun, which melted the wax holding his feathers in place and so he fell to the earth. My personal theory is that the breeze in this windy corner of the Aegean just blew his wings apart. What this means is that Fournoi is little visited even in the summer, yet despite the wind whistling down through the islands there…

Skywatch Windoo 3 It’s no secret that having accurate weather data is important for safe sailing, but you don’t need large or expensive dedicated instruments. I found there is now a big choice of accessories for smartphones – you simply plug them into the headphone socket on your phone and download the free app from the Internet, hey-presto a handheld weather centre in the palm of your hand. One such add-on is Skywatch Windoo, available in three versions: Windoo 1, 2 and 3. All are compatable with iOS and Android devices. The Windoo 1 gives wind speed and air temperature, the 2 adds humidity and the 3 adds air pressure as well. All three models come with a handy aluminium container to protect the device when not in use, as…

If you have a news story to share, contact News Editor Theo Stocker EMAIL theo.stocker@timeinc.com TEL 01252 555164 Sailors have been urged to fit carbon monoxide (CO) alarms in their boats, after three fatal incidents in 2016. The owner of a motor cruiser in Cardiff was found dead on his boat in November after engine exhaust fumes entered the cabin. The two men who attempted to revive him also required hospital treatment for CO exposure. The incident comes five months after two boat owners were fatally poisoned by CO on a boat on the Norfolk Broads in June. Seven people have now died in four incidents of CO poisoning in the last three years, and 30 people have died of CO on boats in the 20 years to 2014, according…

When anyone starts a story with ‘There I was…’, the next phrase usually goes along the lines of ‘...and the waves were forty feet high.’ If it’s sensation you’re after, flip the page now. This is softer stuff. My crew and I were bound up the Finnish Gulf towards Leningrad in the grim last days of the Evil Empire. We were tooled up with visas purchased behind a bus shelter in Helsinki from a dodgy looking character hiding behind the turned-up collar of a trench coat. This honest gangster had relieved me of $400US and made off with our passports, which asked much of my faith in humanity. My hopes of seeing him again were dim, but he told me to come back in four days. I did, and there…

James Stevens, author of the Yachtmaster Handbook, was RYA Training Manager and Yachtmaster Chief Examiner for 10 years ‘We regularly hear the Coastguard dealing with calls from sailors who think they are in trouble’ The definition of distress is pretty clear in the radio handbook: a vessel or person must be in grave and imminent danger. Perhaps the yacht is sinking, a crew member has been struck on the head and is bleeding from the ear, or all control has been lost and the vessel is being blown towards rocks? Those are all clear Maydays, but to stand a reasonable chance of rescue, the decision to call for help has to be made some time before you look death in the eye. So is that water leaking into the bilge…

Norman Kean, FRIN, edits the Irish Cruising Club’s Sailing Directions. He and wife Geraldine sail a Warrior 40 In the Letters pages of YM (Apr 16), Tony Barlow made a plea for regulation of pot marking buoys. He suggested that they should be lit, set well away from sailing routes and have their positions registered on a dedicated website. There is little chance of that coming to pass, but Mr Barlow hit the nail on the head when he mentioned floating lines. These are the greatest single cause of entanglement, and restricting their use would eliminate most of the problem at a stroke. Tony Barlow pointed out that in two years the RNLI had rescued 1,197 people with fouled propellers. That represents about £2.5m, plus Coastguard helicopter mission costs –…

My crew, Spencer Neal, 51, and I had set off for a day sail in Vagabond, my Morgan Giles 30, from her mooring at Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex, to look at the Rampion wind farm being constructed eight miles off the coast of Worthing. The wind was southwesterly, blowing 20 knots, and we had a good closehauled sail south into the English Channel. We’d checked the weather, both on my mobile phone app and with the regular local Coastguard updates via the VHF radio on board, and we knew the wind was going to back and freshen. We had already put one reef in the mainsail, but the wind began to strengthen earlier than we’d reckoned so we turned back to Shoreham before reaching the wind farm in order to get…

We begrudge the cost of yacht insurance, but pay anyway. Of course, yachts do get bumped, grounded or worse and insurers are there to help pick up the pieces. As claims are made, they build up a unique insight into how boats get damaged and what could have been done differently. I spoke to Paul Birch, managing director of yacht insurer Bishop Skinner Marine to find out what the top causes of damage are, and how they can be avoided. It’s good advice that we should all follow, and if we’re honest, we could all do better. 1 Storm damage Predictably, the sheer force of weather is the number one cause of damage to boats. What is surprising, however, is that this damage almost never occurs out at sea. It…

In June 1975 I pedalled out of Vienna for the last time. It was a glorious feeling setting off into the blue. I felt sure I was right in challenging fate instead of waiting for something to turn up. I decided I would go to England and look into working with animals in a zoo, so I headed to St Malo where I could catch the ferry and perhaps stop off at Jersey Zoo en route. When I was looking for the ferry office a saucy young Frenchman, sensing I was lost, offered to show me the way. As we walked along the quay a girl popped her head up from a moored yacht, by chance looking straight at us and asked: ‘Anyone for coffee?’ She was clearly addressing the…

