I describe my home port of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, as the unofficial waterway capital of the world. In fact, many of the boaters with whom I belly up to bars here are fair-weather cruisers like me, quite content hanging around the shallows, where boating tends to be more comfortable, safe and manageable for our children. 

Great pleasure can be had with that type of boating, which is vastly different from the bold offshore endeavors some of our readers undertake. I’m basically playing in the kiddie pool, which is fine, though sometimes it feels like a waste of a perfectly good ocean. Sure, I’ve also enjoyed every drip of some salty offshore legs. They’ve made for some of my most vivid and fulfilling memories on the water. Still, like many of you, I’ve yet to cross an ocean under sail, and a circumnavigation is more a fantasy than a reality. 

Where I’m lucky is that I can embrace my role of helping make the truly adventurous stories come to life within the pages of Cruising World. I can’t imagine the sense of pride and achievement (and relief) that comes with catching that first glimpse of land on the other side of an ocean, or from crossing one’s wake after circling the globe, but I can read and dream about it. 

Cruisers are an adventure-oriented breed. A lust for open water and a healthy respect for Mother Nature run thick in our DNA. Our happy place is any lat/lon where the sea reveals its serene beauty and formidable power. The allure of offshore sailing lies in its ability to transport us to uncharted waters, literally and metaphorically. As we cast off lines and bid farewell to familiar shores, we embark on a transformative journey where self-reliance and resilience become our trusted companions. Each voyage is a unique story, etched with the imprints of challenges overcome, camaraderie forged and dreams realized.

One of the most profound lessons we learn at sea is humility. The vastness of the ocean humbles us, reminding us of our insignificance in the grand scheme of nature. This humility is what drives us to become better sailors, better stewards of the sea. It fuels our thirst for knowledge and our relentless pursuit of skills that can mean the difference between life and death in the unpredictable theater of the deep.

In our sport, safety and preparedness are paramount. We pursue mastery of navigation, where technology and tradition coexist to guide us safely through the labyrinth of currents and weather patterns. We stress the importance of proper maintenance and equipment checks, where vigilant attention to the smallest details can prevent catastrophe. We also learn from stories of survival, where sailors confronted the harshest of conditions and emerged as stronger, wiser mariners. 

Safety at sea is also about the profound connection we share with our fellow sailors. The bonds formed at sea are unique, born out of shared challenges, triumphs and the understanding that we are one another’s lifelines. To that effect, I’m drawn to the stories told by fellow sailors who are out there—many of them way off the grid—facing those challenges and experiencing those triumphs every day. For a shining example of this spirit of camaraderie, look no further than Cruising Club of America member Steve Brown, a venerable skipper who knows a thing or two about heavy weather. Throughout his sailing career, Brown and his wife, Trish, took on a four-year circumnavigation aboard their Oyster 56, Curious, sailed a 30,000-mile circumnavigation of the Americas—sailing north from Camden, Maine, and then an east-to-west transit of the Northwest Passage—and spent more than his fair share of time in the Southern Ocean. 

Brown is up for debating the superlatively inhospitable places on Earth. Along the way, there’s been brash ice and icebergs, rogue waves and drogues, penguins and polar bears. He’s a sailor who’s had the real-life experience of switching from gale-force storm management to survival tactics after conditions transcend control—just the kind of expert you want to lean in to for heavy weather sailing strategies that may save your life. And the recent story about how he managed to lift up a battle-weary crew in the harshest of elements off Antarctica is a must-read.

If you’re like me, perhaps you’ve recently developed an itch to leave the shallows once more, to let your mind wander and wonder about aspiring to that next tier. I’m all for it but with one caveat: Know your limits. With great adventure comes great responsibility.

The post Leaving the Shallows appeared first on Cruising World.

My old Caribe Hypalon RIB dinghy had started to deflate, so I used a soapy-water spray to test for leaks. The forward-chamber air valve was leaking—not around the perimeter, where they normally do, but instead from inside the valve, indicating that it was not making an airtight seal. 

I tried to clean the inside with a cotton ball and liquid soap, and that did reduce the bubbles a little, but not entirely. I also fitted a second sealing washer on the valve cap and squeezed it tight up to the valve face, but the boat still deflated over a few days. “You’ve got to replace the valve,” someone told me. 

It was not what I wanted to hear, but off I went. I bought a Halkey-Roberts air valve from Amazon. It consists of an inner valve and an outer casing that screw together, clamping the valve to the chamber. I couldn’t loosen the old valve by hand, but I managed it after buying a wrench that fits inside the valve, enabling more turning force. It is best to do this with the boat inflated, which offers more solid support.

After fully deflating the boat, I gripped the inner valve body through the thick Hypalon ­material to prevent it from dropping into the chamber. Then I unscrewed the valve. I had the new part ready to screw back in, but after repeated attempts, it simply would not screw into the old body.

I struggled to hold the valve body with one hand while examining the old and new outer valves. The threads on the new valve were much finer than the threads on the old one. There was no way the new valve would thread into the old body. 

Apparently, there are different types of Halkey-Roberts valves. With cramps setting into my fingers, I finally had to let go of the body. It fell into the depths of the chamber.

I called Halkey-Roberts in St Petersburg, Florida, and learned that they altered the valves more than 10 years ago. I asked if they could sell me an old one. Nope. They said I had to figure out how to fit the new body inside and screw it into the new outer valve.

This is decidedly easier said than done. The hole in the chamber is only 1¾ inches in diameter, and the valve rim is 2½ inches. There is no way the old valve will come out, or the new piece will go back in. The aperture is simply too small.

Looking for help online, I was dismayed to learn that the only way to get the new valve body inside the chamber was to slit a hole big enough to get a hand through, and then hold the body in place while screwing the two halves together. This means that anyone with an older boat that has Halkey-Roberts valves will have to replace a leaking one by slitting and patching the chambers.

 More online research taught me that Hypalon requires a special two-part glue to bond a patch to the material. I bought a glue kit for $48.95, which is the most expensive glue I have ever bought in my life, plus another $38.95 for a 12-inch-square piece of patching material. So, along with $10.23 for the new valve and $9.45 for the wrench, the total came to $107.58.Quite an expensive leak.

I started the operation by donning rubber gloves and using acetone to remove blue paint from the dinghy. The work area was soon back down to the original gray material. Then, feeling like a surgeon about to perform the first incision on a very fat person, I used an X-Acto knife to cut a 6-inch-long slit in the dinghy chamber. My wife, whose arms are thinner than mine, reached in, found the old valve body in the bottom of the chamber, and brought it out. Holding the new valve, I then shoved my hand in, and managed to offer it up to the valve hole just below. I then screwed the two halves together and fastened them as tightly as I could using the special wrench, forming an airtight seal—I hoped. 

I was told not to use any sealant—such as glue or silicone—between them, but instead just to screw them together, dry and tight.

All of this was relatively painless (after making the first incision, that is), but now came the job of patching the slot to make it airtight. The instructions with the glue were precise, with six specific operations. 

The first directive warned that the humidity level should not be above 60 percent. With North Carolina suffering a heat wave that week, I waited, along with the dinghy, which was deflated and forlorn in my garage.

I made the cut in the top of the chamber, and there was nothing to support it inside, so I pressed two strips of duct tape under the cut seam inside the chamber to pull it together temporarily. I then smeared a thin layer of marine Goop glue along the cut and let it dry. This glue is ideal for flexible material because it stays quite flexible itself. I didn’t see any need to remove the Goop because even this weak seal allowed the chamber to inflate slightly, giving me some support as I prepared the patch.

On the first cool, low-­humidity day, I cut a patch out of the piece of Hypalon ­material, making it 1 inch larger all around the slit, and with rounded edges at both ends. 

I prepared the surface of the chamber by roughing it with 80-grit sandpaper, exactly as instructed. I then poured some of the adhesive into a glass container and added the curing agent. This was pretty much guesswork because I had no way to measure the glue. One thing the instructions don’t mention is the type of container to mix the two parts in. Do not use a plastic or styrene cup because the glue will dissolve it. I used an old glass jar, which let me see how much glue was being poured.

Applying the glue is a two-part process. First, a thin layer is applied to the joint and the patch, which I did with a ½-inch-wide, stiff throwaway brush. I then allowed both pieces to dry. Half an hour later, a second coat is applied to both parts. After a few minutes, when the glue is tacky, the patch is glued to the boat. I did this by rolling the patch over the slit from one end to the other to reduce the chance of air pockets. The partially inflated tube allowed me to use enough pressure on the roller to expel any air pockets. 

After an hour, I could feel the excess glue beginning to set, so I inflated the chamber a little more. To my surprise, no air came out of the patch or the new valve. 

