Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2023 i Yachting Monthly

The sensible thing to do when a gale is coming is to double up the mooring lines, bend on another fender or two, and put the kettle on. Weather forecasts these days mean we’re unlikely to get caught completely unawares, but it’s not uncommon to find the wind is a force or two stronger than promised. If a tidal gate has slammed shut behind you, there may be little choice but to press on until shelter can be reached. When the new eighth edition of the Adlard Coles classic, Heavy Weather Sailing, landed on my desk, with tales of hurricanes and offshore survival, I was intrigued by the idea of how many of these techniques would actually apply to the coastal sailor. Clearly, streaming a series drogue is not something…

Southampton’s Ocean Village has been announced as the start and finish of the Ocean Globe Race 2023, a fully crewed, retro race that celebrates the 50th anniversary of the iconic 1973 Whitbread Round the World Race. Fifteen yachts will depart Ocean Village on 10 September in the four-leg, 30,000-mile race around the world via the three capes: Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, Australia’s Cape Leeuwin, and South America’s notorious Cape Horn. In the spirit of the Whitbread races, the international crews will have no GPS, no hi-tech equipment and will navigate using only a sextant, charts and the stars. The boats date from before 1988 and six of them have previously competed in the Whitbread. One of the most famous boats is Tracy Edwards’s Farr 58 Maiden, which in 1990…

RNLI lifeboat crews saved 389 lives in 2022 while beach lifeguards saved a further 117 people, giving a total of 506 lives saved, more than one life for each day of the year, recent data from the RNLI shows. Lifeboats around the British coastline were launched 9,312 times in 2022, being called out 1,217 times to motorboats and 864 times to sailing yachts or dinghies, a rise of 5% on 2021. The year runs January to December in 2022. The RNLI was founded in 1824 and since then its lifeboat crews and lifeguards have saved over 143,000 lives. The charity is putting out a Mayday fundraising call to the public, asking people to register for the Mayday Mile and gain sponsorship for walking or running a mile every day in…

Qwerky, our lovely little yellow dinghy, is unstable when we transfer to and from the boarding platform, so we have decided to change over to an inflatable. After taking advice from a dinghy repair company we have opted for a Honwave and on inflating it in the garden I find we’re delighted with the decision. I have no doubt that coupled with our 2.5 Tohatsu she will do us proud. Out with the traditional and in with the new. Inflatable technology is an incredible innovation in which we unthinkingly place enormous faith through lifejackets and liferafts. Beyond that it has expanded over my lifetime, from my dad’s faithful old Avon tender through to stand-up paddleboards, fenders and even our family tent. However, it turns out that inflatable technology isn’t as…

‘Mares’ tails and mackerel skies make tall ships carry low sails.’ This old weather proverb is partly true; mares’ tails refers to cirrus clouds and mackerel skies refers to altocumulus or cirrocumulus clouds. This sky often means that a depression is coming. Since these clouds are the first indication of a warm front, there will likely be no rain for the first 12 hours. As depressions bring strong winds it indicates to us sailors to reef our sails in time for the storm. This is quite accurate as there are almost always cirrus clouds and sometimes cirrocumulus or altocumulus clouds before a depression. However, these clouds can sometimes be seen without a frontal system approaching, or before a weak system which will bring little wind and limited rain. If you…

Q I enjoyed the article ‘Vanishing Volts’ by Duncan Kent about how to troubleshoot your onboard electrical system. He recommends the use of a DC clamp meter, and there are many types available, but the details of what they will measure are very sketchy or non-existent. An example would have been useful but I wonder if it would be interesting enough to warrant a group test of some clamp meters, to evaluate their ability to be used effectively on most boats? A Duncan Kent replies: A DC clamp meter is simply a digital multimeter with an opening ring on one end called a ‘clamp’. It works using the Hall (aka: Field) Effect. Put simply, when the clamp is put around the conductor it collects a very small, induced voltage from…

