Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2019 i Yachting

I SOMETIMES HEAR people chat about how the marine industry is slow to adapt and change with the times. Maybe that was true once, but in my lifetime—including 20 years in this business—I’ve seen some eye-popping advances. ¶ When I was a kid, our boat’s fish finder was a paper chart displaying lightly penciled lines that were supposed to be fish. I couldn’t tell one line from the other, but it worked. Today’s sonars let us look below and around the boat 360 degrees and scan the seafloor off to the sides. We can drop right on structure with pinpoint accuracy. We can differentiate fish by color and drop baits to the depth we desire, watching the line go down the whole time. That’s time-travel-like progress. ¶ We used to…

THE FURUNO BROTHERS Transforming the fishing experience Could one argue that the invention of the modern fish finder was anything less than revolutionary in the recreational-boating world? Certainly not. And while many people believe the fish finder to be an American invention—U.S.companies certainly made them widely available to recreational anglers—the invention of the first fish finder can be traced to a pair of brothers in Nagasaki, Japan, shortly after World War II. ¶ As early as 1942, Kiyotaka Furuno knew fishermen in Kuchinotsu Harbor looked for bubbles on the water’s surface to locate fish. In fact, anglers claimed they could estimate the size of the catch by the volume of bubbles. Kiyotaka and his brother, Kiyokata Furuno, thought of building a machine that would find fish by first locating those…

THE RMS TITANIC sailed into infamy when the ship fatally collided with an iceberg on April 14, 1912, taking the lives of more than 1,500 passengers and crew. Generations of naval architects and engineers studied and learned from this tragedy, as did the U.S. Congress, which passed legislation requiring U.S.-flagged ships to carry radiotelegraph equipment for sending and receiving Morse code distress signals. This requirement set the foundation for what became the International Maritime Organization’s Global Maritime Distress and Safety System in 1979.¶ And yet, while GMDSS has helped to save countless lives since its inception, the equipment it required was bulky and expensive, pushing it out of practical reach for most yachtsmen. ¶ GMDSS has used satellite- and Earth-based radio signals since the late 1980s to facilitate communications between…

AS THE ABACOS AND GRAND BAHAMA continue to recover from the battering Hurricane Dorian unleashed in early September, harbor masters and marina operators from Nassau south throughout the Exumas want charter clients to know things in those Bahamian regions are absolutely pristine for the winter charter season. ¶ “It’s not hard to believe if you look at the geography of the Bahamas: It stretches for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of miles,” says Harry Lee, the harbor master at Albany Marina on New Providence. “Basically what happened on New Providence were some pretty heavy bands of rain coming through. There was some ground flooding, but nothing unusual. It happens all the time here. Our island is entirely undamaged and open for business.” ¶ Albany can accommodate 71 yachts up to…

We are used to symmetry, from our bodies to reflections on the sea, but the essence of the Sanlorenzo SL102 Asymmetric is that it is a “half-wide-body” design, with a full-width salon to port and a side deck only on the starboard-side of the main deck. The design is so neatly executed that you would have to look hard, ideally with a pair of SL102s side by side, to see the asymmetry. ¶ There is function behind this form, to be sure. The result is a yacht that is considerably larger both in the salon—Sanlorenzo claims an added 110 square feet of space there alone—and in the on-deck master stateroom forward. As you’d expect on a 102-footer, there is a salon entertainment area with facing couches as well as a…

SAFETY MEETING ACR’s Overboard Location Alert System has wrist-worn pendants and a Bluetooth transmitter paired to ACR’s app, which tracks all the system’s crew tags. Should a crew tag (from $85) break its radio-frequency tether, the app marks the location and provides return routing and a VHF radio script. For nighttime rescues, ACR’s OLAS Float-On (from $140) offers similar capabilities. ACR Electronics, acrartex.com INTERFERENCE-FREE LED The U.S. Coast Guard recently warned that some LEDs can cause reception issues with a boat’s VHF radio, Automatic Identification System and other onboard electronics. Lunasea says its Zero EMI (which stands for electromagnetic interference) LEDs solves this issue. Zero EMI lights also have features such as dimmability, a high color-rendering index and thermal control. Lunasea Lighting, lunasealighting. STEADY TALKER Icom’s M37 handheld VHF radio…

I KNEW THINGS HAD soured in the Sunshine State when I read the bit in our local paper. The Grim Reaper of foul forecasts—the Weather Channel’s Jim Cantore—was spotted in town doing a live feed. “Twenty-four hours ago, this was ground zero,” Cantore said. Not good. ¶ I’d already begun preparations for the blow, but I had no idea that Hurricane Dorian would mark such a horrible milestone in hurricane history. I’d run from—and suffered the aftermath of—lesser storms, however, having seen the devastation of a Category 5 storm firsthand had changed me. I will never forget Hurricane Andrew. ¶ Our home rests on a 9-foot mound of marl alongside the St. Lucie River, just 2 miles from the Atlantic Ocean. So when we found ourselves in Andrew’s cone of…

IF YOU’RE NOT A FAN of offshore powerboat racing, then you may not recognize the name Fabio Buzzi, who died at age 76 in a crash off the coast of Venice, Italy, in September while trying to break his own endurance record. But if you’ve heard of Benetti Yachts CEO Franco Fusignani, Fountain Powerboats and Mercury Marine, then you know just some of the companies and people who worked with Buzzi and considered him an influence. ¶ Buzzi started racing in 1960, a little more than a decade before he earned a mechanical-engineering degree from the Polytechnical University of Turin in Italy. By 1978, he was racing offshore—and already winning. During the course of his lifetime and that of his company, FB Design, the name Buzzi became associated with dozens…

Small-craft-warning flags were snapping. A post-hurricane nor’easter was blowing dogs off their chains, and muscular 6-to 8-footers roiled the Gulf Stream. I wasn’t surprised to see breakers across the Boca Raton entrance as we headed off Florida aboard the Lexus LY 650. She shouldered her way through the seas, proving that this offering from automaker Lexus was far more than a boulevard cruiser. ¶ She also has the luxury styling for which Lexus is known. Inside are softly padded door coverings, as well as rich woods and fabrics. The dashboard’s black carbon fiber shows through clear resin, revealing a shared lineage with Lexus GT3 race cars. ¶ Her gold-and-black exterior is sure to stand out, and her profile is by superyacht designer Dan Lenard and the Toyota design team, which…

NICK MALEY ’ SALL - STARS ON SINT MAARTEN • PINEAPPLE PETE (Simpson Bay): It has terrific steaks, lobster and ahi tuna, and a friendly atmosphere. They have live music every day.• 12 METRE REGATTA (Philipsburg): Getting to crew an America’s Cup boat is an extraordinary experience. • PAROTTE VILLE BIRD SANCTUARY (Belvedere): It’s a big aviary where people can feed the parrots by hand. It’s a nice local independent effort that gets overlooked. SINT MAARTEN may not be in a galaxy far, far away, but it’s far enough removed from Hollywood to be a surprising location for a Star Wars museum: Nick Maley’s Yoda Guy Movie Exhibit in Philipsburg. ¶ A British makeup and creature-effects designer, Maley is best known for helping bring Yoda to life for the original…