Tabla de contenidos para October 2018 en SAIL

Some photo assignments are more fun than others, and photographer Onne van der Wal clearly enjoyed his stint in the Bahamas snapping the Surfari 50, designed by Rhode Islander Ted Fontaine for none other than singer Jimmy Buffett. For this shot, van der Wal hopped overboard off Bimini with his Canon camera protected in an Aquatech underwater housing. The Bahamas is the natural home for a boat like the Surfari, which was designed for outdoor living with a huge cockpit protected by a hardtop, single-level accommodations and an al fresco galley that looks perfect for grilling up any number of cheeseburgers in paradise. There’s no word on how songsmith Buffett is enjoying his new ride, but we can’t imagine he’s anything but delighted.…

Strange and often wonderful things can happen in the course of an offshore sailboat race, and one of the strangest and most wonderful things we’ve heard of recently took place during the 2,300-mile 2018 Vic-Maui race, from Victoria, British Columbia, to Lahaina, Hawaii. It happened aboard the Swan 39 OxoMoxo, owned by Doug Frazer of the Corinthian Yacht Club of Seattle, when the crew noticed something strange in the water about 900 miles northeast of Hawaii. “I was down below at the laptop,” remembers navigator Marc-Andrea Klimaschewski, “hoping to find a Snickers bar, which was still cold enough to eat—we were following the old rule of navigation if the butter starts melting you are too close to the center of the high—when I heard a call from the cockpit that…

True innovation in monohull sailboat design can be a bit elusive these days. That’s not to say that there are no more new ideas, but it does seem that many new tweaks and introductions are a bit incremental: let’s say evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Just when it seems that we’ve seen it all, though, something comes along that breaks with conventional thinking and pushes old habits into new directions. A clear example of this kind of thinking is the new Jeanneau Sun Odyssey 490. DESIGN & CONSTRUCTION As was the case with the SO 490’s little sister, the Jeanneau Sun Odyssey 440, which won a SAIL magazine Best Boats award this past year in the monohull cruising category, designer Philippe Briand started with a blank sheet of paper when it…

BLOCK PARTY The elegance of these new X3M Flight blocks from Ubi Maior conceals the fact that they can handle loads of up to 15 tons. Designed to be used with a variety of textile loops, as fixed or snatch blocks, the X3M blocks have resin frames to carry the loops and anodized aluminum sheaves riding on “techno-polymer” bearings to take the loads. They are available in sheave sizes from 1 ¼in to 4 ½in. From $220; Euro Marine Trading, euromarinetrading.com PLUG & PLAY STEREO It can be a real pain to install a marine stereo inside a boat, what with the tiresome business of running cables through cramped spaces and finding somewhere sensible to locate the speakers. The audiophiles at Fusion thought about this and came up with the…

It was a bit of an unexpected flashback. After all, it had been decades since I lived in the old Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic) and yet the feeling that bubbled up was the same. I stuck my camera out the bus window to capture yet another of a dozen billboards dotting the pockmarked highway that bisects Cuba. This one shouted “Por Siempre Fidel”—loosely meaning “Fidel Forever.” In keeping with the Soviet style aesthetic, it had a star, although most others featured the leader’s profile or some muscular woman wielding a wrench. I had waited a long time to visit Cuba, and chartering there just added to the allure. Flying in, I noticed unkempt fields and haphazard government-sponsored farms. (I didn’t realize it yet, but they were the harbingers of…

It was not so many years ago that buying a new sail for your boat meant a pleasant trip down to your local sailmaker. You made a call (email was not yet invented), set up an appointment and then spent a few wonderful hours looking at bolts of cloth, talking boats and settling on a price. If you were a good customer a handshake would seal the deal, the sail would be made, and a few weeks later it was delivered to your boat and an invoice would arrive by mail. Your sailmaker knew you by name—both yours and your boat’s—just as your family doctor knew your medical history. More often than not the sailmaker would bend the sail on personally, take the boat out for a sail to check…