The next directive was to let the patch cure for at least 24 hours. I left mine for 48 hours, then inflated it to the recommended pressure of 3 psi. I also couldn’t resist testing the new valve with the soapy water. To my intense relief, it did not bubble at all, nor were there any bubbles around the patch. 

The glue fully cures after six days, but I left my boat for a week before hoisting it back on the davits of my 50-foot schooner, Britannia. As I write this, the RIB has maintained pressure for a month, but it does vary a bit with the weather. It softens a little at night when the air is cooler, and then firms up during warm days. 

This was another job that I had never done before and managed it myself. Not only is success gratifying, but I save a lot of money and learn the intricate workings of my boat, which might someday be a lifesaver at sea.

Roger Hughes is a professional captain, sailing instructor, restorer and happy imbiber.

The post Dinghy Valve Repair on a Budget appeared first on Cruising World.

I routinely encounter defects related to design, materials and assembly in raw-water plumbing systems on cruising vessels. These defects could, and sometimes do, lead to flooding and the total loss of vessels. Here’s a look at the three most common examples of these defects.

The Un-Seacock

Seacocks let crew stem water flow quickly and easily, either for routine service or in the event of a failed hose or fitting or other raw-water emergency. These valves must be readily accessibleand able to operate with relative ease. “Readily accessible” means no tools are needed to access a seacock, nor should a significant quantity of gear need to be moved.

One of the most common of seacock errors involves mismatched threads. Through-hull fittings, sometimes called “skin” fittings, are nearly always made using parallel, straight or NPS threads, while most inline ball valves use tapered or NPT threads. The two are wholly incompatible, and yet I encounter this dangerous assembly practice on a regular basis, on new and old vessels alike. The mismatch leads to a scant two or three threads of engagement compared with a proper seacock with matching threads, which yields eight to 10 turns.  

Underrated Hose

The average cruising ­vessel might use more than a half-dozen types of hose, from fuel and waste to potable-water exhaust. Hose used for raw water, especially below the waterline, should be specifically designed for the application.  

The most common rated raw-water hose carries an SAE J2006 rating (it’s usually a black composition called EPDM, although it can be red or blue silicone). This type of hose is suited for marine wet-exhaust systems. It’s robust. 

With few exceptions, what’s typically not suited for raw water is most clear PVC hose, even if it’s reinforced with nylon filament or spiral (some of these are designed for the food-service industry). 

When I confront builders and yards with clearly noncompliant hose, they frequently ask me, “What makes this hose a problem?” My response is simple: “Is this hose approved for an application where if it fails, a vessel could sink?”  

Furthermore, if the hose easily crushes or kinks, especially when it’s warm, then it’s not suitable for raw water, and it’s especially ill-suited for intake or suction applications.

Wrong Alloy

Only a handful of metal alloys are suited for raw-­water plumbing use. Bronze, which is made primarily from copper, tin and, usually, traces of silicon and other metals, is highly corrosion-resistant for raw-water applications. However, there’s bronze, and then there’s bronze.

Manganese bronze and Tobin bronze, for instance, can include an appreciable quantity of zinc, technically placing them in the brass family. This makes them entirely unsuitable for raw-water plumbing. Any copper alloy that contains more than 15 percent zinc is technically brass and ­therefore should not be used for ­raw-water plumbing.  

Using high zinc-bearing alloys often leads to dezincification, in which zinc corrodes from the alloy, leaving behind a porous, ­weakened structure with a telltale pinkish hue.

Some builders use brass through-hulls and seacocks, with the caveat that they must be bonded and cathodically protected with anodes. This approach is flawed and has led to flooding and vessel loss. Forgetting to replace a zinc should not lead to seacock failure. Barring stray-current corrosion, seacocks, through-hull fittings and other metallic raw-water plumbing should last the life of the vessel. Stainless steel, even 316, while corrosion-­resistant, does not possess the level of corrosion resistance of bronze. This does not prohibit the use of stainless steel for this application, but it is a clear second choice to bronze.   

A nonmetallic option such as glass-reinforced nylon for seacocks and through-hulls, which complies with American Boat and Yacht Council standards, is also an acceptable alternative. 

Steve D’Antonio offers services for boat owners and buyers through Steve D’Antonio Marine Consulting.

The post Raw-Water Plumbing Tips appeared first on Cruising World.

I upgraded from Second Wind, a 35-foot Bavaria Cruiser, to Beckon, a 39-foot Jeanneau Sun Odyssey 39i Performance, in anticipation of cruising the Caribbean for a year or more. My home base is Puerto Rico, and Beckon was in Southwest Harbor, almost as far north in Maine for sailing as you can get. My friend and Jeanneau broker, Francis Shiman-Hackett of Bluenose Yachts, enticed me to sail the coast of New England for the summer, then head south in November after the hurricane season. 

Little did I know that I wouldn’t even get out of Maine before learning some important lessons about being careful and resourceful as a ­singlehanded cruiser. 

I departed just after Memorial Day under an unusually bold, sunny sky, with flat seas and scant wind. The mild conditions allowed me to work out the kinks of sailing a new boat. Beckon has electric winches, a self-flaking system, a sizable forward cabin with stowage, and solid navigation instruments. It has a taller mast and longer keel, which gave it the performance designation. All of this was great for me as a solo sailor.

There was not another ­sailboat to be seen on the 14-nautical-mile motorsail to lovely and protected Swan’s Island, where I picked up a mooring ball, as well as a lobster for dinner from the Fisherman’s Co-Op. The next morning, I motorsailed southwest against a prevailing but mild southwest wind, intending to anchor in Long Cove on Isle Au Haut for the night.

Because it was a cold, cloudy day with little to do on anchor, I pushed past the island and bypassed Vinalhaven Island, seeking a mooring at Tenants Harbor, which is full of lobster boats. By midafternoon, I calculated that I would reach the harbor at dusk—not ideal for an unfamiliar anchorage. My new plan became Home Harbor, located between Pleasant Island to the south and Hewett Island to the northeast, reachable with daylight hours to spare. It’s more of a bay than a harbor, and it’s protected from southwest winds, but the Hewett Rocks ledge was directly in my course heading. I sailed past the rocks at midtide, and a late-afternoon sun peeking out of the clouds illuminated their rugged ­beauty and dangerousness.  

Once inside the tranquil bay, I dropped anchor in 16 feet of water. I am used to the sand bottom of Caribbean anchorages with no tidal range, so I tested my setting twice with hard bursts in reverse. I felt confident that I was securely set. The water was glass, the air was crisp, there was no movement to the boat, the late afternoon sun was bright, and the panoramic background was dramatic, with pink and white clouds ringing the horizon. Smooth and jagged rocks formed the shore. I thought that I would sleep safely and securely, and saw no need to use an anchor alarm. After dinner, I fell hard asleep in my V-berth.

At 1:30 a.m., I heard the screech of my carbon-monoxide alarm. Then I heard the unmistakable sound of my anchor dragging—not an occasional drag, but instead a constant, loud stuttering. I donned my cold-weather jacket and pants, turned on my navigation instruments, and raced up the companionway shoeless. 

I was stunned to find myself in pea-soup fog and air full of cold, thick mist in pitch-black darkness. I could not tell where I was, but my depth sounder showed 16 feet. I felt temporarily relieved, deducing that I could not have dragged far. 

Then I heard the water sway against what I thought was the rocky shore of Pleasant Island. I went below and grabbed my high-powered spotlight. It only emphasized the cold-water mist. Visibility was mere feet. I could see neither land nor shore, though I kept scanning 360 degrees. 

I went below again, this time to fetch Navionics on my iPad. I could not find my location in the bay. I moved the chart in a circle to find my position, and I was horrified to find that Beckon was within feet of Hewett Rocks, the very ledge I had avoided the previous afternoon. I had drifted some 300 yards. I kept scanning with my light and finally saw the jagged rocks within feet off the port side of Beckon.  

With keys already in the ignition, I fired up the engine. I went below to turn on my windlass, leaped back up the companionway, and walked forward on my starboard side deck, one hand holding the light and the other holding the lifelines. I did not take my thumb off the windlass remote until the anchor violently shook in its cradle. 

Navionics seemed to suggest that Beckon was parallel to the rocks. I did not know whether to go in forward or reverse, but I needed to make a quick decision. With one hand on the wheel and the other holding my light, I chose reverse. 

The question then became: How do I get back to the anchorage? After I reached sufficient depth, I took the protective cap off my binnacle compass. I stayed in reverse until I felt comfortable that I was a fair distance from Hewett Rocks, then I put Beckon in forward.

Slowly, I tried to connect the compass heading with the red arrow on Navionics. I could see nothing in the fog and darkness, but I knew that my only impediment to reaching the anchorage was a handful of lobster buoys.  

