Tabla de contenidos para May 2021 en SAIL

The Cruising Club of America, an organization of about 1,300 off shore sailors, has been honoring remarkable ocean voyages and seamanship with an array of prestigious awards for nearly 100 years. The club’s highest honor, the Blue Water Medal, has recognized renowned and little-known sailors alike, from Sir Robin Knox-Johnston to the British mariners who rescued untold thousands of Allied troops from the beaches of Dunkirk in 1940. The CCA also gives an award for acts of exceptional seamanship and rescue, and most recently (in 2016) established what it calls its Young Voyager Award, recognizing “a young sailor who has made one or more exceptional voyages.” The inaugural awardee was polar voyager Erik de Jong. Subsequent awards have gone to solo nonstop circumnavigator Jessica Watson, my husband, Seth, and me,…

A couple of winters ago, I set a new course for my life by following my passions and interests. This in turn led me to boatbuilding. The reason why is I simply needed a change after working in a retail kayak shop a number of years. It was a great job that allowed me to develop as a kayaker and person. Nonetheless, I decided I needed something new. While working at the kayak shop, I’d also worked at a tech startup one day a week for six hours. The company created individualized outdoor recreation plans in real-time based on customer preferences. My role was to create trips for the company database and recommend trips to customers. It was a cool job, but I barely lasted six hours staring at a…

Sitting quietly at the bar of a local yacht club, I gaze out over a rambunctious Lake Michigan on a sunny but blustery spring afternoon. I am enjoying watching a small sloop approaching the marina and recognize it as belonging to one of our newest members. “Pretty little thing. Nice lines,” I think to myself. Moments later, though, my reverie is interrupted by a raucous hoot from one of the “Bar Bunch” to be immediately taken up by several other members of that auspicious group. You know who I mean. Every yacht club has a Bar Bunch. They can be found on the same barstools commenting on the boathandling of anyone who comes within their purview. Of course, their collective memories harbor no recollection of any missteps of their own.…

THOUGHTS ON LOOSE FOOTED MAINS Q: Our J/Boat mainsail has a bolt rope that feeds directly into the slot on the mast. Another rope feeds into a similar slot in the boom. I have always wondered: do boats sail better with a loose-footed mainsail not attached to the entire length of the boom, or with a mainsail that is attached along the boom’s entire length? My own guess is that a loose-footed main has a better shape and might point better on some angles of sail, but that does not necessarily mean it is faster overall. Have you ever experimented by comparing a loosed-foot main with a mainsail fixed in place with a bolt rope on the same vessel on the same day under the same wind conditions? — Brad…

The next time you visit the Bahamas you may find that the people there are carrying a lot less cash. And that’s a good thing. It’s not that they don’t have money, but that they’re using a new type of digital currency that they’re calling “Sand Dollars.” In a drive by the central bank to modernize the Bahamas’ payment system and move consumers away from a historical reliance on cash, Project Sand Dollar was designed as a pilot program and rolled out on Exuma in December 2019. It has been favorably received by the public, enough so that there are now plans to expand it to the entire country. In a press release the bank emphasized that the digital currency is not a cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin, or a competitor to…

As I write this, another hurricane season has passed. In hundreds of harbors and marinas, sailors are breathing a sigh of relief. I know the feeling, since I rode out eight spinners aboard my sturdy 30-footer. I can recall the precise moment when I said, “No more!” It was in 2005, during Hurricane Wilma in Key West. My expensive Aries self-steering vane was being attacked by a 500lb freezer, filled with bags of ice. Both the Aries and my stern were losing the battle. What made it even more irritating, was the cutesy polar bear logo grinning at me from the side of the ice locker, as I tried to repel it with my flimsy boathook. Suddenly, I realized that I was repeating the Spanish word for “enough”—“Basta, Basta, Basta…”…