For a long time I really liked my old Tohatsu 3.5 outboard, smelly little two-stroke that it was, for its willing power and easy starting. Then it started to not want to start. Then, once started, it would run fine just long enough to get me a decent distance from the boat, whereupon it would conk out. No amount of invective or cord-pulling would get it running again until it felt like starting, which sometimes was never. I’m here to tell you that rowing an inflatable upstream and into a headwind gets very old very quickly. The outboard service guy pointed an accusing finger at me for leaving fuel to age in the tank—in this age of ethanol blends there is nothing worse for a carburetor’s tender inner parts—and he…

If you have a paranoid personality, anchoring out can be a validating experience. On the one hand, it seems rather simple. You amble up to the bow of your boat, drop a lump of metal overboard, let out some rode and secure it somehow. Then you stroll back to your cockpit and celebrate with a libation or two. On the other hand, it seems fraught with danger. The closest equivalent I can think of are those guys who sleep out on mountains they are climbing in sacks they hang from tiny pins driven into cliff faces. The immediate result if something goes wrong is not as dramatic, but the potential consequences (loss of life and putative home) can be just as severe. I realized recently that when it comes to…

Over the course of its 80-year history, the overall win in the Edgartown Yacht Club’s ‘Round-the-Island Race has gone to any number of fully-crewed grand prix speed machines. This summer, however, the Verona Trophy for the boat logging the fastest correct time around Martha’s Vineyard went to the doublehanded team of Zachary Lee and Leif Counter aboard the Morris 36 Yankee Girl. “I really haven’t ever done traditional racing on big boats with full crews,” said Lee, who has sailed 10,000 miles on Yankee Girl and has won the doublehanded division in the Newport-to-Bermuda Race twice, most recently in the 2018 edition, with Counter as his crew. “We had picked up our trophy for winning the doublehanded class…and then they called us up a second time. We had no idea.…

This past August, 2016 Rolex Yachtswoman of the Year Daniela Moroz didn’t just win her third consecutive women’s kiteboarding World Championship at the 2018 Hempel Sailing World Championships in Aarhus, Denmark, she truly dominated, getting bullets in 14 of 16 races—all at the still tender age of just 17. This matters, because kite-boarding will become an official Olympic sport at the 2024 Games in Paris. Alas, the rest of the U.S. Sailing Team fell short of any kind of podium finish. However, it did do well enough qualify for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics in the Laser, Laser Radial and men’s 470 classes. For details, visit ussailing.org/olympics.…

It’s funny the way things that work right almost inevitably tend to look right as well. Case in point: the Outremer 45, a catamaran that can’t help but turn heads with its large rig, nicely sculpted cabintrunk and narrow, purposeful bows. Better yet, under sail the boat more than fulfills any expectations you might have had checking it out at the dock, being a performance bluewater cruiser that is an absolute blast to sail. DESIGN & CONSTRUCTION A product of the celebrated Outremer yard in La Grande Motte in the South of France, the Outremer 45’s commitment to performance and safety begins with a design that is not just well executed, but downright smart, having been born of almost a quarter century of boatbuilding. The hulls and deck, for example,…

“The BVI is now a bit like it was 20 years ago,” Josie Tucci, vice president of sales and marketing for sister companies Sunsail and The Moorings, told me last December. “Instead of full bars, it may be a guy on the beach with a cooler and a barbeque, but the spirit of the place is still there.” So went the spin as the Leeward Islands of the Caribbean set out on a path to recovery just after being stomped by back-to-back Category 5 hurricanes Irma and Maria. After the storms pummeled the region, the BVI looked like a war zone. A year later, even the hardest hit islands and their charter companies are returning to some kind of normality. The effort has not been without its challenges, but it…

Five years ago I was invited, as the token sailing virgin, to set sail with my girlfriends and explore the British Virgin Islands. Six women of a certain age ditched their husbands, picked up their ukuleles and had the time of their lives. Fast forward to 2018, and I jumped at the opportunity when I got the call to join another all-female crew on a sailing trip to the Puerto Rico and the Spanish Virgins. This time around we were able to muster only four volunteers, but my enthusiasm remained undented—in the words of our charter company, Sail Caribe, “When Is the Last Time You Focused on You? Dive In, Relax and Disconnect. You Deserve It.” Darn right. I was onboard! So what of our four-lady crew? Well, there was…