There is a lag in the ­movement of the arrow on the screen following a course change with the wheel of the boat. During daylight, it becomes a part of how you drive, but in darkness, it was an almost insurmountable barrier. I tried to go southwest, but I continually overcorrected and was heading in a circle back to Hewett Rocks. More reverse. I did this several times before I started getting the hang of how to navigate by compass in the dark.

I was horrified to find that Beckon was within feet of Hewett Rocks, the very ledge I had avoided the previous afternoon. I had drifted some 300 yards.  

Still, I seemed to be going in circles. I was trying to drive to the middle of the bay, but I found only the northern part, too close to the rocky shoreline. It took me the better part of an hour to find the middle. With my light, I kept seeing the same two orange-and-white lobster buoys, sometimes to port, other times to starboard. I thought that if I woke the residents of the nearby homes, they would think a crazy sailor was doing doughnuts in the bay in reverse with a searchlight.  

I dropped anchor in the southeast corner of the harbor, very close to the shore. I could see the outline of the rocks with my light and thought that I was perhaps 20 feet from land. I weighed anchor and tried again, finally closer to the ­middle of the bay, and right next to the orange-and-white buoys. How I did not drive over any lobster buoys was beyond me.  

My anchor did not set well. I dragged, but I was in a decent location. Fifth time’s the charm, I told myself. Exhausted, I decided simply to watch it. 

I went below and looked at my phone. It was 3 a.m. I had to laugh at myself—I had narrowly avoided disaster on Day Two of my journey. But I had done it, and done it on my own. I briefly thought about making coffee; instead, with my jacket and wet clothes on, and with frozen feet, I collapsed in my V-berth, face up.

It did not hit me until I woke, when I looked at the chart again, that after my anchor dislodged, I drifted over 49 feet of water depth. My anchor reset, to a degree, in 16 feet of depth next to Hewett Rocks, all while I was sleeping soundly. Was I within minutes or more of crashing against the rocks? And why had the carbon-monoxide alarm triggered? Perhaps it was something divine or a warning from the universe.  

The obvious lessons from this experience are to let out sufficient rode and to account for the tidal range. In that part of Maine, the tidal range is 10 feet. Sixteen feet at midtide, when I arrived, meant that high tide would mean at least 21 feet of depth, which requires a quite different calculation on anchor scope.  

I was seduced by the beauty and serenity of that bay. In coastal Maine, conditions can change in minutes, and fog can roll in like a sandstorm without warning or forecast. So, set an anchor alarm, no matter the initial conditions. A captain I met on Mount Desert Island suggested keeping the GPS on and waking yourself at midnight to check your position. Had I done so, I could have seen my tracks and followed them back.

Overall, if you are going to cruise solo, be ready to rescue yourself. Another sailor would have navigated the compass and chart plotter in the dark much more effectively than I did. 

The morning after my almost disaster, and after the heaviest of the fog had lifted, I motored the 6 nautical miles to Tenants Harbor and saw only the occasional lobster boat. I picked up a mooring ball and slept like a rock that night.  

In the early-morning hours, my carbon-monoxide alarm shouted at me again. The illusion of a divinely inspired intervention disappeared like burned-off fog. I ventilated the salon, reset the alarm, and went back to sleep.  

The final lesson learned is to keep the batteries in your carbon-monoxide alarm up to date. That alarm can save you in more ways than one.

Damian LaPlaca is currently in Puerto Rico aboard his Jeanneau Sun Odyssey 39i Performance, Beckon.

The post The Dos and Don’ts of Anchoring In a Tidal Zone appeared first on Cruising World.

The Lesser Antilles, on the eastern rim of the Caribbean Sea, is perhaps the finest watery hideaway for boaters on our planet. It’s impossible to exaggerate the magnificence of this sailors’ paradise. It is as if God and Walt Disney conspired to design the perfect cruising ground: perfect wind, perfect seas and, most of all, perfect harbors. 

And if all that weren’t enough, these harbors are also inhabited by joyous folks with wide smiles. The Caribbean is especially attractive for sailors who like to party—who desire to spend a decade or two hard aground on the mahogany reef. 

From a scientific perspective, the key to understanding this area is plates. The plates are tectonic. They bump into each other, stimulating partial melting of the plates above the subduction zone. These collisions result in arcs of ­volcanoes. In the Lesser Antilles, this happens at regular 40-mile intervals. 

I was confused about this when I arrived in the Antilles in the 1970s. That was, until I purchased a few cases of rum (at 82 cents a bottle) and met up with some farmers tending to their spices and herbs. Thus armed, I began exploring the islands from Culebra to Trinidad. 

Here’s what happens: Pressure builds and builds and builds until the pressure in the earth’s core is so great that it blows a hole along the crust of the tectonic plates. That’s when lava, which is boiling molten rock, flows out. If there’s enough lava, it forms a mountain. 

Often, mountains are pretty. And sloping mountains offer numerous advantages, not the least of which are regular rainfall and a calm lee to anchor behind. 

After an island is formed and few million years go by, the pressure builds again, and it blows a new hole along the same fault line. The happy result in the Lesser Antilles is an arc of islands running north-south that are a perfect daysail apart. 

From Anguilla to Grenada, a boater can awake, take two aspirin, have a beer for breakfast, and beam reach to the next island in daylight—with enough time to anchor, clear in, and be on barstool number one in time for happy hour. At least that’s how I arranged my cruising schedule for nearly three decades. 

Sadly, paradise isn’t ­perfect. In terms of weather, the eastern Caribbean is almost perfect, except for the two or three days a year when passing hurricanes attempt to kill you. 

This is why our fourth vessel was called Wild Card. On September 17, 1989, Hurricane Hugo blew away the entire deck of cards we’d been playing with, along with our beloved self-built 36-foot Carlotta.

But all things must come to an end, and every dark cloud has a silver lining. 

Take the story of ­28-year-old Ludger Sylbaris, for example. He was born in the ­fishing village of Le Prêcheur, Martinique, in 1874. By the turn of the previous century, he’d moved to Saint-Pierre and begun to party. Now, we’re not exactly sure what he did to get thrown in jail, only that it must have been bad. They put him in a dungeon and forced him into solitary confinement in a tiny, fortified cell whose only ventilation was a grate facing away from the mountain.  

Saint-Pierre was a bustling city at the time, nicknamed the “Paris of the Caribbean.” It was scheduled to have an election in a few days, so the city’s leaders didn’t want to evacuate the town just because the local mountain was acting a bit steamed.  

On May 8, 1902, at 7:52 a.m., a sailing ship had just left the waterfront and hoisted sail. Its crew glanced astern toward the shore, and the mountain blew, darkening the sky 50 miles in every direction. Between 28,000 and 30,000 souls were burned or suffocated. A few survived on the sailing ship, which proceeded to Fort-de-France to sound the alarm. 

It took four days for rescuers to arrive, but there was no one to save. Except for Ludger Sylbaris. After he was freed and asked what he was in jail for, he muttered something about parking tickets or whatever. He was, in any case, promptly pardoned by the local judiciary. 

Yes, the Caribbean can be capricious. 

One of our favorite stops was Plymouth on the island of Montserrat. That island was known as the “Emerald Isle” back in the day. The local rum shops on the beach had chalk signs out front that counted down the days until the next St. Patrick’s Day. The reason we liked this anchorage so much was threefold: 1) It wasn’t on the way to ­anywhere; 2) the harbor was rolly; and 3) because of the Beatles. 

We search out rolly harbors in popular cruising grounds because their anchorages are almost always deserted. In Montserrat, we hung with the crowd at the Agouti bar, unless producer George Martin of Beatles fame had someone recording. In that case, Mick Jagger, Jimmy Buffett, Sting, Mark Knopfler or Eric Clapton would sit in with the local reggae band until the wee hours. 

I mean, where better for Buffett to record his album Volcano?

The quaint town itself was delightful, as were its 4,000 inhabitants. It was impossible to get into trouble in Plymouth, where all the locals seemed totally blissed out. If a too-frisky yachtie overindulged in rum (“Rum is food” was our youthful motto) and started punching locals, the big fellas would take the first few blows with a puzzled smile, and then tie up the yachtie and return him to his vessel.

Fishermen would toss still-flopping grouper on our deck without being asked, or offer to sell us conch or lobster for pennies a pound.

Then, in July 1995, the Soufrière Hills volcano sent pyroclastic flows and ash across much of the island. By August 1997, the entire town of Plymouth was buried under ash, with only the tops of telephone poles and the red roofs of its tallest buildings showing. It was as eerie as it was sad, like an abandoned production set from an old Twilight Zone television episode. 

It’s impossible to exaggerate the ­magnificence of this sailors’ paradise. It is as if God and Walt Disney conspired to design the perfect cruising ground.

Each year, we’d sail in the lee of forbidden Plymouth during our passages south to avoid hurricane season. The silence would be deafening, especially with our regretful hearts straining to hear the once-vibrant reggae beat from the now-buried Agouti rum shop. 

