Table of contents for August 2019 in SAIL

A mid the widespread devastation caused by hurricanes Irma and Maria when they swept across the northern Caribbean in September 2017, the destruction of the iconic Bitter End Yacht Club on Virgin Gorda in the British Virgin Islands was particularly keenly felt by sailors. The popular destination had been a magnet for visiting cruisers, racers and charterers since the 1960s, and a stopover there to enjoy a few rum drinks and a fine dinner was almost mandatory for passing sailors. Such was the damage that the docks and waterfront buildings were swept away and the cottages sprawling down the hillsides to the beach all had to be demolished. It took some 20 months just to clear the 64-acre property of more than 100 ruined structures, and restore the beachfront and…

Britain’s Rolex Fastnet race is an ambitious notch in any sailor’s belt, so when Lottie Harland decided to put together a team of nine autistic sailors, it was a major undertaking. Harland is the founder of Ausome, a charity that uses sailing to promote personal and social growth in people on the autism spectrum. After difficulties connecting with her peers as a child, sailing taught Harland confidence, independence and social skills. “I want to give other people that experience,” she says, pointing out that traditional sailing courses are inaccessible to many people on the spectrum, especially for non-verbal sailors trying to communicate onboard. “Ausome was founded to bridge this gap in services for those autistic people looking to experience sailing for the first time or to further their skills.” Harland,…

SUPER-COZY THERMALS Developed in conjunction with Dongfeng Race Team, winner of the 2017-18 Volvo Ocean Race, Zhik’s HydroMerina Superthermals base layers combine the natural anti-odor, comfort and warmth benefits of Merino wool with the ultra-high wicking and enhanced durability of polypropylene. The result is a base layer that will keep you warm and dry while at the same time reducing chafe. Both tops and pants are available in unisex sizes. High-stretch for comfort, the thermals are also constructed with water-repellent Avlare fabric in the cuffs and ankles to keep your arms and legs dry: a good thing whether you’re racing around the world or just out for an extended cruise. $119. Zhik, zhik.com SAFE AND SOUND An age-old problem for smallboat sailors has been taking care of their wallets, keys…

There is something exciting about the extended anticipation of making landfall in a faraway place for the first time: the imminent meeting of expectations and reality, the inevitable differences from the mental pictures you’ve shaped. Through our decade of offshore sailing, my wife, Mia, and I have been fortunate enough to experience that feeling many times in the islands and countries we’ve called in at, both aboard our boat and others we’ve delivered, including Bermuda, Cuba, Canada, Scotland, Ireland, Britain, Sweden and Finland. Few, though, have had the romance of the Atlantic Islands we visited first in 2012, and then again in 2017—the Azores and Madeira, Portugese jewels of the eastern Atlantic. THE LONG WAY TO HORTA Isbjörn, our Swan 48, was running down the miles on the home stretch,…

Many cruising boats, especially smaller ones, don’t have a conventional oven. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t have all the baked foods you want, from bread to brownies to breakfast rolls to casseroles and even a roast chicken. All it takes is the right bit of gear and a willingness to experiment a little. OMNIA OVEN One of my favorite cooking tools is the Omnia Stove Top Baking Oven ($79, amazon.com), which is based on a centuries-old Middle Eastern invention. A circular aluminum pan with a hole in the middle sits on a steel base and is covered by a lid. Food is placed in the pan, its bottom is heated by hot air between the steel plate, and the pan, while morehot air goes up the inner hole…

In the rarified world of Mediterranean big-boat sailing, Italy’s Wally Yachts has few peers. Renowned for their minimalistic beauty, exquisite build quality and eye-watering price tags, these boats are the epitome of high-end sailing. While there have been many one-off Wallys, the latest fad among the company’s performance-obsessed clients is the WallyCento class, where the 100ft boats are built to a box rule that still allows plenty of latitude for individual customization. Owners compete against each other in a series of regattas around Mediterranean hotspots. Here, after rounding the leeward mark during the Loro Piana regatta in Porto Cervo, Sardinia, the crew of the WallyCento Magic Carpet3 springs into action to retrieve the boat’s giant masthead spinnaker before it hits the water— “shrimping,” in racing parlance. The crew work paid…

There’s a lot to said for a trailer-sailer. Say good-bye to expensive boatyard haulout and storage fees. Forget about the laborious annual bottom scrub and paint. Park your pride and joy in your backyard so you can keep a fond eye on her over winter. Luxuriate in lower insurance premiums. And as the trailer-sailing crowd love to say, you can go to windward at 55mph on your way to destinations it would take months to sail to on a bigger boat. Choosing a trailer-sailer, though, is no easier than trying to nail down a bigger boat. There are a lot of them, and it seems the only thing they have in common is that they have sails and can be launched and retrieved from a trailer. For the purposes of…

I arrived on the docks of Beaufort, North Carolina, in late April with two backpacks filled with new gear—everything I’d need for my first offshore passage. Though I’d been sailing for 16 years, graduating from dinghies to keelboats to a J/122, I’d spent my time racing and, in all those years, had never been out of sight of land. Fortunately for me, time-tested captain Andy Burton was headed home to Newport, Rhode Island, after a season in the Caribbean, and I was to join the delivery crew of his Baltic 47, Masquerade. Perhaps even more serendipitous was the fact Andy is just starting to take paying crew and teach them about passagemaking and seamanship, so I got to be a trial run for him while learning from an expert. Knowing…