While New England has a bit of a reputation for conservatism when it comes to things yachting, sailors in this part of the world are still anything but closeminded. To this end, a couple of the region’s classic distance events are both working to broaden their appeal in 2021. The first up on the calendar, the biennial Marion-to-Bermuda race, which jumps off June 18 from Marion, Massachusetts, on Buzzards Bay, is again introducing a multihull class to complement the many other classes and categories of racing it encourages (including a celestial class, shorthanded and double-handed racing, and awards for family-crewed and female-crewed boats). Organized by the Beverly Yacht Club, Blue Water Sailing Club and the Royal Hamilton Amateur Dinghy Club, the Marion-Bermuda will be marking its 23rd running in 2021.…

I’m sitting in a yacht club, having dinner with three other members of my crew, all of them men 40 years my senior. They’re lamenting the tragic state of sailing. “Look around us,” one of them says, gesturing to the other patrons. “Where are the young people?” Another turns to me, “Why don’t people your age sail anymore?” I didn’t know it then, but it’s a question that I would be asked again and again over the next few years. Today, America’s yacht clubs, and sailing in general, appear to be experiencing a population crisis. There are many reasons for this. Sailing’s reputation for posh exclusivity has gone out of style. There’s also the question of cost. Based on 2020 U.S. Census Bureau data, on average Millennials (currently ages 25-35)…

Sailors are notorious for being some of the best storytellers. Movies depict old salts at bars doling out wisdom learned through their many trials and tribulations. Books are written about the tales of mariners. It’s no wonder that when cruisers get together for sundowners, after the talk of weather and anchor scope used for the night subsides, they turn to storytelling. It’s been my experience that the best stories rarely involve beautiful sails in 15 knots of wind ending in a gorgeous sunset. No, the best stories are the ones about problems that arise even as seemingly everything else is also being stacked against you: storms rolling in, the anchor dragging and—topping them all—the motor not starting. These are the tales that bind sailors together, give them a sense of…

Plastic waste—in the form of everything from plastic soda bottles to abandoned fishing nets—constitutes a major threat to the health of the world’s oceans. Giving the immense size of an ocean, though, actually finding all the plastic floating around out there in a time-efficient manner has been a major challenge—until now. Using GPS trackers and enlisting the aid of a wide range of mariners, professional and recreational alike, the Sausalito, California, based Ocean Voyages Institute has hit on a way of “tagging” big clumps of garbage and then using that same garbage to lead it to other garbage. The thinking behind this approach is that the ocean frequently “sorts debris,” so that a tagged fishing net can lead to other nets and a density of debris within a 15-mile radius.…

Among the many developments in the boatbuilding industry in recent years, arguably the most noticeable has simply been the increase in size. Time was a 40-footer was a “big” boat. Not anymore, with production boatbuilders like Dufour and Jeanneau now regularly launching designs not that much smaller than boats sailors of a certain age would have once called “maxis.” JEANNEAU YACHTS 60 The latest in Jeanneau’s “Yachts” line, the French-built Jeanneau Yachts 60 is amazingly not the flagship of the line, but follows in the wake of the company’s Jeanneau Yachts 64. Designed by longtime Jeanneau collaborator Philippe Briand, the new 60-footer boasts many of the same features found aboard her predecessor. These include large twin rudders (essential aboard boats that carry substantial beam well aft) aggressively molded angular lines…

In the spring of 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic was just beginning to surge across the country, many municipalities and health departments banned all competitive sailing. This left yacht clubs, sailing schools, non-profits and other sailing organizations nationwide facing the prospect of a long season of strict limitations. At the same time, they couldn’t help but see golfers beginning to return to the links. Reluctant to see more time pass without either any youth or adult competition, regional sailing communities began searching for ways to get back out on the water and race safely in at least some capacity. Fast forward a year, and scores of regattas put on hold in 2020 are back on for 2021, with fingers crossed and (hopeful) plans underway for a full season of racing.…

If I were to ask, “What are the top five parts of the engine you want to be able to easily access?” How would you respond? Would it be the dipstick? The overflow coolant? I’d wager the raw water pump and its impeller would also make the list. Am I right? The reason we want to be able to get to the latter is not so much to tweak our shoulders (as always happens to mine), but to see if it’s leaking: and, if so, to check or replace the impeller and, every so often, replace or rebuild the pump. Over the years, my partner, Phillip, and I have done so several times on our 1985 Niagara 35, Plaintiff’s Rest, and I never thought past that leaking pump, until… We…