Here’s a truism: The two best times to visit the Caribbean are yesterday and today. We went for a single season of high-wind sailing and stayed decades because of the joy. Nearly all of our 63 years of cruising have been spent in the tropics amid this best quality of life. 

Oh, the tales I could tell about a young, randy Foxy Callwood of Jost Van Dyke. Or the wild and crazy crew of Richardson’s Rigging on Tortola. Or Basil and his pretty boys of the Bitter End on Virgin Gorda. And where would sailors of the Lesser Antilles be without Tom Gerker of Parts and Power, or Charlie Cary of The Moorings in the Virgins, or Robbie Ferron and Bobby Velasquez on St. Maarten?

What rum shop other than Le Select on St. Barts would be successfully managed by a cute 14-year-old named Fast Eddie? We used to call the port of Gustavia “Star Harbor” because Bob Dylan, Harrison Ford and Raquel Welch were often seen wandering its narrow streets. 

Red Hook on St. Thomas was a nest of crazy sailors. Just to the west in French Town was Dick Avery—too busy building a monorail shipyard to notice that he’d invented bareboating. 

And surely there has never been a more famous, more unabashed nudist in the Lesser Antilles then Joel Byerley, skipper of Lord Jim, which was usually anchored in English Harbour, Antigua. Desmond Nicholson’s family brought English Harbour back to life.

Just the salt-kissed ink-slingers were amazing. Carleton Mitchell of the deep-draft schooner Caribee and the centerboard S&S yawl Finisterre wrote Passages East and Isles of the Caribbees, and won the Newport Bermuda Race three times in a row. Sailor Dudley Pope wrote the Lord Ramage series of novels and used to hang in St. Maarten’s Philipsburg harbor. Fritz Seyfarth, an early mentor of mine and author of Tales of the Caribbean, left his literary mark on Marina Cay in the British Virgin Islands. That’s after Robb White’s book Two on the Isle was written about the same sand spit. (The movie starred Sidney Poitier.)

No history of sailing would be complete without mentioning gymnast, ocean-racer and rum-worshiper Rudy Thompson. He not only would put a trampoline on wheels during St. Thomas carnival to do drunken flips over the live electrical wires in downtown Charlotte Amalie, but he also chartered his boat to Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck. 

Just imagine how many more I could name if my ­short-term memory hadn’t been so ruthlessly abused.

Yes, the Caribbean is truly a movable feast—an unstoppable sailors’ party—and the best time to go is still right now. 

The post Caribbean Cruising: A Moveable Feast appeared first on Cruising World.

As active seasonal ­cruisers seeking winter warmth, usually in the Bahamas, my husband, Radd, and I have spent many winter holidays aboard our Island Packet 40, Sasha, far away from family and friends back home. We do miss the gatherings and traditions, but no matter where we are, we try to embrace new ways of celebrating—joining local celebrations or attending local services—while preserving a few tried-and-true traditions from our land life. 

Nassau, on New Providence Island in the Bahamas, was the backdrop for one of our most memorable holidays. We arrived a few days before Christmas, got settled, and then set out to explore. That day’s mission was to visit the Bacardi distillery.

In all our cruising ­destinations, when venturing beyond walking distance of our harbor, we always use whatever public transportation is available (if any). Yes, we’re frugal cruisers, but public transport is a great way to interact with local people and absorb the culture. It’s always far more interesting than taking a taxi.

In Nassau, we were lucky: There’s an extensive bus system. New Providence is a fairly large island; if you want to head away from Nassau harbor and the downtown area to the island’s south side (“over the hill,” as the locals say), you must hail a taxi, get a ride or take the bus. 

After ensuring that we were going in the right direction, we asked our friendly bus driver if the Bacardi distillery was on the route. 

“No,” he replied, with a ­sorrowful head shake. Then, his face lit up with a wide smile. “But I’ll take you there.”

And away we went, the only two riders on the bus.

Once we got “over the hill,” we discovered a whole different world: homes with yards, small shopping centers, and no tourists. Eventually, we were out in the country. The driver took us right to the distillery’s entrance. We expressed our heartfelt thanks, and then he asked, “What time do you want me to pick you up?” 

The friendliness and ­courtesy of the Bahamian people are astounding.

After a pleasant tour and, of course, a rum tasting, we emerged with several bottles of Bacardi to restock our near-empty liquor locker on board. Sure enough, our new friend retrieved us at the ­appointed hour, and back “over the hill” we went.

Back on the boat, feeling festive, I formulated a plan. For as long as I can remember, my mom made special cookies for Christmas Eve. They were moist and creamy, with a hint of peanut butter perfectly ­complemented by chocolate centers. She always used packaged Brach’s Chocolate Stars, so we called them Star Cookies.

Of course, she passed down the recipe, one she’d modified through trial and error. I began to gather ingredients on the boat and realized that I had everything but the chocolate stars. It didn’t matter: The cookies are delicious with any small, solid-chocolate candy pieces for the centers. You can use dark chocolate, milk chocolate, even white chocolate.

When Christmas Eve arrived, we rode the city bus again, this time to attend a holiday service at the magnificent 300-year-old Christ Church Cathedral, a Nassau landmark. In yet another demonstration of Bahamian courtesy, a different driver apologized profusely for not being able to take us directly there but promised he’d get us within a short walk. We both wore wide smiles as easy-­listening Christmas carols blared out of the bus speakers. 

Late that night, back aboard Sasha, we feasted on the cookies, along with eggnog spiced with fresh nutmeg and a healthy shot of our recently acquired rum. Turns out it’s possible to be home for the holidays after all.

Star Cookies (yields 30 cookies)

Ingredients:

• 1¾ cups flour
• 1 tsp. baking soda
• ½ tsp. salt
• ¾ cup butter
• ¾ cup creamy peanut butter
• ½ cup sugar plus ½ cup more for rolling 
• ½ cup brown sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp. vanilla
• About 30 small chocolate pieces
• Powdered sugar, for dusting (optional)

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. Sift together flour, baking soda and salt. Set aside. 

Cream together butter, peanut butter, ½ cup sugar and ½ cup brown sugar. Add egg and vanilla. Beat well, then mix until consistency is like dough. (It will be slightly wet.) 

Line a cookie sheet with baking paper. With your hands, form the dough into 1½-inch balls (about the size of a ping pong ball), and roll each ball in the remaining ½ cup sugar. Place about 2 inches apart on cookie sheet. 

Bake for 8 minutes. Remove from the oven, place a chocolate piece on each cookie, and press firmly. Return the cookies to the oven and bake for 2 to 5 more minutes, or until the cookies are golden-brown and set. 

Let the cookies cool, and then sprinkle them with powdered sugar, especially if you miss snow. 

Prep time: 1 hour
Difficulty: Medium
Can be made: at anchor

Cook’s Note: 

Use a 1-tablespoon measuring spoon to scoop out raw cookie dough, then roll to shape into balls. A heaping tablespoon makes a perfect-size dough ball.

Do you have a favorite boat recipe? Send it to us for possible inclusion in Sailor & Galley. Tell us why it’s a favorite, and add a short description of your boat and where you cruise. Send it, along with high-resolution digital photos of you aboard your boat, to sailorandgalley@cruisingworld.com.

The post Sailor & Galley: Home for the Holidays appeared first on Cruising World.

I’m no Ernest Shackleton. I live in Hawaii, and I love the warm weather and clear blue waters of the tropics. Having done a little high-latitude sailing, I have to admit that freezing weather is not my favorite. My boat doesn’t even have a heater.

Yet here I was with Tracy, a surfing friend from Hawaii, ripping down Puget Sound at 12 knots under spinnaker, in the dead of winter. I had on about 10 layers, two puffy jackets, gloves, boots and a hat. I also had a huge smile on my face.

This was shaping up to be an ideal adventure, filled with solitude and unexpected experiences. It was also some of the best sailing I’d done on my Jeanneau 509, Kāholo. And it had all started with simple necessity: I had to move the boat to get new canvas.

In 2021, I had sailed ­new-to-me Kāholo 5,000 miles, across the Atlantic and the length of the Caribbean, from Portugal to Panama. While soaking under the torrential rains of Panama, I realized I definitely needed new canvas. Once we got to the Pacific Northwest, I learned that Iverson’s Canvas in Olympia, Washington, had a yearslong waiting list. And its team would not travel to your boat. Like the Soup Nazi in Seinfeld said, “No soup for you!” Unless you were ­prepared to travel.

Olympia is on the South Sound near Tacoma, 80 miles south of my winter berth in La Conner, near the San Juan Islands. Although I managed to secure a spot on Iverson’s busy schedule, the only date its team could do the work was in mid-February, the coldest month of the year.

