Table of contents for May/June 2024 in PassageMaker

The origin story of Deep Water Yachts is about someone who was unsatisfied with current offerings, and who was graced with an entrepreneurial, restless mind. Founder Peter J. Bost was raised by the sea in Holland and pursued a career in the Netherlands Marine Corps. After serving his country, he logged thousands of nautical miles on a fiberglass vessel, wandering about the European coastline from Belgium to the French Riviera. “I found out what I wanted and didn’t like on a boat,” Bost says. He spent several months going around Holland “looking at all these little yards for the ideal boat, and I couldn’t find it.” Undeterred, he wrote his own set of specifications, found a naval architect who could interpret them to his liking—fellow Dutchman Willem Nieland—and settled on…

With the rapid advancement in self-driving cars, it was easy to predict that self-driving boats wouldn’t be far behind. Military and commercial craft will inevitably be ahead of recreational in adopting autonomous operation, but cruising boaters will definitely be welcoming the technology aboard in the near future. Autonomous features are already available for boat handling. An autopilot is a form of self-piloting, especially with the ability to lock it onto a route autonomously created by a GPS. Self-docking systems have also been available for a couple of years; they control proportional thrusters and transmissions to assist in maneuvering the boat into tight places. As sophisticated and as helpful as these tools seem, they are light years behind the technology that companies have in mind for us. One marine electronics company…

When equipment fails, boat owners often say they don’t know anything about electricity. They won’t touch any of the wiring. This is unfortunate because a majority of the time, faults are caused by loose connections, corroded wiring or blown fuses—all things that are simple to troubleshoot. The trick is being able to “see” why the electricity is not flowing. You have to know where to look. Adding a multimeter to an onboard toolkit is key to understanding what’s happening. A LOOK AT ELECTRONS Electricity requires a source of power. This source can be a battery charged with direct-current energy from an alternator, solar panel or charger; or the source can be alternating current from a generator or inverter. DC energy, unless it’s intended for propulsion, is generally low voltage: less…

Interior designer Victoria Sass starts every project by learning about a space’s story. It’s an appropriate formula for her studio, Prospect Refuge, named after a design theory that explains why clients choose certain environments over others. Taking that philosophy and turning it inward, you would find an upbringing that bucks convention. The 40-year-old grew up in sunny Santa Cruz, Calif., famed for its Endless Summer surfer culture. “My childhood was pretty bohemian,” she says. Not only did her parents drive a Volkswagen van, but they also lived out of it while visiting national parks. Now with three kids of her own in Minneapolis, Sass and her husband, Torben Rytt, couldn’t agree on the best way to explore the country. Rytt, a 45-year-old tech consultant raised just outside of Copenhagen, was…

I’ve done countless offshore passages, including a 3,000-miler without stops or even seeing another vessel. And here’s my short take: That’s a long, long way. That’s really, really boring. Yes, I know that this magazine is named Passagemaker. It suggests making longish offshore passages. I have another suggestion: bareboat charters. That 3,000-miler took us about 16 days, and we were banging off 8 knots when the winds and the seas looked upon us kindly. If the speed doesn’t register with you, that’s two full-length spy novels and 21,600 minutes of empty horizon. It is also 12 bottles of a pleasant pinot and about 1,250 miles per gallon of vin ordinaire. After the first day of departure excitement, it was endless tedium and monotony. Being awakened at midnight or, worse, 4…

Growing up, my penchant for building model boats was insatiable. In many ways—like the glue I used to hold hulls and decks together—it cemented my career path as a boat designer. A few of those creations have survived and are now my children’s toys. For some reason, the ones that remain are Storm-class patrol boats that are modeled off vessels built for the Royal Norwegian Navy in the mid-1960s. In Norway, the fast patrol boats are called missilkanonbåter, meaning boats with missiles and guns. Their design is attributed to countryman Harald Henriksen, a career Norwegian serviceman. The graceful proportions of these fighting craft always stuck with me: Henriksen gave the navy a functional fighting machine in a streamlined, beautiful craft. Recently, while engaging in my morning ritual of drinking coffee…