Fourteen years ago I wrote several articles extolling the virtues of digital switching systems (DSS) and explaining why this technology was going to soon dominate the world of boat wiring and electrical systems. I was right in one sense—the technology is now becoming mainstream—however, my timing was off by more than a decade. What took so long? A conventional distribution system concentrates most of the switching functions for a boat’s circuits at the navigation station. To do this, the wiring for all these circuits must be brought up into a single breaker box, adding considerable distances to many circuits. To avoid voltage drop, cable sizes also have to be increased. The result is a substantial bundle of relatively large cables coming off the back of the breaker panel and then…

In last month’s column I covered the amazing mix of cultures that have called the Dalmatian Coast home over the centuries. Croatia cruising is like a smorgasbord of intertwined centuries, and the islands are a movie set. A little farther south, though, you’ve also got Greece, which has an even longer history and a what seems to be a monopoly on fabulously preserved ancient temples, amphitheaters and statues. Indeed, Greece makes Croatia look almost young by comparison. It also has multiple island groups to explore so that you can return over and over again and not see the same things twice. My latest trip to Greece was with Navigare Yachting (navigare-yachting.com), a charter behemoth with six locations in Europe alone. Our intended destination was the Cyclades island group south of…

It is with great sadness that we read of the murder of New Zealand cruiser Alan Culverwell, and the attack on his family, by criminals who boarded their boat in Panama’s Guna Yala/San Blas Islands early in May. The San Blas were known as a “safe” area to cruise. Aside from petty theft, there had never been reason to believe the region was unsafe, especially when compared to some of the area’s cities. Many cruisers feel that living aboard, even in exotic locations, is safer than living on land, but is it really? As cruisers, we generally anchor where nature gives us the best protection from wind and waves, not from humans. The human element is far more unpredictable than any weather forecast. What was once a friendly area can…

Looking at the photos of previous Tahiti Pearl Regattas, I thought there was no way this place could be real, that it was the visual equivalent of “Fake News.” It’s just not possible for anywhere to have water that clear, skies that blue, settings so bucolic and evocative that they’re on every computer in the world as a screensaver to annoyingly remind you that you’re at your desk and not there. Yet when you do get to Tahiti, you see this it’s exactly as it’s depicted. The people are attractive, friendly and kind, the scenery is stunning, the temperatures in the Austral autumn remain unvaried in the low 80s, and you quickly feel your internal turbines winding down to a low hum. It’s no wonder those first European and later American…

After sailing on Puget Sound and in British Columbia for over 30 years, my wife, Jeri, and I retired to Florida, bought a house on Punta Gorda and worked hard to get it straight. The walls had been painted, furniture bought and assembled, belongings packed, transported and unpacked, and with only a couple of shower doors yet to be replaced, I started looking at the boat ads. I’ve always wanted a Gemini catamaran. But while I’d checked them out at boat shows over the years and sailed a friend’s, they are not common in the Pacific Northwest. Time, money, opportunity and the right boat also never seemed to line up. Soon I found Lady Marie, a 1998 Gemini 105M that had had only one owner from new. She was well…

There has been a long tradition, both in the United States and abroad, of sturdy trailerable cruisers carrying their crews hither and yon in search of adventure. In fact, so celebrated are the accomplishments of these little tough-as-nails boats—think the West Wight Potter, Canadian-built Norseboat or any number of catboats, just to name a few—sailors could be excused for thinking trailer-sailers that you can sleep aboard have nothing to offer those in search of a bit of an adrenaline rush. However, those sailors couldn’t be more wrong. Since the advent of trailerable trimarans, in particular, trailer-sailing can now mean blistering speeds as well as comfort afloat. In more recent years, modern materials and design concepts have also resulted in a number of trailerable monohulls that make knots as well as…

WATER GETTING INTO COAX Q: While inspecting behind the nav station for my spring cleaning, I discovered water behind my chartplotter and VHF radio stack. Freshwater to boot! Do electronics leak? I didn’t think so. —Everette Gracy, Norton Shores, MI GORDON WEST REPLIES Last winter your region was pounded with rain, ice and snow, right? With a masthead VHF antenna or a stern-pulpit GPS antenna, water from rain, snow and ice can creep down coax cable via an exposed antenna connector jacket or seep into the jacket through cracks in, say, a GPS sensor coaxial cable line that froze last January. The water then migrates via capillary action down the braid of the coax, eventually pooling at the connector that feeds your antenna connections. The good news is that the…

There’s a fabulous line from an old Paul Simon song that I often sing to myself while sailing: I can gather all the news I need from the weather report. It is part of the magic of sailing, this ancient process by which we propel our vehicles through and with the environment that surrounds them. In conjuring that magic, the only thing that really matters is the weather. What is also magical, of course, is how accurate our modern weather reports have become, how much further into the future they can see, and how easily we can access them, even when sailing in the middle of nowhere. Still, even the best weather report can’t tell you everything. It may, for example, warn you that squalls are more or less likely…