Well aware of the shifting weather systems in Puget Sound, I stacked things in my favor by leaving plenty of time to choose a weather window. As luck would have it, a high-­pressure system was set to fill in, bringing a favorable, but very cold, northerly wind. To get ready for the next day’s northerlies, Tracy and I made a short sail out to the historic town of Coupeville on Whidbey Island, where we spent time in a warm pub with the colorful local crowd that had replaced the summer tourists. Well-fortified against the cold, we paddled back out to lonesome Kāholo, the only anchor light in the anchorage.

Leaving Coupeville early, we had a serene reach south in calm water, all alone, jibing back and forth across Possession Sound under an asymmetrical spinnaker. It was challenging sailing in shifting winds, amid evergreen-­covered islands down Whidbey, the second-longest island in the United States, after New York’s Long Island.

The wind began to build as we neared the bottom of Whidbey. The helm felt lively. Somewhere around freezing, the wind sent a chill right through me. Adding another puffy jacket at the helm, I was quite comfortable but looked like the Michelin Man.

We blew right past the mooring I’d had in mind for the end of the short winter day, not to mention the alternate destinations I’d marked off in case the weather or the gear failed to cooperate. This was no ordinary sail, and we were having too much fun. We continued south toward Seattle.

Passing the southern tip of Whidbey Island, we sailed into the comparatively open water of Admiralty Inlet. Both the seas and the wind began to build. Now we were reaching at 12 knots with more than 20 knots of apparent wind. This was the upper limit for the spinnaker. The boat was ­handling well, but I could feel the rudder loading up as the boat leapt through the following seas. Rounding up in this wind with the spinnaker would mean taking it down in pieces. Breaking seas to windward alerted me that the wind was still building in the exposed waters of Admiralty Inlet. As the saying goes, any fool can put up a sail, but it takes a sailor to know when to take one down—and I’d ­apparently left it a bit late.

“Tracy!” I called out. “We need to get that spinnaker down. Now!” 

As Tracy hustled forward, I brought the boat downwind to hide the spinnaker behind the main. Tracy tried to douse the sail, but the sock refused to come down. The spinnaker sock lines had become tangled after so many jibes. I managed to balance the boat on a deep reach, with the seas slewing her around and the spinnaker flailing behind the main. I set the autopilot, praying we wouldn’t wrap the sail around the forestay, and jumped forward to help. We managed to untangle the lines while the autopilot miraculously kept us safely off the wind. The sock ­finally slid over the unruly beast and we dropped the sail to the deck with a sigh of relief. After that battle, we were no longer cold. The wind increased to the point to where the working jib was now plenty of sail, and we surfed south to Port Blakely, just across Puget Sound from Seattle on Bainbridge Island.

We arrived as the sun set and the lights of Seattle came alive in a purple sky. We could see the huge marinas of Elliott and Shilshole bays, housing thousands of boats. Yet we were alone, swinging at anchor in a quiet cove at the end of a perfect weekend sailing day. Finally, one other sailboat joined us: a singlehander on his 30-foot Wauquiez. 

With the setting sun, temperatures dipped well below freezing. Luckily, we had thick down comforters on the bunks to keep us warm. In the morning, I found water pooling on the floorboards, something no captain wants to see. Assuming we had a freshwater leak in one of the pressurized lines, I pulled off panels to reveal the hullsides. They were running with water. In freezing temperatures, comparatively warm moist air inside the cabin condenses on the cold hull of the boat “like a cold can of soda on a hot day,” as one sailor described it. I immediately invested in a dehumidifier for use at the dock. The proper solution while underway would, of course, be a diesel heating system. 

The northerlies were still blowing the next day, and we raised the spinnaker again, doing an outside jibe back and forth down serpentine Colvos Passage to Gig Harbor. For an outside jibe, I bring the boat directly downwind, jibe the main to put the boat wing on wing, and then completely release the working spinnaker sheet, letting the spinnaker flag in front of the boat. I then turn the boat through the wind, onto the new tack, and haul in the leeward spinnaker sheet, which is led around the bow on the outside. I can do this singlehanded, and it works like a charm as long as the sheets don’t get snagged on anything. Sadly, they often do, which requires a trip to the foredeck to unsnag them.

Gig Harbor was where we’d planned to meet the team from Iverson’s Canvas. A lively harbor town shadowed by Mount Rainier—with several marinas, a fishing fleet, a strong paddling scene, and lots of maritime history—Gig Harbor was named in the 1800s for Capt. Wilson’s gig, or rowboat, brought into the narrow entrance for shelter. The town is home to Gig Harbor Boat Works, which builds traditional gigs from modern materials.

It was amazing to watch Kyle and Mike, two guys from Iverson’s. They installed custom, large-diameter stainless, and patterned the entire dodger and Bimini top with plastic sheeting, all in a day. They said it would be two weeks for me to receive the dodger and Bimini top, but they were back a day early. The new dodger transformed the cockpit, with better visibility and clear windows. It felt as though I’d been upgraded to an ocean-view home after cowering under an old tent for years. It wasn’t cheap, but it was money well spent.

As luck would have it, sailing north back up Puget Sound was also a downwind run. Southeasterlies are quite common in winter, often associated with the approach of a low-pressure system. This was exactly the case I encountered: An approaching low was sending me 15-knot southeasterlies. I jibed back and forth up the sound, this time singlehanding because Tracy had flown back to Hawaii. Often, I would tangle the sheets on some obstacle on deck or on the anchor, and I’d need to hustle forward to free it. On my last jibe across Admiralty Inlet, on a layline for Port Townsend, I noticed the unmistakable T-shaped mast of a submarine steaming at me en route to the naval yard at Bremerton. Two oceangoing tugs and two US Coast Guard vessels were in escort. Soon, the Coast Guard politely hailed me: “Sailing vessel Kāholo, I see that you are making tracks for Marrowstone Point. We request that you keep as close as you feel safe to the shore. We will be turning right, into your path.” Good thing I was on a layline, with good speed, and didn’t plan another jibe. The consequences of something going wrong were too great.

An old friend, veteran bluewater sailing instructor John Neal with Mahina Expeditions, met me at the dock at Port Townsend. He showed me around the bustling boatyards and introduced me to his favorite sailmaker, Port Townsend Sails, and riggers, Port Townsend Rigging. These are family operations where attention to detail and craftsmanship are the rule. John says that he can get 50,000 to 55,000 miles (two circumnavigations) on a single main and jib built by the craftspeople at Port Townsend Sails, who, by the way, are all women. 

I set out on foot to see the boatyards at Port Townsend, the premier wooden-boat building and repair region on the West Coast. It’s a dynamic place where the next generation of shipwrights learns traditional skills at places such as the Northwest School of Wooden BoatBuilding. I wandered around the yards, amazed at vessels like the 133-foot San Francisco bar pilot cutter Adventuress, built in 1913 and still sailing here. 

Port Townsend is famous for its annual wooden-boat show, but what seems to have escaped worldwide notice is that Kirsten Neuschäfer, the South African sailor who recently became the first woman to win the Golden Globe round-the-world race, sailed a Port Townsend boat: a 36-foot, 1988 fiberglass-hulled version of a traditional 1930s design built by Cape George Marine Works. Her boat was among only three boats to finish the grueling race without pause for repairs, and it survived 235 days at sea around the tempestuous Great Capes—and with Neuschäfer managing to rescue a skipper whose boat had sunk.

Continuing my stroll through Port Townsend on this cold, blustery afternoon, and seeing a small sign advertising “sails and canvas built and repaired” on an old wooden building in the harbor, I ducked into a shop called The Artful Sailor. Engulfed by the smell of tar, hemp and linseed oil, I found Emiliano Marino and Pami-Sue “Salty Sue” Alvarado practicing the ancient art of marlinspike seamanship. The late-afternoon light streaming in through the windows made it look like a scene from an old Dutch painting.

Only in Port Townsend could a sailor encounter a nuclear submarine, see a 1913 schooner and meet a couple practicing traditional marlinspike splicing, all in the same day.

Unfortunately, my luck ran out with the weather, and I sailed the 30 miles up to Deception Pass and to Kāholo’s La Conner slip in full foul-weather gear, in cold, drizzling rain and variable winds. The ending was a bit of a letdown, but overall, this had been an unforgettable voyage, precisely because it had happened in the dead of winter.

Not that I am planning any Shackleton-esque small-boat crossings in the Antarctic, but at least now I understand the beauty of a winter’s sail. Next on the my shopping list? A diesel heater.

Tor Johnson is an award-­winning photographer and writer who has shot 16 covers of CW, so far. He grew up sailing the world with his family.

The post A Winter’s Sail appeared first on Cruising World.

It was early afternoon on Day One of a weeklong course to prepare for the US Coast Guard’s captain’s exam, and besides my head feeling like a balloon about to pop, already several pages of my notebook were filled with hastily scribbled notes, including this gem: 1.169 x square root of light height = geographical range. Who knew I’d have to know that?

