Inhaltsverzeichnis für April 2017 in SAIL

John Rousmaniere is a titan of yachting journalism, having written hundreds of articles and several books on sailing and seamanship. He was an onboard reporter for both the 1972 Bermuda Race and the infamous 1979 Fastnet Race, races in which both fleets experienced extreme heavy weather. Rousmaniere’s book Fastnet: Force 10 helped create change in yacht design and offshore safety equipment. You quickly started a freelance career when you were younger and spent a lot of that in sailing. What was your initial motivation? I was brought up in Cincinnati, OH, which is a baseball mad town. My father was a sailor. Eventually, we moved back to Long Island when I was about 10. We always received Yachting, and I always read it, because he knew all the people. By…

Over the years J/Boats has created designs that range back and forth in terms of performance and creature comforts, with some boats offering a minimum of the latter, while others venture more toward the cruising end of the spectrum. The J/112e is the latest of the company’s boats designed to appeal to cruisers as much racers. But don’t be fooled, this is still a boat that has plenty of get up and go. DESIGN & CONSTRUCTION The third in J/Boats’s “E” series, in which the E stands for “elegance” and “evolution,” the J/112e boasts a sleek, carefully sculpted cabintrunk that combines with the hull’s blunt ends and somewhat springy (for a modern performance boat) sheer to create a very nice look. There’s even something about the boat that reminds me…

BLOCK PARTY Ratchet blocks are common on raceboats, but their benefits extend to cruising boats too. They have a ratchet that prevents the sheave from turning in one direction when it is loaded, but lets it spin when you ease the line. Ratchet blocks are especially useful for furling lines, making it easier to control the amount of sail you are letting out or taking in. Schaefer’s new M66-08 single ratchet block has an injection molded body and an aluminum sheave running on ball bearings. It can take up to 1/2in line and has a safe working load of 750lb. $85. Schaefer Marine, schaefermarine.com HOLE SAVER It’s an unfortunate fact of boat ownership that adding goodies like solar panels, antennae and so on means we often need to drill holes…

The proposal struck a chord: Jock, an old sailing buddy, had his Pacific Seacraft 37, Annie, in Puerto Rico and welcomed hands to bring her back to Florida for sale. And since Cuba was opening up, Havana would be the intermediate destination. Jock was a colleague from Foreign Service days. We had collaborated on Palestinian-Israeli issues in the late ‘70s and executed President George H.W. Bush’s strategy in the first Gulf War aft er Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. Upon retirement, I bought Panope, a Pacific Seacraft 34, and in 2011 Jock helped me sail her from the Bahamas to Bermuda and then on to the Azores. Inspired, he then bought Annie. Age increasingly factored in. Jock, now over 70, equipped Annie for singlehanding—lines to the cockpit, mast pulpit, oversized…

ON DECK ϫ Give each winch a quick spin. If they’re not turning freely, now is the time to strip and clean them. ϫ Windlass issues are almost always down to poor connections. Inspect these closely, especially at the foot switches, and if necessary take the connections apart, clean them, apply some petroleum jelly or dielectric grease and reassemble. ϫ Check your lifelines for signs of corrosion. Sheathed wire is especially prone to this. Replace if they look suspect. Also check the split pins or split rings at the terminals. Split rings have a habit of working loose. ϫ Take a close look at turnbuckles and shroud terminations. Make sure all split pins are in place—especially if the mast has been unstepped for the winter! In the spring, yard workers…

Over the last 25 years there has been a dramatic shift in the types of refrigeration systems carried aboard cruising boats. Today, 12-volt systems prevail, but the systems most oft en installed up to the late ‘90s were driven by the main engine. Engine-driven refrigerators function just like the air-conditioner in your car, with a belt-driven compressor forcing a refrigerant gas through a typical vaporcompression cycle. Though it’s typically one of the less-understood onboard systems for boat owners, an enginedriven system consists of only a few key components—a compressor with a clutch activated by an electric timer, a condenser (usually by the engine’s raw-water pump), an expansion valve, an evaporator (inside the holding plates) and some lengths of copper tubing. One of the key advantages to engine drive systems is…