Lithium-ion batteries have several times the energy storage capacity of an equivalent volume and weight of lead-acid batteries, and can be charged at extraordinarily high rates of charge to very high states of charge. They can be discharged almost totally without damage anywhere from hundreds of times to thousands of times. They are immune to sulfation and as such can be operated permanently in a partial state of charge. Whereas the most efficient lead-acid batteries (AGM) are only 85 percent efficient at converting electrical energy into chemical energy and vice versa, lithium-ion is better than 95 percent efficient, resulting in far less heat generation during high-rate discharges and recharges—an important consideration with my current high charge rate experiments. This is an amazing set of positive characteristics. There are, however, some…

Sometimes Aeolus is kind. Sometimes he’s not. But rarely is the ancient Greek “keeper of the winds” as entirely absent as he was for much of this year’s Bell’s Beer Bayview Mackinac Race. How slow was the 2018 running of the 94-year-old distance race, which always starts on a Saturday in mid-July on lower Lake Huron? So slow that by the time the awards were being handed out the following Tuesday as part of the final party at Mackinac Island’s Grand Hotel, a number competitors were still on the course. So slow that dozens of the 197 boats that crossed the starting line ended up dropping out, many within the first 24 hours. Most years, the first boats to finish do so on Sunday. But this time around the first…

As soon as I opened the e-mail bearing news of the Eagle Class 53, this sporty cat leapt straight to the top of my Boats-I-Want-to-Sail list. The performance multihull niche has grown like wildfire in the last decade, and this outrageously potent-looking foiling cat takes another leap into the outer limits of design. Created by a top-notch design and build team with deep America’s Cup roots for a client who originally wanted to convert his Gunboat 90 to a foiler—which would have been quite something to see—the Eagle Class 53 brings together the talents of designers Paul Bieker, Eric Jolly and Andres Suar and boatbuilder Wolfgang Chamberlain. They took full advantage of the open design brief to come up with a boat that will foil on either C- or T-foils…

When it comes to sailing, the first boat a newbie sets foot on can make all the difference in the world; which is why our editors were especially impressed with the new Zest training dinghy from RS Sailing when they selected it as one of their winners in SAIL’s 2018 Best Boat contest. Its sprightly yet predictable performance, ergonomic design and easily handled rig all combine to make the boat user-friendly, safe and fun to sail. A bright yellow sculpted thwart seat provides inboard seating for small crew not yet comfortable with hiking and doubles as a rowing seat when the optional oarlocks and oars are in use. Intermediate side-seats and comfortable side-decks in the main cockpit also allow less experienced sailors to stay comfortable while driving the boat. The…

“God must have been a sailor when he created the Caribbean,” a friend once told me. “How else could he have so perfectly aligned the crescent of West Indian islands running north to south with tradewinds blowing from the east at about Force 4-5 almost every day of the year?” I could see God’s perfect work for myself as I looked out the window of the plane taking me to Grenada. The Grenadines are as close to sailing paradise as you’ll find in the Caribbean and the islands are as lush as they come. It was November, and it was a case of three men on a boat looking for an early winter escape. My friends Pete and Ralph flew down from Boston, and we met at a bar called…

When I was 15, some of my sailing classmates kicked off the summer by sailing the Figawi, New England’s legendary season-opening race held every Memorial Day weekend. A winding course between Hyannis and Nantucket, it was a seemingly epic voyage to a bunch of kids who had never sailed boats larger than 420s. My teammates, though, were quick to tell me that it was men-only. No girls allowed. Yes, I know I should have found this suspicious and gotten a second opinion from someone who wasn’t a 15-year-old boy. But I was so embarrassed by the rejection that I never mentioned the Figawi to them again, and my hopes of sailing a “big boat” fell by the wayside. In fact, it was five years before it even occurred to me…

They say cruising is just fixing your boat in exotic places. Maybe that’s why so many people prefer to charter. After a week of sailing you pack your bags and step off your charter boat without another care in the world, leaving the base manager and mechanics to deal with the aftermath. Charter boats work hard, though, upward of 300 days a year depending on the base location. No matter how well cared for, a boat is a boat, and when you charter, you had better be prepared to do a little MacGyvering. A recent 10-day excursion in French Polynesia found us on a 7-year-old boat. She was a strong sailer, with crispy new sails, but she had been a workhorse. Every day I had to crawl into the port…