PART 1 OF 2 ■ Avoiding bad weather n Preparing your boat above and below ■ Preparing your boat above and below ■ Reducing sail as  the storm builds MARTIN THOMAS was a commodore of the OCC, and is editor of the latest edition of Heavy Weather Sailing. He races and cruises his own classic yacht From South Ocean pitchpolings to North Atlantic hurricanes, much has been written about the means and methods of surviving heavy weather in open water. The column inches tend to be dedicated to those with nowhere to hide, but with plenty of sea room to play with. As coastal cruising sailors, we have the luxury of avoiding the worst of it, but we still sail for long enough to eventually be caught out. The proximity of…

The thing about Covid is that it upsets the best-laid plans, as it did for the Island Cruising Club, a New Zealandbased outfit that organises flotillas to sail to the Pacific Islands every year. When casting around for alternatives, Viki Moore, the cheerful convener of Island Cruising NZ, lit upon the obvious solution – the Te Wai Pounamu, the South Island of New Zealand, otherwise known as the Waters of Greenstone. Sixteen yachts and their crews took up this idea, including half a dozen catamarans. So in a real sense, she really was herding cats – cruising yachties being a fairly free-spirited lot at the best of times. We were among them, on our Schionning-design 12m cruising catamaran, Skyborne. Also in the fleet were Lisa and Martin Bennett on Champagne,…

Challenging, but at the same time could be broken down into a number of small hops of between 30 to 50 miles, the cruise I was planning wasn’t straightforward. It also had to be accessible so that we could change crews. North and South Brittany, which together have 1,700 miles of coastline, was the perfect destination, offering demanding sailing with many fascinating approaches. Alan, one of my crewmates aboard my X-Yachts Xc-38 described the Brittany coast as graduate-level sailing, but this should not put anyone off from exploring this fantastic cruising ground; think Cornwall on steroids. Crossing the Channel from the Solent area to the Channel Islands can be a long day-sail but from there St Malo and northern Brittany are nearby. Similarly, yachts based in the south-west can reach…

Having pressurised hot water on your boat will make all the difference to comfortable living when on board. A hot shower at the start of the day can invigorate the crew for the day ahead, and washing dishes and clothes without boiling a kettle is so much easier. To enjoy the luxury of hot water on your boat you will need both a pressurised freshwater system and a calorifier. Most modern production yachts come with at least a basic cold water system, incorporating a pump that activates by the drop in pressure when a tap is turned on. If yours doesn’t, then it’s a fairly simple and inexpensive modification to carry out. The hot water system then utilises the same pump and water supply, but is piped through a calorifier…

Water companies to invest £1.6bn to clean up rivers and coastlines More than £1.6bn is to be invested by water companies in improving the industry’s infrastructure in England in the next two years, the water industry regulator Ofwat announced recently, in a victory for environment campaigners. It follows a request from the government Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) to English water companies to ramp up their investing between now and 2025 to tackle storm overflow discharges, reduce nutrient pollution from treatment works and address water resilience challenges. Public outrage over the discharge of raw sewage into rivers is now a major political issue with Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer accusing the government of turning Britain’s waterways into an ‘open sewer’. Many members of the public have…

A new report by Ireland’s Marine Casualty Investigation Board (MCIB) has found that the continuous operation of an outboard engine at its maximum design capacity was a key factor in starting a fire aboard a yacht which subsequently sank in Ringabella Bay, south-east of Cork, in December 2021. The MCIB recommends that the Irish Minister for Transport should amend or update the Code of Practice for the Safe Operation of Recreational Craft to advise owners to ‘ensure auxiliary engines fitted to racing yachts adequately provide the necessary power to allow safe inshore or coastal passage, particularly when adverse weather or sea conditions prevail.’ The report recommends that the ‘Minister for Transport should publish a marine notice highlighting the risks associated with refuelling operations or decanting volatile flammable liquids, at sea…

Cleaving tracks between nations, we all love the great sea passages. Even if it’s only Calais. But there’s another lure, the secretive romantic appeal of turning inwards from the coast and going upriver. In this issue London Apprentice takes Ken Endean as far as Barnstaple, way up the Taw, and since we moor on the Dart I started peering at maps to see how – with plenty of portage and dragging of an inflatable – one could keep going beyond the navigable upriver from us, cross Dartmoor, find the River Yeo and join up with Ken and the coast via random creeks. Devonians will know this fantasy was a waste of time, but there is something pleasingly subversive about cutting across country by water. I used to have a dream…