Among the many quirky races that have sprung up in California over the decades, surely one of the best must be the Three Bridge Fiasco, held each winter on San Francisco Bay. Organized by the Singlehanded Sailing Society of San Francisco Bay, the race sends a massive fleet of over 350 singlehanded and doublehanded boats from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Richmond-San Rafael and Bay bridges and back in a test of seamanship, local knowledge and luck. It also serves as the season opener for the Bay’s shorthanded sailing season, which also includes races like the Singlehanded Farallones Race and the semi-annual Singlehanded TransPac. For details, visit sfb aysss.org.…

It’s been a strange Cup cycle. For all the press releases and hoopla surrounding the America’s Cup World series, AC35 continues to feel somehow distant—no surprise given it’s taking place off a small island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean—and this sense of distance has been only exacerbated by the lack of Cup boats. Until now. As this edition was going to press, the five challengers and the defender, Oracle Team USA, were finally launching the AC50s aboard which they will compete beginning next month, aft er having expended a mandatory 28-day “blackout” period during which the boats could not be sailed. “It’s a great moment to see our raceboat hit the water in Bermuda. We will be working very hard now on the final development and testing of…

Hard to believe, but Antigua Sailing Week will be celebrating its 50th edition when racing kicks off the end of this month with the Peters & May Round Antigua Race, followed by five days of coastal racing. One of the region’s most prestigious regattas, the event typically draws 100 yachts or more to enjoy magnificent tradewind-sailing off Falmouth and English harbors, including everything from superyachts to bareboat charters. For more on the event visit sailingweek.com.…

While many redesigns have more to do with marketing then with actual design, the recently launched Dragonfly 28 “Performance” from Denmark’s Quorning Boats (which follows in the wake of the company’s successful Touring and Sport versions) truly does push the envelope in a meaningful way to incorporate the latest in multihull technology. At the heart of the trailerable Dragonfly 28 Performance’s new look and feel are a pair of dramatically reconfigured amas to enhance both speed and stability. Most noticeable are the wave-piercing bows, a design feature whose benefits cannot be overestimated when pushing a boat like this hard in rough conditions. Not so obvious, but equally important, is the fact that the amas are almost 2ft longer and provide 20 percent more volume, which in turn translates into sail-carrying…

Examining Vendee Globe boats on the dock in Les Sables d’Olonne prior to the start of the race last November, one thing was perfectly clear: the genie is out of the bottle when it comes to foils on monohulls. All six of the new generation International Monohull Open Class Association (IMOCA) 60s competing in the latest edition of the vaunted solo round-the-world event were equipped with exotic “Dali foils” (so-called by their designers, Van Peteghem Lauriot Prevost (VPLP)-Verdier, aft er the Spanish artist’s swoopy mustache) that jutted menacingly out of the hulls and required extra-big fenders to keep clear of pontoons. There was also one older boat, Maître CoQ, that had been retrofitted with very similar appendages. Foils like these were expected to boost performance by margins of up to…

My last day of a recent weeklong charter revealed an expensive lesson: when we gathered up all the left over provisions, they covered the saloon table. I’m no newbie when it comes to provisioning, but I let this one slip as we were harried on departure day and multiple people shopped. Not only is over-provisioning wasteful, it’s expensive. So here are a few tips (that I know too well, but didn’t employ on said occasion) to help you slide into the finish line with nary a Saltine left . TYPES OF PROVISIONING Most bareboat charter companies offer three levels of provisioning: full, partial or none. “None” is risky if the stores are closed when you arrive, and “full” is usually expensive and disappointing. The smartest way to go is a…

A GRANDFATHER’S DREAM Before I was born in 1947, both of my grandfathers had already passed away. Italian immigrants, they came to America with an incredibly strong work ethic–the ability to work hard and to never give up. When my grandson Ryan was born in 2007, I was reminded that I never knew my grandfathers and wanted to establish relationships with my grandchildren that would transcend the usual, the methodical and the mundane. I thought it would be fun for Ryan and me to build a boat together. Ryan was 7 when we started this project and 9 when we christened our finished craft , Ryan’s Club, an 8ft Chesapeake Light Craft Eastport Pram. We chose it because we were planning to use Ryan’s Club as a dinghy for our…

