Table of contents for May/June 2025 in PassageMaker

JIM SPRAGUE GETTING IT TOGETHER WRITER Jim Sprague spends much of the summer around Escanaba and on Michigan’s Great Lakes with his wife, Lori, and their family and friends. Sprague, a former champion boomerang thrower, enjoys the outdoors, travel and coaching high-school robotics. Follow the family’s adventures on board their 49-foot custom trawler Perseverance at naval-gazing.com. NORRIS COMER 101 YEARS OF NEW TWRITER Norris Comer is a Pacific Northwest-based author, writer and sometime seagoer. His award-winning book Salmon in the Seine: Alaskan Memories of Life, Death, & Everything In-Between is available wherever books are sold. You can follow him on Substack at Norris Note. STEPHENIE HOLLYMAN SMALL BOAT, BIG LIVING WRITER A former New York Harbor tugboat cook and Fulbright scholar, Stephenie Hollyman lives on her 36-foot Sundowner trawler, PoTolo,…

The man who owns Hull No. 1 of the new flagship Helmsman 46 Pilothouse had the boat commissioned at CSR Marine boatyard in Seattle. I caught up with him at the nearby Salmon Bay Café, where he told me about his life growing up on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, spending a lot of time on boats. “I’ve had all different kinds of boats, from fishing boats to express cruisers and now trawlers,” Robert Chanpong told me, going through about 20 years’ worth of boats. The Helmsman is named Kiskadee, after a tropical bird native to the Caribbean. Chanpong’s trawler lifestyle began in 2018 when he ordered a Helmsman 38E. “I had a fishing boat at the time, an aluminum outboard cuddy cabin,” he says. “To be honest, because I…

Sustained 30-knot winds buffeted Sea Nest, which was anchored on the south end of Eleuthera in Rock Sound, Bahamas, when I caught up with Julia and Michael Bertelsen. It was the couple’s third season wintering aboard their Ranger Tugs R-25, and they were ready for the onslaught. When a storm blew in the night before, “we just switched our anchor on the location of our anchorage to the other side of the bay. So now we have the generator running and we’re doing our office work,” Michael says. A professional wildlife photographer by trade, Michael and Juila lead tours throughout Canada via their company, Wild Outdoor Photography. Winter is for planning and for living as nomadic liveaboards, armed with GoPros. Several of the videos on their YouTube channel, Expedition Sea…

As I write this, it’s midwinter boat show season, at least in Florida. I found myself wandering the docks, pausing before one of the new breed of small trawlers. One particular boat, thankfully, didn’t call itself a fast cruiser, an oxymoron right up there with jumbo shrimp or deafening silence. The idea of “cruising” at 30-plus knots is just as contradictory as saying “small crowd.” I decided to go aboard after admiring long rows of drink holders, which, perhaps, are a necessity for fast cruising. Then, I noticed a sign on the rail next to the boarding gate: “Please do not pull on the rail when boarding.” Being a perverse sort, I considered this warning and then decided to test my suspicions. I used the rail to lever myself (at…

I loaded the pickup bed under the cover of twilight, shivering a bit when stocking the cooler. It wasn’t the ice that got me, but the chill of the early morning air. The end of summer was upon us. On the way to the town marina, where my buddy’s 17-foot center console was berthed, I nursed a large take-out coffee and buttered Kaiser roll to steel me for the day ahead. As the first to arrive dockside, I started to back the truck into a spot to unload my gear. That’s when the duct tape that held the rearview mirror to the windshield gave way. My slick move to catch it resulted in a lapful of lukewarm French vanilla. It was probably a better scent than the unwashed board shorts. I…

I’m an advocate of reimagining classic yachts in a modern context, and there are more than enough designs to keep me busy for many years. Nearly all of them inspire me, but to tell you the truth, I have mixed feelings about some of them. One of those is the fantail. The aesthetics of a spooned transom are timeless. This feature is an elegant, graceful way to complete a design. I appreciate how a fantail makes the mass of the ship seemingly disappear in a narrow, rounded transom, and I’m pleased with the way the boat floats—with the countenance of a royal. So why don’t I like it? Because of the way my family and I use a boat. A fantail doesn’t provide our preferred leisure experience, which involves a…

Back in my days as a freelance skipper, fuel problems were foremost among my mechanical worries. Water, debris or microbe contamination often clogs fuel filters only after rough seas stir the tanks, and engine-crippling air leaks might not crop up until a boat is running at cruising speed with the tanks drawn down. I often ran twin-engine boats, so there was usually one operating engine to crawl out of peril, but a neglected fuel system can kill both engines at once. Take it from me: The metaphorical sinking feeling is downright joyful compared to drifting toward a breaking reef without propulsion. The thing is, even in well-maintained boats, fuel system issues seem to come up often. Just a little ongoing attention can head off most problems before they leave a…

DRAWING BOARD OUTER REEF ANNOUNCES THE 540, ITS SECOND ADVENTURE SERIES MODEL Like the steel 780 Adventure—the first model that Outer Reef Yachts teased after its strategic merger with the Dutch shipyard Lynx Yachts—this fiberglass 56-footer is drawn by Bernd Weel Design and engineered in the Netherlands. Her hull will also be fast-displacement, creating the characteristics of a full-displacement boat for seakeeping with a faster cruise speed and top end, and she will be CE A-class rated for open-ocean navigation. The three-stateroom layout includes a full-beam, amidships master stateroom with a king berth; an en suite VIP forward; and a portside guest stateroom with twin bunks. Crew quarters are optional. Powered by 600-hp Volvo Penta shaft drives, the 540 is reported to have a 2,000-nautical-mile range at displacement speeds. outerreefyachts.com…

Let’s talk about the foundation of skilled boat handling. I will begin, of course, with field-goal kickers in the National Football League. No, I haven’t gone off the deep end. Stay with me. In the 1990 NFL season, the chances of a kicker making a field goal from 50 yards was about 35 percent. Compare that to today, when kickers have improved their success rate to nearly 75 percent. That’s a staggering improvement in a sport where games are often decided by three points or less. What changed? Did kickers suddenly become bigger or stronger? Not exactly. Teams credit this increased performance to one major change: coaching. In 1990, precious few NFL teams had a dedicated kicking coach. Kickers, for the most part, were left to figure things out on…

We’d never had my octogenarian parents on board our 49-foot passion project, Perseverance, and if we were going to do it, the time was in June, in Chicago. They’d be passing through on their last epic driving vacation from their home in Connecticut to our region in the Midwest, and we wanted, at least once, for them to experience all the great things that have made owning this boat worth it. Logistics for meeting them in June dictated that we start our cruising season with our longest-ever-attempted voyage. Chicago is about 260 miles south of our winter quarters in Marinette, Wisc., so we planned to traverse Lake Michigan with several stops along the way. We built in slack for the inevitable weather and equipment delays, and we got buy-in from…