One could say the Kadey-Krogen 54 broke the mold in a big way. In the timeline of Kadey-Krogen production boats, this serious motorsailer launched in 1988, after the 42, the 38 cutter (designed by and for co-founder Jim Krogen) and the 36 Manatee. The 54 was also a bit of a pioneer. According to Jim Krogen’s sons, Kurt and Jimmy, she was believed to have the first asymmetrical house design in a Kadey-Krogen, and possibly the first one available on any production cruising trawler. Her design could take her anywhere. Patty (Hull No. 7) was delivered to the French Riviera after a 24-day, 4,800-mile journey across the Indian and Atlantic oceans. Overall, eight hulls were built. This is a workboat-inspired cruiser. Amid a sailboat’s complexity of shrouds and stays, booms…

When you’re trying to buy a boat, your surveyor will provide a summary document. This summary will be several pages long with photos and a list of recommendations. Your insurance underwriter will need a copy, and the results will certainly influence whether you move forward with the deal or walk away. We advise our sellers to think of the summary as a school report card. The better the seller has cared for the boat, the closer the summary will be to a coveted A grade. But as the buyer, you ultimately need to rate the vessel with your own criteria as a pass or a fail. The survey report is time-sensitive. It starts the clock to get approvals to meet your contract due-date obligations. You need to allow time for…

Arksen is a thoroughly modern boatbuilder, which is to say that it is not a boatbuilder at all. Instead, it’s a fulfillment agency that can address an adventurous boater’s needs from its London headquarters. It doesn’t matter whether the boater needs a $1,200 jacket, an upcycled Land Rover, a zippy chase boat or a hybrid explorer (as a co-owner or outright owner). And, Arksen is happy to take payment in cryptocurrency. If it all sounds a little unorthodox, it is reassuring to get up close to the first Arksen 85, an all-aluminum, twin-diesel motoryacht with the uncompromising air of a battleship. This is a rugged, go-anywhere machine that wears its unfaired welds with pride. The owner opted not to paint the hull, creating a zero-maintenance workboat exterior, but inside, this…

Founded in 2002 by longtime J/Boats honcho Bob Johnstone, MJM Yachts built its brand on a line of handsome, capable vessels with all-weather pilothouses and accommodations for extended onboard time. A few years back, after two decades in Boston, the company opened its own boatbuilding facility in North Carolina. The MJM 4, which splashed in late 2022, was among the first vessels to come out of the new facility. The latest model is much the same as its brethren, but instead of sporting a pair of 12-cylinder, 600-hp outboards, she is matched to 440-hp diesel sterndrives from Volvo Penta. One thing that MJM retains on the 46-footer is her winning layout. I’m fond of her large, seat-laden cockpit (with a Bimini top), and the boarding door for easy access to…

One of the best dollar-for-dollar values in boat ownership is the $20 or so it costs for a bottle of wax to keep gelcoat ingood shape. Gelcoat is nothing more than a base of vinyl or polyester resin impregnated with a colorant. Gelcoat lacks the strength of fiberglass-reinforced plastic, but is durable in its mission to add beauty while requiring little more than simple care and attention. The almond hue of the gelcoat may be all that is left of a 35-year-old trawler on the hard at the last-chance boatyard. And gelcoat will always be the first thing you notice about any fiberglass boat. The key to maintaining the gelcoat is twofold: Wash it regularly with gentle soap and a thorough rinse to remove air and waterborne dirt and grime,…

We wake as first light creeps over the horizon. The orange hue brings us to deck for another wondrous sunrise and a refreshing, 10-knot breeze from the southeast. Behind us, we can just make out the Australian mainland. Our Fleming 65, Freja, sits in 30 feet of crystal-clear water in the north of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Today’s weather looks to be a repeat of yesterday’s: wind building to 20 knots, a small swell and neap tides resulting in good protection behind the fringing reef. This will enable us to fit in two scuba dives. Visibility here is superlative—averaging over 65 feet and sometimes well over 160 feet—and we’ll be suitably rewarded with a dazzling array of sea life, from sharks to nudibranchs and everything in between. Between dives, we’ll…

“So hope for a great sea change on the far side of revenge. Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.” These mental images of the sea by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney explore themes of struggles and hope. My husband, Gerry, and I left Dublin in 1986 with our baby daughter and an ambitious spirit to make a better life in Brooklyn, N.Y. Our immigrant journey would have an imprint on every other life choice we would make, including our notion to cross the Pacific, many years later, in our Nordhavn 43. Our cruising life began in America in 1990 when, with no sailing experience whatsoever, we met a fellow Irishman who had crossed the Atlantic in a 27-foot Westerly Centaur. He told us the same model was…