During the course of the morning, we’d slogged our way through license requirements, calculating days underway inshore and seaward of the boundary line that wraps like a string around the offshore points along America’s coasts. We’d touched on license endorsements, required publications when carrying ­passengers, and a list of additional things we’d need to procure before applying for any license. Things such as a Department of Transportation physical, CPR and first-aid cards, and a Transportation Worker Identification Credential.

We discussed in detail aids to navigation, buoy functions, beacons, light characteristics, Intracoastal Waterway navigation, light ranges, weather patterns and cloud identification.

And in between it all, Capt. Greg Metcalf, owner of the Atlantic Captain’s Academy, and instructor Capt. Chris Davis, an ex-Coastie-turned-towboat-skipper, spun entertaining sea tales and bantered back and forth with the 12 students—nine would-be tuna charter captains, a mate with a family tour boat that runs on the New Jersey coast, and a couple of sailors—who had committed to this immersive experience, held in a hotel conference room on the banks of the Annisquam River in Gloucester, Massachusetts. 

That first day, a Sunday, as Metcalf outlined what we’d cover before taking four individual exams the following Sunday, he assured us of one thing: We’d make it through. ”Anyone know a charter captain?” he quipped. “Do they seem like rocket scientists?”

And then there were Davis’ two fundamental rules of ­navigation that we’d be reminded of again and again: “No. 1: Never hit bottom. No. 2: Never hit anyone else.”

Different Routes, Same Waypoint

There are all sorts of good ­reasons for mariners to ­consider becoming licensed captains. In the class that I took, several of the students were fishermen who had spent years on boats of all sizes, either chasing sport fish or fishing commercially. A license would allow them to take paying passengers out on charters, or it would let them command boats on which they’d been deckhands. A Maine lobsterman wanted to take tourists out on Sundays and charge them to haul traps on days when commercial lobstering isn’t permitted in that state. One woman, a school nurse, had summer jobs lined up driving launches out to islands off the Merrimac River. 

Me? I do some teaching at a sailing center in Boston, and a ticket would let me spend more time on the bigger boats and run an occasional charter. 

The basic license, Operator of Uninspected Passenger Vessels, is where it all starts. Sometimes called a “six-pack license,” it allows a holder to carry up to six passengers for hire in coastal waters. To qualify, besides passing the US Coast Guard exams, you need 360 documented days underway, 90 of which must have been in the past three years. The next step is to pursue Master credentials. At the Atlantic Captain’s Academy, this involves a two-day course on top of the OUPV curriculum. A Master allows you to captain a Coast Guard-inspected vessel with more than six passengers. The size of the boat and where it can be operated depends on your prior experience.

With various study options from which to choose, an eight-day in-classroom course worked the best for me. Setting aside a single solid chunk of time was easier to plan for than committing to a longer time frame, and the course in Gloucester was relatively close to where I live. Metcalf offers courses in several other New England locations, as well as online instruction.

Alternatively, Steve Wilson, the lead instructor at the Boston Sailing Center, who along with a friend had plans to be in Florida for the winter, opted to take one of Metcalf’s online programs that met in a Zoom classroom for three hours every Monday and Wednesday night for nine weeks, starting in January. When they returned to the Boston area in late spring, they and most of their Zoom-mates met in Maine for a day to take the proctored exams for OUPV credentials.

“Anyone who embraces Zoom technology and can learn that way, it’s awesome,” Wilson says. Before each class, he spent time becoming familiar with the material in Metcalf’s textbook, and after each class, he and his partner spent additional hours studying, working through exercises, and taking practice tests. He estimates that involved another 12 or so hours a week, sometimes a bit more. Near the end of the course, Metcalf held two optional weekend study days, and he was available throughout to answer questions over the phone or by email, Wilson says. 

During the online course, students had ample time to get to know one another, Wilson says, and his classmates came from a variety of backgrounds, as was the case with my class. A few of the students in his class were auditing the course with no intention of taking the exam at the end. They just wanted to learn the material to become better boat operators.

Cruising Solo

While the Atlantic Captain’s Academy and many other schools across the country offer a variety of schedules that employ Coast Guard-approved curricula to help mariners earn their credentials, they aren’t required. 

Tim Murphy, a CW editor-at-large and a New England-based marine journalist, first earned his OUPV credential when he was 18 and living in New Orleans. In high school, he’d signed up as a trainee on the brigantine Young America and was invited back as a volunteer. That, in turn, led to a six-month job crewing, so he was at sea every day and able to rack up 180 days of sea time. Meanwhile, his family was living aboard, and with them, he sailed all throughout the Bahamas, so in a period of three years, he had all the sea days needed.

Murphy says that a car ­accident during the summer after his senior year left him idle for a few months, so he spent the time studying and memorizing Chapman Piloting & Seamanship. He also used flash cards his father had employed while earning his own license to memorize all the mnemonics sailors rely on to remember navigation rules. Then he walked into Coast Guard headquarters and passed the tests. A year later, when he turned 19, the minimum age for Master credentials, he qualified for a license allowing him to captain vessels up to 100 tons, 200 miles offshore.

Murphy let his ticket expire in the 1990s, but in 2018, after buying hisPassport 40, Billy Pilgrim, with the intention of going off cruising with his partner, he decided to renew his credentials and used a few texts the boat’s previous owner had left to prepare on his own again.

“It was so hard,” he says with a laugh. “It was really hard.” But ultimately successful. Murphy again now holds those same Master’s credentials and will be able to use them if the opportunity arises in his travels.

By the Book

Back in the hotel in Gloucester for Day Two, we spent more time going over currents and tides, and then many hours poring over navigation rules. That night, we went home to review navigation general material—buoys, lights, weather—and took a practice test that we corrected in class the next day.

Day Three was all about mnemonics. “Red over red, captain is dead,” meaning the lights displayed on a vessel not under command. “Red over white, a fishing boat at night,” meaning a commercial fishing boat not trawling. “Red over green, sailing machine,” meaning a sailboat displaying its masthead tricolor. They were endless. “Turn to port, go to court,” meaning what action to take as a give-way power vessel in a crossing situation.

There were horn signals to memorize, whistles, gongs and bells. All followed by practice quizzes and more practice quizzes. Ditto on Day Four.

On Thursday, Capt. Davis had us roll out the paper charts and grab our Weems & Plath plotting tools and dividers for a three-day deep dive into current set and drift, plotting, dead reckoning, speed, fuel—you name it. I’m not sure I’d ever used up an entire eraser before.

Then finally, on Sunday, it was the day of reckoning, with exams in Navigation General, Chart Plotting, Rules of the Road, and Deck General. Navigation and Deck required minimum scores of 70 percent. The other two, 90 percent.

It was intense. It was challenging. But in the end, Metcalf was right: It was doable. 

That afternoon, a few of us stuck around to study and take an add-on exam for a towing endorsement. And a couple of weeks later, most of us turned up for the two-day Master’s course. Two of us also opted for sailing endorsements.

So what’s the plan? Well, that’s still in the works. But already my Inland Waters Master credentials have earned me a few bucks and provided some new opportunities. And one thing I know for certain after a full summer on the water is that I’m definitely a better and more knowledgeable sailor. For that alone, it was well worth the effort. 

Mark Pillsbury is a CW editor-at-large.

The post Plot a Course for Captain Credentials appeared first on Cruising World.

In 1974, Australian journalist Murray Davis assembled a ragtag crew of sailors and scribblers in Newport, Rhode Island, and put out the first issue of Cruising World. The bet Murray made that summer was a big one: 65,000 big ones, if bets are measured in printed magazine copies. Ten years later, he sold the brand to The New York Times Company. Paid circulation had grown to 120,000 copies addressed to high-net-worth individuals (in the parlance of Madison Avenue). Davis retired to a life of ease on Newport’s tony Ocean Drive.

In some ways, the joke was on Madison Avenue. Davis’ genius was to tap into a countercultural zeitgeist impelled by skyrocketing oil prices, back-to-the-garden dreams of self-reliance evinced by the Whole Earth Catalog, and a particularly prominent June 1973 Time magazine story called “The Good Life Afloat,” which placed, of all boats, a Westsail 32 front and center. 

“Beached though he may be by responsibilities ashore,” the Time story went, “the cruising sailor can still feel a certain smugness about his boat. She can take him across an ocean whenever he is ready to go. Just a few years ago, the men who owned boats like these were usually looked upon as oddballs, dropouts, or dreamers ready to up-anchor and take off for the islands. They were incurable eccentrics, antiquarians putting in their time refurbishing relics of another age. But suddenly those old-fashioned boats and their gear seem strangely up-to-date. The cruising sailor seems less eccentric. The boats they have preserved have now become objects of envy.”

