Tabla de contenidos para October 2020 en Cruising Helmsman

CORAL Sea Marina Resort announced renewal of its platinum sponsorship for Volunteer Marine Rescue Whitsundays, committing to another three-year sponsorship. The Airlie resort is now entering its second term as platinum sponsor, after securing the naming rights on the vessel Coral Sea Marina VMR1 during the last term. VMR Whitsundays have seen more activations in the last twelve months than in any other year since operations commenced, indicating a larger reliance on the services of the organisation by the boating community. Providing assistance 24 hours a day/ seven days a week, VMR Whitsundays is operated by a group of approximately 50 dedicated and experienced volunteers. Paul Darrouzet, owner Coral Sea Marina Resort, explains “the work done by the volunteers of VMR Whitsundays is nothing short of exceptional. In a region…

SURVEY SAYS AGAIN Hi Phil, I write in response to the 'Survey Says' letter from Scott Clarke published in the July 2020 edition of Cruising Helmsman as I too have fallen foul of a rogue survey inspection. I employed a well-regarded, or so I thought, surveyor from the Gold Coast, just like Scott did to conduct a prepurchase inspection on a Farr B30 yacht I was keen on buying. The report included a lift and inspect as well as a myriad of accompanying photos and a detailed eleven page report. Nothing too worrying was found and the deal was struck and I have been happily sailing on the boat since. Not long after, it became time for some routine antifoul and this is when issues with this report came to…

FOR many years I have been using a variety of laptop and tablet computers to run chartplotting software. The laptop arrangement has the great advantage of being able to have a back-up at a reasonable cost, not to mention portability. I have taken my laptop(s) and tablet on other peoples’ boats when crewing/navigating. The software I am using is free, but the map license costs a moderate amount. Charging for the chart information is a common arrangement in the industry. My current licence allows installation on two Microsoft, two Android and two Mac platforms. The most generous of all the licences I have seen. The electronic charts are raster copies of paper charts, so they are familiar when shown on the chartplotter. Sometime it is necessary to manually zoom in…

IN the northern hemisphere summer of 2014 the sailing yacht Drina completed a successful east-to-west transit attempt of the fabled northwest passage. Four years later, two of Drina’s loyal crew rejoined her skipper Michael Thurston for an attempt to circumnavigate Antarctica by way of the Southern Ocean (Cruising Helmsman May 2020). In doing so Drina’s two sailing expeditions retraced large swathes of ocean; the same places both HMS Erebus and her sister vessel HMS Terror, had also visited during those famous voyages of discovery in the 1830’s and 1840’s. The Arctic ultimately claimed both the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror on the ill-fated voyages to search for the elusive northwest passage. Erebus’s final resting place was first located some 167 years later, the year of Drina’s successful transit. On…

WORLD renowned Australian yachtsman Jon Sanders AO OBE has passed the halfway point of his eleventh solo circumnavigation of the world, overcoming myriad problems including the COVID-19 pandemic. The 80 year old sailing legend is sailing due south of Panama into the Pacific Ocean, having passed the midway milestone of his journey to raise awareness of plastic pollution: one of the greatest health and environmental threats facing our planet. Throughout the voyage Sanders has been collecting water samples for analysis by researchers at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia. The results will build a more detailed picture of the plastic pollution across the oceans of the southern hemisphere. Estimates suggest that plastic costs over US$2.2 trillion a year in environmental and social damage. This unacceptable cost to humanity led Andrew…

TAFE NSW graduate Arakel Hamamdjian pursued the job of his dreams and became the skipper of his own vessel. Now he has worked his way up from showboat waiter to proud owner of his own business, Magic Cruises. Now he wants others to consider a career on the high seas. The maritime sector has an estimated annual revenue of $5.76 billion and added an estimated $2.58 billion to the Australian economy in 2017. Domestic commercial vessels (DCV) in New South Wales have continued to operate during COVID-19 with social distancing measures in place, allowing local holiday makers to enjoy recreation activities without having to travel interstate or overseas. Arakel fell into the maritime industry largely by accident, taking a job as a waiter on showboats at the age of 21.…

FOUNTAINE PAJOT TIMES THREE The lockdown period has not stalled any of the projects at the shipyard. Announced in September 2019, the Samana 59 will be presented afloat at the Cannes Yachting Festival, named after an island in the Caribbean seas. This catamaran has large living spaces, including a 30 square metre flybridge, a 27.5m2 cockpit, modular sunbathing stations up forward, expansive cabins and an epicurean galley that opens onto the saloon. Fountaine Pajot is also exhibiting a 40 foot catamaran, the Isla 40. The Isla 40 will replace the successful Lucia 40 sailing catamaran and will be available from early 2021. This compact sailing catamaran reflects its Flagship range and features inverted bows and a saloon where the chart table is accessible from the entrance and gives way to…

KEEPING TRACK OF THE AMPS Modern boats are extremely power hungry and David Williams’s Bavaria 46 Galadriel is no exception. With four fridges, a microwave and all the usual twenty-first century instrumentation to look after, one of the first things David fitted was a battery monitor. However, don’t think you only need to keep track of the amps if you have a sophisticated boat. It is perhaps even more important on a boat with minimal charging and storage capacity to know what is flowing in and out of the batteries. This is a fairly easy project that most boat owners can tackle. A battery monitor comprises two components; a shunt that measures the amount of current flowing in or out of the batteries (for the purists, it actually measures the…

THE Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) is launching a focused inspection campaign targeting cargo securing arrangements on container ships visiting Australian ports. This inspection campaign is being initiated in response to several serious incidents involving shipping containers lost overboard recently. Incidents like the losses of 81 containers off Newcastle by the YM Efficiency in 2018, 50 containers off Wollongong by the APL England in May and three containers from the Navios Unite off Cape Leeuwin in June have caused significant environmental damage to Australia’s iconic marine and coastal environment. Incident investigations by AMSA have discovered that the improper stacking and securing of cargo and poor maintenance of securing equipment are likely to have been contributing factors to these incidents. AMSA acting general manager of operations Michael Drake says that vessels…

WE began our trans-Pacific voyage in Wellington, New Zealand and over a twelve month period we planned to sail to French Polynesia then on to Hawai’i before finally arriving in Alaska in summer the following year. We had left Thailand some years before on board Distant Drummer, our Liberty 458 cutter rigged sloop, so becoming somewhat used to heading eastwards against the prevailing winds, so sailing the wrong way across the world’s largest ocean did not seem like such a crazy idea. French Polynesia is made up of four archipelagos. The Society Islands, which include Tahiti, are the westernmost island group and are the most developed. The next archipelago, which lies 200 nautical miles to 300nm to the east, is the Tuamotu group; a series of low sand and coral…

WHEN my husband announced he wanted to get another boat, I was not surprised. He had been trawling the internet for weeks during the Covid-19 lockdown, this time in search of a big catamaran at a bargain price. When we sold our previous vessel six months prior, a Peterson 43, I knew it would not be long before sea fever would set in. “Nothing challenges you like the sea does”, he says. As an infamous water rat once announced, “…there is nothing – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats”. However, the boat chosen is a very different type. A one-off design built in Urunga from Queensland plantation pine in 2009 by Yvette Wijnin. At 21.6 metres long and 11 metres wide Gaias…