Table of contents for March 2025 in PassageMaker

Kim Kavin grew up boating at her grandfather’s New Jersey lake house. Her marine articles have won dozens of national awards. She has descended more than 500 feet below the surface in a submarine, sailed through the chop aboard America’s Cup designs, and explored aboard expedition yachts in Indonesia, Galapagos and the South Pacific. Kim is also Passagemaker’s copy editor. Capt. Vincent Daniello grew up fishing and diving off South Florida. He ran charters and private boats from Canada through the Caribbean. Now based in Massachusetts, he writes and shoots photos for Boating, Power & Motoryacht and other marine titles. John Johnson first set foot on a boat when he was 7 years old. He served for six years in the Royal Navy on frigates and an aircraft carrier, and…

Riviera Yachts won us over with its Sport Yacht series. The boats are epic poems to the Aussie boating life, offering the ideal combination of indoor-outdoor living atop lithe, stout hulls built to take on the notorious seas off Australia. The model line, which ranges from 46 to 60 feet, was enhanced several years ago with the Platinum Series. In-house customization gives these boats modified exterior and interior styling cues that include gunmetal hulls and dark electronics arrays, with matching soft goods and other luxe touches. The popularity of this approach is undeniable. By the time the flagship 6800 Platinum Edition made her U.S. premiere at the 2024 Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show, the builder had already sold 30 hulls. Boarding from the swim platform, I was happy to see…

App developers have been working to deliver a chartplotter experience on tablets ever since Apple introduced the iPad in January 2010. It’s still debatable whether tablets are suitable as full replacements for installed navigation equipment, but some developments in the field make that debate livelier. For starters, today’s navigation apps are impressively robust with complete feature sets. In many cases, an internet connection and easy update mechanisms can deliver more or different functionality than traditional installed navigation electronics. However, heat, weather resistance and durability remain the Achilles’ heel of tablet-based navigation systems. In contrast to an installed navigation system, tablets give boaters options at their fingertips. Want to use Navionics charts? Download the Navionics Boating HD app and access the most recent charts for $49 a year. Need the U.S.…

Mike Kugler stood outside the headquarters of the Vripack design firm in the Netherlands, looking up at the American flag. It was flying in honor of the visit he was making that day alongside his mother, who was nearly 90 years old at the time. They had sure come a long way from the town of 8,000 people in southwest Nebraska. “I didn’t realize they were that big and did all these superyachts,” Kugler says. “They treated us great.” Indeed, Vripack is known for more than 7,500 completed projects. It has designs such as the 230-foot CRN Project Thunderball under construction in Italy, and the 141-foot Project Triple X being built at Alia Yachts in Turkey. The award-winning firm is now also partnering for the first time with Nordhavn, offering…

As a yachting journalist, I love boat shows. They provide an opportunity to get a glimpse behind the curtain. I generally arrive the day before a show opens to the public. I sneak into the event to get the lay of the land. Each time, I come away amazed by the organized chaos and the fact that when I arrive the next morning, everything is in its right place. Attendees only see the final product: polished steel railings, gleaming hulls, perfectly stained teak and smiling sales representatives. But there’s an armada of delivery captains, marketing coordinators, forklift operators, trade booth assemblers, brokers and boat detailers who do the heavy lifting. And beyond them, all over the world, are all the people involved with creating the boats. The naval architect’s hand-drawn…

B/OLD LOA: 50ft. Beam: 16ft. 2in. Draft: 4ft. 10in. Displacement: 70,500 lbs. Fuel: 1,200 gal. Water: 400 gal. Power: 2x 180-hp diesel inboards Our team’s mission with B/OLD was to design a platform for active owners who want the look of a classic workboat, but with modern ease of maintenance. That combination would describe many boats, but with B/OLD, we went further to expose the raw art of conceptual design. We started with her main profile. From a distance, she has the recognizable bona fides of an archetypal trawler. As one gets closer, the shapes and proportions of her superstructure zag from traditional design. Contrasting blocks and colored surfaces break up what is normally all white, giving B/OLD an appeal that we think makes her less vulnerable to market trends.…

