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Cruising World November/December 2023 (Digital)

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16 Articles

3 min.

Editor’s Log

Leaving the SHALLOWS I describe my home port of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, as the unofficial waterway capital of the world. In fact, many of the boaters with whom I belly up to bars here are fair-weather cruisers like me, quite content hanging around the shallows, where boating tends to be more comfortable, safe and manageable for our children. Great pleasure can be had with that type of boating, which is vastly different from the bold offshore endeavors some of our readers undertake. I’m basically playing in the kiddie pool, which is fine, though sometimes it feels like a waste of a perfectly good ocean. Sure, I’ve also enjoyed every salty drip of several offshore passages. They’ve made for some of my most vivid and fulfilling memories on the water. Still,…

1 min.

UNDERWAY

Shadowed by the majesty of Mount Rainier, the lively sea town of Gig Harbor, Washington, has several marinas, a fishing fleet, and one of the most competitive rowing and paddling fleets in the United States. It also drips with maritime history. Its namesake dates back to 1840, when Capt. Charles Wilkes and crew, looking for safe haven during a heavy storm, entered the perfectly protected harbor’s narrow entrance in a longboat called a “captain’s gig.” Today the location is home to an upscale community with museums, great restaurants, hiking and biking trails, and a variety of stores and options for provisioning, as CW contributor Tor Johnson discovered on a recent winter expedition through the Pacific Northwest. Story on page 36…

12 min.

AN ODE TO Lahaina

I first visited Lahaina from the south. After 13 days on an unleashed reach out of French Polynesia, I clung to the mast top, my legs wrapped in a death grip. We swung west into Alenuihaha Channel, known to Hawaiians as the river of laughing waters. The sun blazed and the trades howled as 20-foot rollers raced up our stern and frothed over the rails. Flying our heaviest chute was risky because the channel boiled with towering whitecaps, but the Beach Boys blared from the deck speakers, and Maui loomed ahead in all its verdant glory. Cobalt-blue waves cascaded on the approaching lava rocks of Kaupo. Hana stood lush to the east, with the Big Island’s Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea silhouetted to the south. I hadn’t been back to…

6 min.

Seamanship

Talking Trade Winds With JIMMY CORNELL When Jimmy Cornell set off with his young family in the 1970s on his first world voyage, there were no reference books for world cruisers. World Cruising Routes—which Cornell first published in 1987—was the type of book he wished he’d had. The only electronic navigation device he carried on board was a battery-operated depth sounder. Offshore cruising was done by celestial navigation, with time signals obtained by shortwave radio. GPS was decades in coming. But pilot charts have been an essential planning tool for sailors since the middle of the 19th century. Cornell’s Ocean Atlas, by Jimmy and Ivan Cornell, was first published in 2011 as a way to provide hundreds of pages of information drawn and updated from traditional pilot charts, and to…

7 min.

Boathandling

A Rocky START I upgraded from Second Wind, a 35-foot Bavaria Cruiser, to Beckon, a 39-foot Jeanneau Sun Odyssey 39i Performance, in anticipation of cruising the Caribbean for a year or more. My home base is Puerto Rico, and Beckon was in Southwest Harbor, almost as far north in Maine for sailing as you can get. My friend and Jeanneau broker, Francis Shiman-Hackett of Bluenose Yachts, enticed me to sail the coast of New England for the summer, then head south in November after the hurricane season. Little did I know that I wouldn’t even get out of Maine before learning some important lessons about being careful and resourceful as a singlehanded cruiser. I departed just after Memorial Day under an unusually bold, sunny sky, with flat seas and scant…

7 min.

Education

Plot a Course for CAPTAIN CREDENTIALS It was early afternoon on Day One of a weeklong course to prepare for the US Coast Guard’s captain’s exam, and besides my head feeling like a balloon about to pop, already several pages of my notebook were filled with hastily scribbled notes, including this gem: 1.169 x square root of light height = geographical range. Who knew I’d have to know that? During the course of the morning, we’ d slogged our way through license requirements, calculating days underway inshore and seaward of the boundary line that wraps like a string around the offshore points along America’s coasts. We’d touched on license endorsements, required publications when carrying passengers, and a list of additional things we’d need to procure before applying for any license. Things…

4 min.

Sailor & Galley

HOME for the HOLIDAYS As active seasonal cruisers seeking winter warmth, usually in the Bahamas, my husband, Radd, and I have spent many winter holidays aboard our Island Packet 40, Sasha, far away from family and friends back home. We do miss the gatherings and traditions, but no matter where we are, we try to embrace new ways of celebrating—joining local celebrations or attending local services—while preserving a few tried-and-true traditions from our land life. Nassau, on New Providence Island in the Bahamas, was the backdrop for one of our most memorable holidays. We arrived a few days before Christmas, got settled, and then set out to explore. That day’s mission was to visit the Bacardi distillery. In all our cruising destinations, when venturing beyond walking distance of our harbor,…

7 min.

On Watch

THE Movable FEAST The Lesser Antilles, on the eastern rim of the Caribbean Sea, is perhaps the finest watery hideaway for boaters on our planet. It’s impossible to exaggerate the magnificence of this sailors’ paradise. It is as if God and Walt Disney conspired to design the perfect cruising ground: perfect wind, perfect seas and, most of all, perfect harbors. And if all that weren’t enough, these harbors are also inhabited by joyous folks with wide smiles. The Caribbean is especially attractive for sailors who like to party—who desire to spend a decade or two hard aground on the mahogany reef. From a scientific perspective, the key to understanding this area is plates. The plates are tectonic. They bump into each other, stimulating partial melting of the plates above the…

5 min.