Playboy magazine took the idolatry a step further in a 1976 feature: “Your ultimate destination in a Cigarette boat may be no farther than the forward berth, but there is no navigable place in the world beyond the range of the Westsail 32.”

Davis came to the subject honestly. For the first half of the 1960s, he’d written a column about the Western Australian waterfront scene for The Age, a Melbourne daily. That lasted till his wanderlust overtook him. In 1967, he and his wife, Barbara, and their two small children boarded a 21-ton, yawl-rigged Falmouth Quay punt called Klang II and sailed themselves to America.

“Every escapade needs a hook to lend it legitimacy,” Nim Marsh wrote in a 2004 profile. Davis’ hook was, in his own words, “to watch Australia’s challenge for the great symbol of sailing, the America’s Cup.” He would cover the races in Newport, in which Australian hero Dame Pattie was to compete, reporting back to his readers in Melbourne. As the Davis family sailed halfway around the world, they befriended some of that era’s giants of the cruising community—Eric and Susan Hiscock, Miles and Beryl Smeeton, Blondie Hasler—as well as young up-and-comers such as Lin and Larry Pardey and Bruce Bingham. The first issue of CW included dispatches from all of them.

Though Davis tapped into a deep vein, he didn’t invent the worldwide cruising community; instead, he discovered one that by the 1970s was already thriving. To locate the father of this community, he’d have to look back still another 50 years to a man named William Washburn Nutting—arguably the most influential cruising sailor that today’s cruisers have never heard of.

We All Sail in the Track of Typhoon

 “I think it is reasonable to say that a country is only as big as its sports. In this day when life is so very easy and safe-and-sane and highly specialized and steam-heated, we need sports that are big and raw and, yes, dangerous. Not that we recommend taking chances in the roaring forties in the middle of November or crossing the Atlantic on the fiftieth parallel at any time of the year. This sort of yachting, I suppose, will never be popular. But I do hope that if there is any result from my book on the Typhoon, it will be to inspire a confidence in the possibilities of the small yacht and instill an interest in the sea and a desire to explore.”

Thus wrote W.W. Nutting. His 1921 book, The Track Of The “typhoon,” lit a fire whose flame still spreads more than a century later. “I feel that what American yachting needs is less ­common sense, less restrictions, less slide rules, and more sailing,” Nutting wrote.

A line he borrowed from a US Navy sub-chaser commander distilled Nutting’s ultimate disdain for his own safe-and-sane era: “Is ‘Safety First’ going to be our national motto?”

Like Davis, Nutting started his career scribbling on the waterfront scene—in Nutting’s case, from the Manhattan offices of The Motor Boating Magazine in the years just before World War I. Nutting was a gregarious man who gathered around him a Parisian-style salon of other men who were interested in something entirely new under the sun: sailing on the ocean “for the fun of the thing.”

In the 1910s, there was no seagoing cruising community. Yacht clubs had begun to proliferate after the Civil War, but with a focus that seldom extended beyond inshore racing. A handful of America’s wealthiest Brahmins very occasionally raced to Bermuda or across the Atlantic, but with large crews of paid professional sailors. Amateur sailors had made well-publicized ocean voyages: Joshua Slocum, who published his enduring bestseller about the first recorded solo circumnavigation from 1895 to 1898; Howard Blackburn, who in 1901 crossed to Portugal in 39 days aboard a 25-foot Friendship sloop. Still, before World War I, there was neither a cohort of long-distance cruising sailors nor a fleet of seaworthy yachts to take them sailing.

Nutting changed that. In summer 1913, with scant experience of sailing, piloting or navigation, he sailed the 28-foot cutter Nereis, mostly singlehanded, from New York to Newfoundland. Along the way, he survived several near calamities. Off Nantucket, Massachusetts, he was knocked overboard by the boom. Only dumb bloody luck and a loose lazy jack saved him from drowning. But that summer’s experience inflamed his adventuring spirit, and the stories he published inflamed others. With friends he met during those travels, Nutting began to dream of a shorthanded trans-Atlantic voyage—and of the boat that could accomplish such a trip.

One of those friends was Canadian engineer Frederick W. “Casey” Baldwin, the first British subject to take flight in March 1908, shortly after the Wright Brothers’ first Kitty Hawk flights, and the man who would go on in 1919 to set the world speed record of more than 70 mph across the water in a hydroplane that he designed and built with Alexander Graham Bell.

Though World War I interrupted the conversation they had started in 1913, Nutting and Baldwin reconvened in fall 1919 to work out their plans—for the boat and for the voyage. Nutting wrote: “Finally we got down to the inevitable subject of boats and more particularly of cruising boats.” 

Their choices were limited to one of two categories: fishermen or racers. There simply were no other choices. Fishermen—­adaptations of Friendship sloops, oyster dredgers or Gloucester schooners—accounted for all the boats sailed in shorthanded transoceanic voyages. These tended to be rough-hewn, solid, seaworthy and slow. Casey, by contrast, had collected silver by racing lightly built boats with long overhangs designed under Nathanael Herreshoff’s Universal Rule. Casey, Nutting wrote, was “all for a big boat—as big a one as possible without going beyond the strength of one man in the matter of the mainsail and the ground tackle, which are really the limiting factors.”

Nutting’s tastes were shaped by his summer on Nereis. “I think a singlehander should be as small as possible without ­sacrificing full headroom—say, 28 to 30 feet on deck,” he wrote. But, conceding that singlehanding wasn’t the most desirable way to cruise, he consented to a compromise: “a 40-footer, fisherman style, ketch rigged with an auxiliary motor.”

Ocean Sailing “For the Fun of the Thing”

Back in New York, Nutting delivered his commission to yacht ­designer William Atkin, a pal and stablemate at Motor Boating, who pushed the length to 45 feet before the boat was done. Baldwin oversaw the boatbuilding at Bell’s laboratory in Baddeck, Nova Scotia, and on July 3, 1920, Typhoon launched.

As Davis legitimized his escapade with the hook of an America’s Cup summer, so Nutting latched onto the Harmsworth Trophy Races, set for August 10 in Cowes, England, to ­legitimize his. “Not that there was any serious motive behind the cruise of the Typhoon,” Nutting hedged. “We were not trying to ­demonstrate anything; we were not conducting an advertising campaign; we hadn’t lost a bet. I had the little vessel built according to Atkin’s and my own ideas of what a seagoing yacht should be, and we sailed her across the Atlantic and back again for the fun of the thing. We feel that the sport of picking your way across great stretches of water, by your own (newly acquired) skill with a sextant, pitting your wits against the big, more or less honest forces of nature, feeling your way with leadline through fog and darkness into strange places which the travelers of trodden paths never experience, chumming with the people of the sea—these things, we believe, are worth the time, the cost, the energy—yes, and even the risk and hardship that are bound to be a part of such an undertaking. We did it for the fun of the thing, and we believe that no further explanation is necessary.”

They did it, all right, crossing from Baddeck to Cowes, 2,777 miles in just over 22 days. Along the way, they encountered several gales, which Nutting illuminated for his steam-heated readers in full, breathless detail: “It was a roaring, wild, wonderful night, the sky pitch black, the sea a driving stampede of weird, unearthly lights. The countless crests of breaking waves made luminous patches in the blackness as though lit by some ghostly light from beneath the sea, and the tops, whipped off by the wind, cut the sky with horizontal streaks of a more brilliant light, like the sparks from a prairie fire.”

For a shipmate, Nutting could have picked no one better than Baldwin. “Casey, drenched and grinning, was in his element,” he wrote. “The wind was still increasing, but there was no trace of concern in his voice as he shouted back a ‘cheerio’ through the racket. He was enjoying himself as only the man at the wheel can at such a time.”

At Cowes, word of Typhoon’sexploits quickly spread through the harbor. General John Seely, the Lord Lieutenant of Hampshire, brought regards from King George V, a sailor himself. The Earl of Dunraven, who’d challenged the America’s Cup with three Valkyrie iterationsbetween 1887 and 1895, came aboard Typhoon. But the most consequential acquaintance Nutting made was Claud Worth, vice commodore of the Royal Cruising Club, established in 1880.

Birth of a Cruising Community

“Before leaving England,” Nutting wrote, “there is one institution we must mention because I hope that some time there will be such a one in our country. This is the Royal Cruising Club whose membership included many of the real cruising yachtsmen of England. Why can’t some such club be started on this side of the Atlantic?”

One of the first things Nutting did when Typhoon returned to New York that November was to propose what would become the Cruising Club of America—established in 1922, with Nutting elected as its first commodore. The club’s purpose? “To encourage the designing, building, and sailing of small seaworthy yachts, to make popular cruising upon deep water, and to develop in the amateur sailor a love of true seamanship, and to give opportunity to become proficient in the art of navigation.” You can walk down the dock of any seaside marina today and judge for yourself what kind of success Nutting had. Or, you can simply flip through these pages.