Maybe you’ll notice the bilge pump running for a while, or maybe not. The alarm indicating high bilge water is hard to miss. Water gushing into the engine room, through what used to be a propeller shaft seal, is the ultimate eye-opener. With adequate maintenance, shaft seals seldom fail so severely, but these thin lines separate boats from the sea on large openings that lurk far beneath the waterline. Shaft seals fall into three categories: traditional stuffing boxes, face seals and lip seals. Each of these has its advantages, but none are maintenance-free. “Checking stuffing boxes or shaft seals is near the top of my list during engine-room checks,” says James Knight, president of Yacht Tech in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. His company mostly services long-distance cruising boats, whose shaft…

Luuc Klop wasn’t searching for a pilothouse cruiser. The longtime captain, whose day job is overseeing a fleet of pilot tenders and commanding a large cutter in the Netherlands, was exploring the market for a manageable project. He had his sights on a retired tug or workboat that could serve as a hobby and a legacy for his two children. But when he stumbled across the listing for a half-finished, 44-foot pilothouse trawler, something about its rugged, unfinished appeal called to him. “The build quality really impressed me, especially the engine room,” Klop says. “It had that authentic workboat feel.” When Klop learned of the vessel’s history, it only added to the mystique. Designed in 1990 by Piet Hersbach and built at the Schiedam yard in the Netherlands, the rugged,…

I admit it: I’m just not a morning guy. My family will readily back me up on this. I’ll snuggle back under the covers for the faintest of excuses: a rainy morning, a sunny morning and especially those days when the paperboy (yes, I still read a printed newspaper) manages to hit near the front porch so I can read in bed. As I said, it doesn’t take much. But there’s one type of morning I always enjoy, and it seems to embody much of what I love about cruising: the dawn watch. I uniformly volunteer to stand the last watch of the night. With many watch systems, this means I must endure two stints on deck in the darkness. I’ve always felt it was worth the effort. Dawn is…

DRAWING BOARD The latest in Hunt’s Ocean series, the 56, is under construction. The smallest model in a line that includes 63-, 68- and 76-foot versions, the Hunt 56 is also built with the venerable Hunt deep-V hull, which has a variable-deadrise bottom and a sharp, deep entry forward that flattens to some degree toward the transom. The benefits include a soft, dry and stable ride in a range of conditions, and confident tracking at all speeds. The 56 can be had in flybridge and express versions. Each has an option of an extended roof that shades the cockpit. Renderings show a full-beam master stateroom with a VIP forward and a lounge that flanks the galley down. A three-stateroom configuration is an option. ON THE NIGHSTAND Exploring America’s Great Loop:…

After spending a few weeks in the Netherlands, I found myself marveling at a process I’d once considered purely functional: boating through locks. In a country where entire cities are below sea level, locks are vital for controlling water and preventing floods. It’s quite different from the United States, where locks are primarily used to manage water levels in manmade canals. Lock structures allow boats to traverse sections of water at differing heights. It’s a process that may seem daunting at first, but that becomes second nature with a little basic understanding and good boat preparation. Locks are, in essence, water elevators for boats. Picture a chamber with gates at both ends. When a vessel enters, the entrance gate behind the boat closes, and the water level inside the chamber…

As a former professional captain, I spent thousands of hours delivering boats along the Intracoastal Waterway. The one constant chore during those many ICW miles was cleaning up the yellow-mustache hull stains that expanded upward from the waterline. No matter how well a boat is maintained, stains are a constant peril. They are best addressed sooner rather than later. Bird droppings, rust, corrosion, acid rain, mildew, diesel soot, poor quality wash-down water, marine growths and countless more environmental offenders can require intensive cleanings and restorations. Worse yet, a simple stain that gets ignored can reveal a more involved problem. A rust trail bleeding from a wooden hull once alerted me that the fasteners beneath the paint were rotting. On any modern boat, the number of holes drilled into the transom…

Lauren Tolla was having trouble processing what she was seeing. And feeling. And smelling. It was October 2021, and her husband, Tom, had persuaded her to go check out a boat that he had seen advertised for sale on Facebook Marketplace. They’d driven from their home in Guilford, Connecticut, up to New London, where it had rained the day before. The name of the 1984 Nauset 35 Downeast was Seahorse. Clearly, it had been ridden hard and put away wet. “It was dripping,” says Tom, who was in his late 50s at the time. “I was looking at it and trying to stay positive.” Lauren, who was in her early 60s, looked all around the boat’s interior. She then looked at Tom and said, “Do you think we can do…