If you’re planning to set sail for a year with your kids, you have one narrow goal—to keep up so your children will be able to rejoin their friends when they return. For kids in kindergarten to eighth grade, this usually means studying math, a bit of writing, a lot of free reading and they’ll be fine. If your kids are in high school, you can either try to do a full year, which means you may have to cut down your cruising plans, or do the minimum school and have your children graduate a year late. Either can work fine, but it will need to be your teenager’s choice. Are you heading out indefinitely? If so, your role becomes much more important, but also offers more flexibility. You can…

The antipodal summer of 2016-17 proved to be the season when no round-the-world record was safe. Last month we reported that Frenchman Thomas Coville set a new solo round-the world record of 49 days, 3 hours, 7 minutes aboard the 110ft trimaran Sodebo. Soon aft erward, Colville’s compatriot Armel Le Cleac’h not only won the Vendee Globe aboard his IMOCA 60 Banque Populaire VIII but smashed the previous race record by nearly four days, crossing the finish line off Les Sables d’Olonne, France, just 74 days, 3 hours, 35 minutes aft er setting out. Soon aft er that, yet another Frenchman, Francis Joyon, and a crew of five crushed the crewed roundthe- world record aboard the 103ft maxi-tri IDEC Sport, completing the 22,461-mile lap in an incredible 40 days, 23…

There is always a theme or trend evident in the new sailboats that make their debut at Boot Dusseldorf, the world’s largest boat show, held every January in the heart of Germany’s Rhineland. T-keels, twin rudders, hard chines, molded bowsprits; you saw them here first. Perhaps it’s because the world’s designers and builders are sitting back and taking a breather from the hard work of innovation, but there was no identifiable design trend evident at this year’s show, at least in smaller boats. All the action was in the over-50ft segment, where the consensus seems to be that yes, size matters. We had Beneteau with its new Oceanis Yacht 62 alongside two new Sense models, the 51 and 55; Jeanneau unveiled a new 51, smaller sister to its 64ft and…

If you spend enough time on the water, stuff happens. And when you sail solo like I do, “stuff ” can take on a new and scary meaning— like when my top-down furler drum got freakishly fouled by the asymmetrical spinnaker’s tack line in a sudden knockdown wind, or when I was transiting the Chesapeake Delaware Canal at night and the railroad lift bridge lowered without an audible or visual signal, threatening to decapitate my mast. In the first case, I was able to cut the jammed line and free the furler before charging into shallow water. In the latter, I had the presence of mind to believe what my tired eyes were seeing before it was too late. Nonetheless, in both these stressful moments it would have been nice…

The Mini 6.50 Prototype class is renowned as a seedbed of design development, so it’s not surprising someone has thought to put foils on one of these 21ft thoroughbreds. The first to launch and race a Mini with foils was Swiss sailor Simon Koster, who graduated from the “Series,” or production, class to the cutting-edge “Proto” class in 2015 and was determined that his new boat, Eight Cube, dubbed “the Flying Frog,” would push as many boundaries as possible. Developed by Michel Desjoyeaux’s design firm Mer Forte, the scow-bowed Frog was about as complicated as a 21ft boat can be. In addition to the lifting foils, set well outboard on either side, there were twin T-foil rudders, plus a telescopic canting keel that could also rotate to improve its angle…

A hard dinghy serves well to row out to your mooring and set off on a day sail. For weekending and vacation cruising you will find a lightweight inflatable with a small outboard serves you better and allows you to go further. As your cruising range extends, the demands on your dinghy change. By the time, you get ready for longterm cruising, you will appreciate all that a rigid inflatable dinghy has to offer. My wife, Cristina, and I were forced to reexamine our dinghy needs on a trip through New England’s Buzzards Bay on our 31ft C&C. Our 9ft air-floor inflatable with a 2hp outboard was so light we could easily stow it on the foredeck, and it rolled into a small package when not in use. It moved…

It is a very slippery slope, this business of owning sailboats. We all like to throw around the old saw about the two happiest days of our lives when buying and selling them, but the first time I ever bought one, and by that I mean one big enough to actually live on, I was scared out of my mind. It was the biggest check I’d ever written in my life, by a factor of about 10, and represented a substantial percentage of my total net worth. This was to buy a 30-year-old fiberglass yawl for a price that today might land you a nice used car. But it was a fantastic investment. I lived on that boat full-time for a number of years, wandered all over the North Atlantic,…