On a night watch it’s easy to fixate on a chartplotter if there’s one on deck. The solution is to put the cover on the screen. This helps to keep the light down and removes a distraction whilst still allowing access to the plotter if we really need it. Don’t sit in one position for two hours and doze off. Instead, stand and walk about every 15 minutes or so, doing a full horizon scan by turning a full 360 degrees. After you’ve stood up three times, the next time you stand up, go and make a logbook entry and make a hot drink, which often marks halfway through a two-hour watch. As part of the night watch ritual, the oncoming person to the watch fills out the logbook with…

The first rule of cruising is that if it’s a great anchorage and the weather is good it’ll be full of boats! So what can you do? Spend hours watching for collisions and shouting at your neighbours, anchor deep, anchor shallow or go away? We often anchor shallow and enjoy being where no one else dares go. You need to think carefully that if you touch bottom whether it will be mud, bumpy sand or rocks. That means you need to research wind directions, tidal heights, charts and pilot guides. Now the fun bit: assuming you have a 1.5 to 2m keel, sail straight through the anchored boats and stop at 3m depth. Check the immediate area around you and drop the anchor in the middle with 15m of chain,…

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Send your sailing gossip, diary dates, cruising news and club or owners’ association updates to Heather Prentice heather.prentice@futurenet.com Beer by barge in Essex Young people from Essex spent their Easter holidays delivering beer in a Thames sailing barge without an engine to waterside inns and pubs in the county. The firkins of beer, from a brewery in Maldon, were loaded onto the barge Blue Mermaid in early April and sailed by the young people to establishments in Harwich, West Mersea, Tollesbury, Bradwell and Burnham on Crouch. The project was sponsored by Essex County Council as part of their Climate Change Challenge to help Essex reach net zero. The voyage highlights the use of wind and tide as a clean and renewable source of energy for local deliveries around our coastline.…

FROM £32.95 REVOLVE DECK BRUSH HI-TECH SPACE SAVER marine-products-direct.com/revolve-tec/ Using British technology originally designed for inspecting nuclear cores in power stations, Revolve is a lightweight roll-up handle that can be fitted with various tools. The latest addition is a deck brush for mounting onto the end of the dedicated pole – a system that already works as a communications mast, boathook and a tripod. The handle is a patented polypropylene-glass composite that rolls lengthways or widthways. Store it in a compact 11cm-diameter roll, just like sticky tape, and when you open it up it will curl the opposite way to form a 1.8m-long tube. There’s a simple one-pin bayonet-style fitting on the end to take the brush head (or hook). In pole format, the shape is stable enough to press hard, but…

The dramatic rescue of Golden Globe Race skipper Ian Herbert-Jones after his yacht was rolled and dismasted in an extreme storm 900 miles ENE of the Falkland Islands has overshadowed the tight race to the finish for the rest of the fleet, currently expected late April. Herbert-Jones suffered a back and shoulder injury and a gash to his head after his Tradewind 35, Puffin was rolled and dismasted in severe weather, with 50-knot winds gusting to 70 knots and confused 7.7m seas. The yacht had taken on water and its rig was trailing against the side of the yacht when Herbert-Jones activated his EPIRB and then his Yellow Brick distress signal manually at 1725 UTC on April 10. Taiwanese fishing vessel Zi Da Wang was 90 miles from Puffin when…

The Home Office is reportedly looking to use the three-storey accommodation barge Bibby Stockholm to house asylum seekers in a bid to reduce reliance on hotels, although this could face a legal challenge, the BBC and other media report. The barge will reportedly be moored in Portland Harbour – this is yet to be confirmed. The three-storey Bibby Stockholm has 222 rooms and can house more than 500 people in en suite rooms as well as offering a TV and games room and a gym, according to its owner Bibby Maritime, which has not confirmed the deal. The government says more than £6m a day is being spent on hotels for migrants. But charities say military bases and boats are ‘wholly inadequate places’ to house people fleeing war and persecution.…

HANSE 510 It doesn’t seem long since Hanse launched its 508, but it has now launched the 510 as the second model of the new style as it sets about updating its range in a design partnership with Berret-Racoupeau. The first boat to have received this update, the 460, won European Yacht of the Year last year. At the heart of the design is creating as much volume as possible for accommodation and relaxation space, and improving sailing characteristics, particularly in light airs. To achieve this, the beam has been carried all the way aft, as well as gaining fuller bow sections, but the waterline has remained narrow thanks to hull chines, with a marked flare in the forward sections a foot or so above the waterline. The 510 is…

