Inhaltsverzeichnis für May 2016 in SAIL

Last February, 70 boats from 30 different countries flocked to Antigua for the start of the RORC Caribbeam 600—a race through the Caribbean that covers 600 nautical miles and circumnavigates 11 islands. There was a wide range of boats making up the fleet—from production cruisers like Dufours and Oysters to some of the fastest boats in the sport right now, including Comanche and Phaedo3— but it was the U.S.-flagged Proteus, George Sakellaris’s Maxi72, that was declared the overall winner. For video of the event, go to sailmagazine.com…

At 0500 on the stormy morning of December 2, 2010, the Multi50 trimaran Region Aquitaine-Port Medoc, en route from Guadeloupe to France, was hit by a violent squall and capsized in mid-Atlantic, 1,000 miles from land. Skipper Lalou Rocayrol and his crew were soon rescued by a passing freighter and the boat was never seen again—not until December 5 last year, when a Reliance Yacht Management crew delivering a boat from Europe to the Caribbean sailed within spitting distance of the upturned tri. Captain Hannah Golebiewska photographed the wreck and passed its position on to the authorities. The trimaran was just one of a spate of re-appearances of missing sailboats. In January, the capsized hull of a Leopard 44 catamaran was found drifting off the east coast of South Africa.…

With the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics only a few months away, the U.S. Olympic sailing team is fast coming into focus as the athletes compete for spots based on their results in a pair designated regattas for each class. At press time, the roster already included two familiar names: Laser Radial sailor Paige Railey, who hopes to avenge a disappointing eighth-place finsih in the 2012 London Olympics; and Moth world champion Bora Gulari, who along with crew, Louisa Chafee, will be competing in the Nacra 17 catamaran class. In an interesting note, both are past Rolex Yachtsman and Yachtswoman of the Year winners. Also qualifying to compete in Rio this summer were Thomas Barrows and Joe Morris in the 49er, Paris Henken and Helena Scutt in the 49erFX class,…

This ambitious boat, effectively a small superyacht constructed on a mass-production basis, is the culmination of a years-long collaboration between Jeanneau’s American-born production chief Erik Stromberg, French yacht designer Philippe Briand and British interior design maven Andrew Winch. Winner of a SAIL Best Boats award for Best Flagship Monohull, this impressive luxury cruiser features a diverse choice of accommodation plans, a great sense of style, and superior fit and finish— all at a very competitive price point. CONSTRUCTION The vacuum-infused hull and deck are cored with discontinuous endgrain balsa set in polyester resin. Solid laminate is interposed around the keel root. The hull’s exterior is finished in isophtalic NG gelcoat and the bottom is barrier-coated to thwart osmotic blistering. High-load deck hardware installations are set over plywood coring. The hull’s…

In 2011, British television presenter Paul Heiney set sail for the southern tip of South America as a way of rediscovering the “voice” of his lost son, Nicholas, a poet and avid tall-ship sailor who’d taken his own life at the age of 23. The 18,000-mile voyage in turn served as the basis for Heiney’s recently published book, One Wild Song. The following excerpt describes Heiney’s attempt to sail around Cape Horn at the midpoint of his voyage. The heat was on when we got back to Micalvi, the derelict vessel that now serves as a kind of yacht club in the marina Puerto Williams in the Beagle Channel. The weather was as balmy as an English summer’s day, and we found Denis, who’d been watching my Victoria 38, Wild…

Like many Vendée Globe competitors who cannot attract major sponsorship, Rich Wilson has had to sail older generation Open 60’s that can never be optimally competitive in the race. Great American IV, though nearly 10 years old, is considerably more sophisticated than her predecessor. She has a carbon hull, outboard ballast tanks, twin daggerboards and even a powerful hydraulic ram to shift her keel. She is considerably lighter than GA III with a stiffer hard-chined hull shape, and with the added advantage of those ballast tanks she has much more righting moment and can carry more sail in stronger conditions. “This boat should be much faster,” says Rich matter-of-factly. “I should have no trouble beating my old time of 121 days around the world.” When asked if this is an…