It’s not for his seamanship that we remember Nutting today. “He was a charming character and good company, a good sailor in some ways, but foolhardy and had too much courage,” recalled George Bonnell, an early CCA member.

Neither is it for his yacht-design eye, the musical equivalent of a tin ear when you compare it with others of his CCA cohort: John Alden or Olin Stephens or Philip Rhodes.

But for infectious enthusiasm, no one ever beat Nutting. Shortly after founding the CCA and publishing Track Of The “typhoon,” he became infatuated with a boat type he’d seen on a Copenhagen canal during the war: the redningskoite, or Norwegian rescue boat, as developed by the Scottish-Norwegian designer Colin Archer (1832-1921). 

Virtually no one west of the Atlantic in 1924 had ever seen such a craft. He wrote: “Although strange to an eye accustomed to the racing type yacht, or to the fisherman type as we know it today in America, these boats held a fascination for me and I resolved that one day I should own one and try it out.”

On one winter’s evening, Nutting found a book that contained the drawings for a Colin Archer-designed redningskoite: “The lines scale to about 47 feet overall. After a few rough measurements we decided that if the boat were reduced to 32 feet overall, we could get the headroom under a trunk of reasonable height and sitting headroom under the side decks, and so, for convenience, we had the design photostated 16 inches overall, or to a scale of one-half inch to the foot. With these lines to work from, I spent a couple of evenings making a skeleton model.”

Nutting’s old pal Atkin helped him clean up the lines. Together, they named the design Eric for the Viking explorer Erik the Red, and Atkin published them.

It was aboard someone else’s version of a redningskoite that Nutting, with three shipmates, crossed the North Atlantic from Norway by way of Iceland in summer 1924, then set off from Greenland on September 8—after which, none of them were ever seen again.

“It is more than too bad that Mr. Nutting should not have lived to see the popularity of his child,” Atkin wrote many years later about the Ericdesign, “for some 175 sets of blueprints of the 32-footer were sold by the designer within three years after the plans appeared in Motor Boating, and many more have been sold since.” Argentine solo sailor Vito Dumas famously circumnavigated in anEric during the 1940s. And the fact that Robin Knox-Johnston’s Suhaili, the boat that won the 1968 Golden Globe solo round-the-world race, was built to an Ericdesign inspired a California entrepreneur to commission an adaptation for fiberglass-series production.

The result was the Westsail 32. Yes, the Westsail—object of so much love, and of so much derision. (“Wet Snail,” anyone?) The Westsail, with Nutting’s hand in its creation all but erased after the decades, was the very image that launched so many 1970s cruising dreams. 

“This wonderfully sturdy sailboat,” ran the 1976 Playboy ­feature, “embodies within its wide stubby hull all of the ­wanderlust fantasies harbored by each of us: that marvelous dream of shucking the niggling demands of daily life and simply taking off, boosted by the wind and sea, to probe the corners of the earth. A Westsail skipper turns each cruise into a long reach to Pago Pago.”

Or to Greenland.

Nutting started a fractious 100-year conversation that we, cruising sailors all, still gather round—whether we remember him for it or not.

CW Editor-at-Large Tim Murphy is the author of Adventurous Use of the Sea (Seapoint Books, 2022), which tells the full story of William Washburn Nutting and 16 other influential cruisers and yacht designers from the past century. Murphy develops marine-­trades curricula for the American Boat and Yacht Council.

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When Groupe Beneteau’s Excess Catamarans introduced its first model in 2019, a test sail in winds approaching 40 knots made it abundantly clear that the 38-foot-7-inch Excess 12 wasn’t just another pretty new face in the ever-growing cat crowd. That boat could sail.

A recent light-air outing aboard the company’s newest model, the Excess 14, was perhaps equally revealing. With a hull length right around 44 feet and a beam of 25 feet, 9 inches, this is a big, roomy and comfortable cruising cat. But in just 5 knots of breeze, sailing with the main and working jib set, the chart plotter’s speed over ground read 4.1 knots heading upwind with the sails sheeted hard. A little later, with the jib rolled up and the code zero unfurled and set on a sprit that brings the boat’s LOA to 52 feet, 5 inches, our boatspeed was 5.7 knots on a reach in wind gusting to maybe 6. 

Those were conditions that would have left a lot of similar-size multihulls parked, but the Excess 14 felt relatively lively underway and “tacked quickly,” I wrote in my notes. I also noted that line handling was easy, thanks to sheet winches within reach of the helms and an electric Harken FlatWinder winch that handles a traveler mounted outboard of a comfortable bench seat that spans most of the transom.

For the record, I’m a fan of the Excess brand DNA that calls for outdoor helm stations located far aft on either stern. Sitting at them underway, you can see and hear the water rush by and feel the breeze in your face. You know, like when you’re sailing. You can converse with people seated in the cockpit, and you have easy access to the salon should you care to set the autopilot and keep watch out of the elements, through windows that provide nearly 360 degrees of visibility.

Open to fresh ideas, the team at Excess started with a blank slate when they conceived the 14, and they gave naval architects at VPLP Design some liberty in terms of hull design in their quest for better performance. VPLP, drawing from their experience with a long line of racing machines, then tested and ultimately opted for asymmetrical hulls—think of a monohull sliced lengthwise down the middle and then separated—that tend to reduce the size of the waves produced between the hulls, thereby reducing drag that slows down the boat.

The design team also toyed with replacing the stub keels affixed to most cruising cats, including earlier Excess models, with the sort of lifting daggerboards found on high-performance cats. They dropped that idea, however, because daggerboards add complexity when sailing and take away from living space below. Instead, the 14 has more-efficient, deeper and thinner fixed foils that increase draft to 4 feet, 10 inches—a few inches deeper than what you would expect to find on cats of a similar size.

There are also interesting ­innovations found in the 14’s interior, where saving weight has a direct relationship to livelier sailing. Relatively lighter carbon-fiber cloth is employed in some structural areas for strength, and some bulkheads are infused using foam coring. And there’s less wood used in furniture, drawers and stowage areas. Overhead, the cabin top is injected-molded, eliminating the need for a liner. And in hulls with two staterooms and two head compartments located amidships, the toilets share a single holding tank to reduce plumbing, while the staterooms share one larger Webasto air-conditioning unit, saving the weight and wiring required for two. 

Excess is also involved with Groupe Beneteau’s overall efforts to adopt more-sustainable building practices. Laminates used for the performance mainsail and genoa are recycled material, and hemp fibers are used in place of fiberglass and injected with partly bio-sourced resin in some nonstructural parts such as locker lids. Even furniture knobs have been replaced by neat little loops of rope.

Buyers have a few decisions to make when ordering an Excess 14. There is a four-­stateroom version that would be well-suited for charter, and there are a couple of three-stateroom options. In one, the owner gets a large fore-and-aft bunk aft, a sitting area with a desk at the foot of the companionway, a head and shower forward, and a walk-in closet in place of a V-berth. A second plan, called the Transformer Version, has bunks far forward that can be folded down for sleeping or up for stowage. (One company photo shows a paddleboard stashed away there.) That’s the layout we saw in Miami and the one I’d choose if it were my boat. In all the layouts, the salon gets lots of sunlight and has a pleasant, airy feeling with the sliding door and window open aft. There’s an abundance of fridge and freezer space adjacent to the galley to port. Dining tables are indoors, at the front of the salon, and in the cockpit. 

The Miami boat included a pair of optional 57 hp Yanmar diesels with saildrives (45 hp engines come standard) that pushed us along at 7.8 knots in cruising speed and 8.4 knots in get-home-quick mode. Gear included an electric winch at the starboard helm to make raising the main easier, as well as engine controls at either wheel to make docking simpler. Davits are available, as are canvas Biminis over the wheels for shade.

The boat also had an optional seating area on the flybridge. It reminded me a bit of a stretch version of the footwell that you’d find on a Sunfish. I’m not sure if it’s an option I’d choose, and with the boom set relatively low on the mast, it wouldn’t be a place to lounge underway. Some might like to sit up there while at anchor to enjoy the view though.

The sail-away price for the boat we visited is right around $980,000, but that’s loaded with gear, including an Onan generator and a Pulse rig and sail package that includes a 70-foot-8-inch mast instead of the standard 64-foot-11-inch spar. The upwind Pulse rig sail area of 1,453 square feet will be appreciated by those who sail in variable conditions and like to go fast; in the trades, the standard 1,323 square feet might suffice, and the shorter rig would let you just squeeze under most Intracoastal Waterway bridges.

Me? I was happy to have the added horsepower provided by the bigger square-top main. Sailing a big cat in 5 knots of breeze isn’t always fun, but aboard the Excess 14, we had a jolly old time.

Excess 14 Specifications

Sea Trial

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