LIGHT and LIVELY

When Groupe Beneteau’s Excess Catamarans introduced its first model in 2019, a test sail in winds approaching 40 knots made it abundantly clear that the 38-foot-7-inch Excess 12 wasn’t just another pretty new face in the ever-growing cat crowd. That boat could sail. A recent light-air outing aboard the company’s newest model, the Excess 14, was perhaps equally revealing. With a hull length right around 44 feet and a beam of 25 feet, 9 inches, this is a big, roomy and comfortable cruising cat. But in just 5 knots of breeze, sailing with the main and working jib set, the chart plotter’s speed over ground read 4.1 knots heading upwind with the sails sheeted hard. A little later, with the jib rolled up and the code zero unfurled and set…

10 min.

A WINTER’S SAIL

I'm no Ernest Shackleton. I live in Hawaii, and I love the warm weather and clear blue waters of the tropics. Having done a little high-latitude sailing, I have to admit that freezing weather is not my favorite. My boat doesn’t even have a heater. Yet here I was with Tracy, a surfing friend from Hawaii, ripping down Puget Sound at 12 knots under spinnaker, in the dead of winter. I had on about 10 layers, two puffy jackets, gloves, boots and a hat. I also had a huge smile on my face. This was shaping up to be an ideal adventure, filled with solitude and unexpected experiences. It was also some of the best sailing I’d done on my Jeanneau 509, Kāholo. And it had all started with simple…

13 min.

The Most Famous Sailor You’ve Never Heard Of

In 1974, Australian journalist Murray Davis assembled a ragtag crew of sailors and scribblers in Newport, Rhode Island, and put out the first issue of Cruising World. The bet Murray made that summer was a big one: 65,000 big ones, if bets are measured in printed magazine copies. Ten years later, he sold the brand to The New York Times Company. Paid circulation had grown to 120,000 copies addressed to high-net-worth individuals (in the parlance of Madison Avenue). Davis retired to a life of ease on Newport’s tony Ocean Drive. In some ways, the joke was on Madison Avenue. Davis’ genius was to tap into a countercultural zeitgeist impelled by skyrocketing oil prices, back-to-the-garden dreams of self-reliance evinced by the Whole Earth Catalog, and a particularly prominent June 1973 Time…

12 min.

Wicked Weather: Bare Poles Edition

T here cannot be many yachtsmen who can claim to have been knocked down and driven ashore inside an active volcano, and even fewer while their boats are covered in inches of snow and ice. This is a claim that I would rather not make, but our arrival inside the volcanic caldera at Antarctica’s Deception Island is not easily forgotten.—Steve Brown, Cruising Club of America Steve Brown knows a thing or two about heavy weather. Throughout his sailing career, Brown and his wife, Trish, took on a four-year circumnavigation aboard their Oyster 56, Curious, sailed a 30,000-mile circumnavigation of the Americas—sailing north from Camden, Maine, and then an east-to-west transit of the Northwest Passage—and spent more than his fair share of time in the Southern Ocean. Brown is up for debating…

6 min.

HOW I REPLACED A LEAKING DINGHY VALVE

DIY PROJECTS My old Caribe Hypalon RIB dinghy had started to deflate, so I used a soapy-water spray to test for leaks. The forward-chamber air valve was leaking—not around the perimeter, where they normally do, but instead from inside the valve, indicating that it was not making an airtight seal. I tried to clean the inside with a cotton ball and liquid soap, and that did reduce the bubbles a little, but not entirely. I also fitted a second sealing washer on the valve cap and squeezed it tight up to the valve face, but the boat still deflated over a few days. “You’ve got to replace the valve,” someone told me. It was not what I wanted to hear, but off I went. I bought a Halkey-Roberts air valve…

3 min.

RAW-WATER PLUMBING ISSUES

MONTHLY MAINTENANCE I routinely encounter defects related to design, materials and assembly in raw-water plumbing systems on cruising vessels. These defects could, and sometimes do, lead to flooding and the total loss of vessels. Here’s a look at the three most common examples of these defects. THE UN-SEACOCK Seacocks let crew stem water flow quickly and easily, either for routine service or in the event of a failed hose or fitting or other raw-water emergency. These valves must be readily accessible and able to operate with relative ease. “Readily accessible” means no tools are needed to access a seacock, nor should a significant quantity of gear need to be moved. One of the most common of seacock errors involves mismatched threads. Through-hull fittings, sometimes called “skin” fittings, are nearly always…

1 min.

CHARTERWISE

Nestled at the northern edge of the Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park, Shroud Cay is a protected area in the heart of the Exumas and should be considered a must-do for any charter itinerary. When the tide is running, the winding, crystal-clear inland waterway (affectionately known as the “washing machine”) acts as a natural water-slide for swimmers and personal watercraft. Sea turtle and stingray encounters are a regular occurrence in the mangrove-lined channel. Only dinghies and PWC are permitted, and they must be run at minimal speed. Just make sure you’re back out in open water well before low tide, or it’ll be an extended tour. Though in this little patch of paradise, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. —Andrew Parkinson COMPANIES ADVERTISING THIS MONTH CHARTER COMPANIES Bitter End…

3 min.

Off Watch

Maine MAN My old mate Ronnie Simpson was on the phone, having just pulled into Halifax, Nova Scotia, after a short hop from Portland, Maine. It was the first week of September, and he was en route to A Coruña, Spain, aboard his newly renamed Open 50, Shipyard Brewing. On October 28, he would start of Global Solo Challenge—a nonstop, singlehanded round-the-world race with a rolling, pursuit-style start for boats from 32 to 60 feet. “We were seeing a lot of cyclonic activity,” he told me, describing the suddenly bustling North Atlantic tropical-weather picture. “I think it was the right decision.” Knowing Ronnie, he’d definitely given it a lot of considerable thought. Because as I’d come to learn, he basically has one speed: fast forward, with dispatch. I’d last sailed…

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