Are you out there sailing, cruising and living the sailing life? If you are, send your sailing photos to sailmail@sailmagazine.com for a chance to have them featured in these pages. Here are a few pictures from other readers, taken during their latest cruising adventures. This picture was taken at Steppingstone Marina in Kings Point, New York, where I have worked as a launch operator for the past three summers.—Josh Rieders Th is photo shows some of the 20-plus boats on our club’s annual cruise in 2015, heading towards Boston, Massachusetts from World’s End island..—Susan Th euns This is my favorite sunset, viewed from the Dinner Key mooring field in Coconut Grove Florida. —James Noland @SAILfeed In his SAILfeed piece “Hapless or somewhat heroic” on January 29, Brian Hancock wrote about…

“Tack! Tack!” I roared. “Those are the lights of Cuba over there. We don’t need any gunboats threatening us.” It was 1974. We were returning from a winter in the West Indies aboard Golden Eagle, a classic 72ft wooden ketch. After leaving Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, we rounded the west end of Cuba, taking care to not venture too close. With the wind on the nose, our port tack brought us within sight of the coast, which was closer than I wanted to be. Without the luxury of electronics, I had to rely on the vagaries of dead reckoning and questionable sextant positions, skewed by a fast-flowing Gulf Stream and a not too weatherly full-keeled ketch that made lots of leeway. Fast forward 42 years to the Inaugural Miami…

Exclamation marks, curse words...honestly I had trouble holding myself back when Furuno and Garmin both announced new solid-state radars at the Miami Boat Show in February. After many years of Navico trailblazing what is arguably a better way of doing radar, and with Raymarine’s Quantum just recently announced, suddenly all four major brands offer some form of solid-state radar. That would be big news by itself, but Furuno, with its NXT radome, and Garmin, with its Fantom open array, could also both justifiably proclaim a first in bringing valuable Doppler radar enhancement to our boating world—because neither apparently knew what the other was up to. Can I get a holy mackerel! Below in Fig. 1 we have a screen shot from the new Furuno DRS4D-NXT UHD in action on a…

The brainchild of veteran multihull maven Jens Quorning, managing director of the Danish boatbuilder Quorning Boats, the Dragonfly 32 is one of a long list of trimarans providing a combination of exciting performance with more-than-adequate accommodation space for cruising. Like the rest of the line, the D32 includes the company’s unique SwingWing feature, which allows the amas to be quickly retracted when tying up to a dock or entering a slip. Also, the boat’s shallow draft with its centerboard up means it can be easily beached for swimming or stretching your legs. Not surprisingly, sailing the D32 in the flat seas and 13 to 15 knot breezes we had on the Chesapeake Bay was a total blast. Not only did the boat consistently hit speeds in excess of 8 knots…

Canada’s Bay of Fundy is possessed of a certain tension in the best of weather, but there was none of that to be seen as the 26ft Leight drifted desultorily along under a sky the color of yesterday’s dishwater. A musing breeze had shown promise, but faded to feeble scurries, while a lone petrel skimmed the restless seas and fog erased the pale thread of Nova Scotia coast. We could have powered along, but a lifetime of sailing, and 31 years of knocking about in our International Folkboat, had shown that getting about by natural means was optimal, and days without design among the most precious of commodities. Hurrying our way through a cruise has almost always proved the wrong way to address it. That said, patience is still not…

The Vendée Globe is the world’s toughest sailing event, bar none. Every four years, a diverse group of solo sailors—men and women, young and middle-aged—depart Brittany, France, in November, leave the three great capes—the Cape of Good Hope at the tip of Africa, Cape Leeuwin on Australia’s southwestern corner and Cape Horn at the tip of the south American continent—to port, Antarctica to starboard, and (hopefully) finish back in Brittany some 28,000 nonstop miles later. It’s a supreme mental and physical challenge; an almost superhuman level of endurance and skill is required to keep a high-performance 60-footer sailing hard and fast around the clock in often extreme conditions, at the same time conserving the boat’s equipment—one small failure can end a race—and guarding against the everpresent risk of serious injury…