WIN The confession of the month wins a floating Standard Horizon handheld VHF radio worth £140 PLUS an original Bill Caldwell cartoon STANDARD HORIZON  POST Confessions, Yachting Monthly, Blue Fin Building, 110 Southwark Street, London SE1 0SU EMAIL yachtingmonthly@timeinc.com Please send us your confessions in less than 200 words I’ve got that sinking feeling CONFESSION OF THE MONTH By Neil Harper Several years ago I kept my Foxhound 24, Pippa III, dryberthed at Queen Anne’s Battery Marina in Plymouth. My son was sailing with the yacht club cadets one evening, so while waiting for him I took the opportunity to do some much-needed maintenance on the boat, which was ashore in a cradle. The boat had a number of rainwater leaks around the coachroof, which led to the constant need to…

If you have a news story to share, contact News Editor Theo Stocker EMAIL theo.stocker@timeinc.com TEL 01252 555164 French yacht-building giant Bénéteau has unveiled the world’s first production yacht with hydrofoils. The technology will be incorporated into the Figaro 3 class. From 2019, these 10m (33ft) boats will replace the Figaro 2 boats used in Le Figaro, the singlehanded race series. Although not a cruiser, this boat brings foiling to the world of small production yachts, previously only seen on boats such as the International Moth and America’s Cup catamarans. Foils on boats that do not ‘fly’ provide lift and increase righting moment, allowing lighter, faster boats. So far, the IMOCA 60 yachts sailed in the Vendée Globe race is the only offshore monohull class to have adopted curved foils.…

Through our sailing life it has often been round about now, in the cold bleak months, that we searched for a new little ship. The Boat Show and its impossible yearnings plant the idea of upgrading or starting out; but buying a new boat is rarely the outcome. We’ve done it once, long ago, and indeed it was a big thrill. Having ordered the hull, we had to wait six months after it arrived to amass enough money to fit it out. ‘It was all about the vision, the dream of how she would feel at sea’ Mostly at the Show, one buys new charts, gizmos, mug-racks and humorous t-shirts, or if flush with money a couple of winches, some lifechanging nav gear and perhaps a new propeller. Actually, that…

Practical advice for all sailors Tom Cunliffe has sailed tens of thousands of miles all over the world and has been a Yachtmaster Examiner since 1978 DEFUSE THE MAINSAIL ON A DEAD RUN It’s been said with justification that gentlemen don’t boast about how windy it was out there, but the shape of my ensign in the photo will give well-informed readers a fair idea. They will also note that I’m on a near-dead run. The sea is building, I’ve paid off the autopilot a while back and, however carefully I steer, I’m vulnerable to a gybe. It just isn’t good enough to battle on regardless in these situations. LEFT: Running downwind in wild weather, the prospect of an accidental gybe is very real. Douse the main in good time…

Lighthouses of the world By Marie-Haude Arzur, published by Adlard Coles Nautical at £18.99 Lighthouses are designed to be visible and they are situated in dramatic locations. Their shape and form pleases the artistic eye in us all. It’s not surprising, then, that this is a lovely book to browse through, admiring the beautiful photography of each of the 150-odd lights and learning a bit about their history and whether or not you can actually visit them for a ‘hands on’ tour. Simple details are provided for each light, such as the date of build, its height, whether it can be visited and a potted history. I would have liked to see details of the light in terms of colour and timing, but all we get is ‘white and red…

With beautiful turquoise waters, exciting sailing conditions, a sun-drenched climate and arguably some of the most beautiful bahias in the world, the lure of Colombia’s Caribbean coast is undeniable. Yet many have turned their boats away, cautious of the danger once associated with the country. Is the Colombian coast finally safe to visit? Rough, ready and perfectly unpolished, Santa Marta is Latin America’s oldest city and known affectionately as La Perla de America, or the American Pearl. Thanks to a new purpose-built IGY (Island Global Yachting) marina, it’s now the perfect stop en route to Panama (300 miles west) but, as I discovered, it also delivers as a destination in its own right. While checking in to my hotel, I was pulled into a tight hug by the elderly owner…

Easy-fit tank inspection hatch With diesel bug around, it is baffling why tank access is either difficult or impossible. The same goes for water tanks. The solution? An inspection hatch. It’s bizarre that until now there wasn’t a simple-to-fit inspection hatch. This Vetus hatch is 190mm wide (7½in) and the inner diameter gives plenty of room to get in. It can be fitted in a GRP, plastic or metal tank. Cut a 159mm (6¼in) hole in the top of the tank, using the template; choose the correct insert for the wall thickness of your tank; drop in the hatch, then nip up the four bolts connecting the inner and outer flanges. Tightening the bolts up squeezes a rubber spacer between them, creating the seal and securing the inspection hatch in…

As someone who has sailed through the ‘need strong muscles’ stage of anchor use and then the evolution of electric windlasses, I have learned a lot and made some observations. This is not about rule-making, just practical things that yacht owners and buyers should consider to remove a potential danger to their crews. Always remember that chain is for pulling, not pushing! You may think it obvious, but some yacht builders seem to have forgotten. In the old days when everything was done by hand, we devised ways to use the weight of the boat to wriggle anchors free and take up the slack before attempting to retrieve them. Yachts had chain pipes, which were an absolute pain, with chain jamming both up and down, due to the small hole.…