Driving Over Lemons, Chris Stewart’s book about Andalucia, is a book I have not read. But I don’t need to. The title itself brilliantly encapsulates the incongruity a foreign land can reveal – in this case a place where citrus fruit is so plentiful that car tyres pulp them as if they were no more than windfallen cherry blossom. Such incongruity came into my mind last summer as I went to explore another foreign land: the past, to paraphrase LP Hartley, and in this case the foreign land of my youth, when, as a teenager, I registered the hulks of abandoned sailing barges, with the sort of zealotry normally reserved for the trainspotter. The first ever graveyard of barge hulls that I explored, with my father, Richard, was that along…

Most yachts have a barometer, but the markings for ‘Fair’ or ‘Change’ and so on can practically be ignored as you can have thunderstorms in very high pressure and sunshine in low pressure. What is important is the rate of change in air pressure, so you need to keep an eye on it. If the pressure is slowly falling, poor weather is likely to persist. If there are short-term pressure changes it indicates unsettled weather, likely having strong wind, rain and even fog. Improvement is likely only when pressure continues to rise slowly and steadily. If the pressure rises quickly it indicates strong wind, despite a blue sky. A long continuing rise of over 1 millibar per hour is a sure sign of a high pressure gale. Keep at least…

If you are going to anchor, you will clearly check tides and forecast, but have you shared your plans with anyone and have you briefed your crew? When did you last check your anchor is properly secured? Has it got chain markers and a written record to show what they mean? Do you have a length of warp attached to the bitter end, so that you can cut it if necessary? Do you have gloves and a knife ready in the anchor locker? And have you got a spare anchor ready?…

In areas where there are lots of islands, such as the Greek islands or the Baltic, ferries have a nasty habit of appearing around headlands at full speed. They know where and when they’re going and seem to assume you know that too: usually you don’t! So keep watching on AIS and make sure their tracking line is displayed on the chartplotter. Although the AIS radio signal shouldn’t transmit through rocky headlands, in my experience there is at least a 90% chance of seeing the dotted line on your AIS in plenty of time to take avoiding action. If you also transmit AIS the ferry should of course be able to see you but I guess the chance of them not seeing it or not taking any action is also…

How would you get out of this tight berth? Q Tide Race is an 11m production GRP yacht with a fin keel and a fixed three-bladed prop. While giving plenty of power, the prop also gives a substantial kick to port when engaged astern. Alex the skipper, who has owned the boat for a year, is gradually mastering this effect and how it influences boat handling in a confined space. Tide Race is currently moored alongside a pontoon in a small recess in a marina which is normally reserved for yachts being craned out or masts being unstepped. There is no boatyard activity for a couple of days so Tide Race has stayed there for the night, starboard side-to. It was a snug spot when they arrived with the wind blowing…

This sounds like one of those puzzles that do the rounds on social media: Kenichi Horie held the record for being both the youngest and the oldest person to sail across the Pacific single-handed and non-stop. How is that possible? And, no, the answer isn’t that he’s the only person to have done it. The correct answer is that he first sailed across the Pacific (solo and non-stop) in 1962 at the age of 23, becoming the first (and therefore the youngest) person to do so. He then did it again in 2022 at the age of 83, becoming the oldest person to do so. To hold both records is an extraordinary achievement – and probably a record in itself. But that’s not all. In between those two landmark voyages,…

www.yachtingmonthly.com/books Guy, Juliet and their two children were on passage from the Virgin Islands to North Carolina when they were caught in a violent storm. Lightning crackled across an immense bank of cloud hanging above us and thunder ripped its way down so loudly that we ducked. ‘Turn her into the wind!’ I shouted as I crawled my way up the deck. Immediately we turned into the waves, we felt their full size, and I clung to the Samson post as Forever lurched and pulled with a great weight of water on her bow flowing thickly around my legs. I worked as fast as I could lower the sail as the boat climbed each wave. At last the sail was in and I crawled my way back to the cockpit…