Off shore sailors are by nature schizophrenic. We spend long hours, much money and considerable effort preparing for the worst that nature can throw at us and then use all the resources at our disposal to ensure that this effort and expense are not needed. In practice, today’s weather forecasting options are so good that unless you are planning to venture into higher latitudes or to go sailing in the tropics during hurricane season, there is little likelihood of being caught out in extreme weather. Nevertheless, you must still make the effort to plan and prepare for extreme conditions. The worst conditions my wife, Terrie, and I have ever encountered were in just 20 to 25 knots of wind blowing against a 4-knot current in an area off the coast…

There’s no doubt that pro racing—à la hard-charging European events, like the Vendée Globe and Barcelona World Race—has been an uphill battle on this side of the Atlantic. (And yes, that does include the America’s Cup.) However, the Atlantic Cup (atlanticcup.org), which features fleets of high-performance Class 40s and includes thousands of dollars in prize money, appears to be going stronger then ever as it ramps up for its fifth edition. Scheduled to begin May 28, this year’s regatta will field at least 10 teams competing in a pair doublehanded off shore legs stretching from Charleston, South Carolina, to New York City, and from New York to Portland, Maine. Once in Maine, an overall winner will be then be decided following a two-days inshore series. Some other numbers to consider:…

Visitors to Boston’s New England Boat Show in February got a first glimpse of two new boats from Elan Yachts—the 36ft Elan E4, a sharplooking sport cruiser with twin wheels, twin rudders and a retractable sprit, and the Impression 45, a roomy cruising yacht that also promises good performance. The boats are built in Slovenia, on the Adriatic Sea, by a company that is better known for its skis. Briton Rob Humphreys has been Elan’s “in-house” designer for 20 years, in which time the yard has become known for building sturdy boats that stand up well to the demands of both racing and cruising. Humphreys has designed Open 60 and Class 40 racers as well as a number of boats for Oyster Marine, and his versatility was obvious in the…

Going Overboard It is one of the worst case scenarios for any sailor—having a crewmember go overboard. It is scary, and it can happen in the blink of an eye. That’s why it is essential to have the training and devices to help you recover your shipmate. LIFESLING HOISTING TACKLE In any man-overboard situation, finding the crew in the water and getting him or her back to the boat is only the first part of the battle—you still need to get them out of the water and back onboard. If you are sailing shorthanded, the crew still onboard may be surprised to find out how heavy a waterlogged sailor can be. That’s where a hoisting tackle setups come in handy—when it’s time to haul an MOB back onto the boat,…

I’d heard through the grapevine about what happened with Rich Wilson and the lightning. Shortly after he acquired his first IMOCA Open 60, Great American III (ex-Solidaires), back in 2006, he had parked her on his mooring at the outer harbor of Marblehead, Massachusetts, where, unfortunately, she took a strike that wiped out all her electronics. The fortunate part was that this was before he took her in for a total refit in preparation for his 2008-09 Vendée Globe campaign. Flash forward to the summer of 2014 and we find Rich with another new-to-him Open 60, Great American IV (ex-Mirabaud), that he plans to run in the next Vendée Globe this coming November. She gets another full-on refit—including new electronics and an all-new electrical system—and Rich parks her on the…

On March 30, 2014, the coordinates 179W were transmitted from Andrew Taylor’s AIS MOB device after he went overboard during the 2013-2014 Clipper Round the World Race. Taylor’s boat, the Derry-Londonderry-Doire, had been struck by a wave that swept the sailor overboard. He was 2,000 miles offshore in the North Pacific and an hour away from any other vessel. But he happened to have his AIS MOB unit in his pocket, and that led his shipmates back to his location. An hour and a half later, he was back onboard. This is just one of hundreds of examples of sailors being saved by emergency devices. And it is a reminder that whether it is an EPIRB, PLB, SPOT signaling devices or an AIS MOB unit, every sailor who goes to…

When people ask me to name my favorite charter desination, my answer is always the Sea of Abaco, in the Bahamas, in the offseason— in fact, smack-dab in the middle of hurricane season. This, of course, is completely contrary to conventional wisdom, owing to the area’s seasonal weather trends. In fact, so inadvisable is it to go sailing there in late August (when my family and I did) that you just miss the month of September, when the place shuts down completely until the onset of winter. That said, it’s important to remember that every charter carries with it an element of risk, especially when it comes to the weather. Plenty of sailors have had a Bahamas or Caribbean charter go bad in the middle of high season because of…