I’m cheap but not chintzy. I believe that I can do really cool, really fun things on my boat (for pennies) that make it safer and more seaworthythan the expensive, gold-plated boat anchored next to mine. Plus, because I’ve almost never worked ashore, I whip up these cruising gizmos on a microbudget. Saving money on such projects—and being able to spend it while cruising the world—is really important to me. 

Example: stepping masts. I purchased my first vessel as a teenager in Chicago. It didn’t have a mast. When I finally managed to finagle a Sitka spruce spar, I couldn’t afford a crane to step it. Not a problem: I laid it on deck on sawhorses and drove my boat under the bridge at the Lake Shore Drive S-turns in Chicago. At rush hour (to discourage pesky questions), my father and some friends pulled over into the breakdown lane and tossed over a block-and-tackle. Within minutes, they hoisted the heavy wooden mast in place—and we were gone before the Chicago police knew what happened. 

Thus, with all my vessels and in all my days, I’ve never once paid to have a mast stepped or unstepped. Why would I?

Alas, in the Virgin Islands, bridges are few and far between, but large sailing vessels are a dime a dozen. Thus, just before our first circumnavigation, when I wanted to pull the mast on my Hughes 38 Wild Card, I just jammed her between a Little Harbor 82 named Tala and a Hinckley 65 named Skeets. Both were anchored in Hurricane Hole, St. John, for happy hour. Before their skippers were able to sober up enough to ask me what was going on, I had tied both their spin halyards in a bowline around my mast and hoisted the halyards to my spreaders. From there, it was a simple matter to lift the keel-stepped mast gently out of the boat and lower it to my deck like a Fabergé egg. (Re-stepping it was just as easy.)

Ocean sailing on pennies is just a matter of imagination. I’ve never had self-tailing sheet winches—not ever. Instead, I put a figure-eight knot in the sheet’s bitter end, add two wraps around the winch, and toss it in the water. The drag of the line while under sail is just right—free and instantaneous self-tailers. (Try it. You’ll be amazed. And no rat’s nest on the cockpit sole. Just be sure to pull these sheet ends out of the water before you put your engine in gear.)

Don’t want to pay for an outrageously priced ­bilge-pump float switch? Attach a cheap, ­household mercury switch to a ­fore-­and-aft-mounted hinged toilet-­bowl float. How cool (and ­inexpensive) is that?

Speaking of toilets, I’ve found the ring of bowl wax (used to install a toilet in a house) to be a handy underwater sealant—and easier to use than expensive underwater epoxy products. Mix it with a little antifouling paint if you want it to match. And when it comes to leaks and underwater patching, old-fashioned bike inner-tube patches stick like crazy underwater.

Thick safety glass—­especially perfect-size pieces with rounded corners—are expensive. So, when I built the 36-foot Endurance ketch Carlotta, I used all the windows from a Volkswagen van that I found in a junkyard, for 2 bucks apiece. I’m not sure how long they last—only that they were perfect after 18 years of ocean sailing.

I don’t find most marine buckets strong enough for use underway. Their weak bails pull out. So, I use construction buckets intended for carrying cement. (Some can mar topsides; others don’t.)

Our narrow-of-beam 38-foot sloop, Wild Card, didn’t have much room below, so we practically lived in our cockpit. When we first salvaged this boat, it had typical (heavy, expensive and undependable) wheel steering. It soon broke. I almost fell over when the salesman on St. Thomas told me how much it would cost to replace. Thinking quickly, I asked, “How much for the 2-by-4 propping open your door?”

He gave it to me for free, and it worked perfectly during our first circumnavigation. This solution had the added advantage that tillers are superior to (faster to react than) wheels when coupled to a self-steer gear such as our Monitor. 

Since we almost never steer anyway, for our second circumnavigation, I mounted two tillers: a rigid one aft and a hinged one that could point either fore or aft. The aft racing one was where I could attach my Monitor windvane; the ­forward-facing tiller was hinged so that it could nestle in the aft-facing one, leaving our cockpit tiller-free and much more sensuous. Plus, we were able to incorporate a folding cockpit table—perfect for our food fiestas as well.

Of course, when one of our Nicro Fico ventilators (white with red insides) got snatched overboard during a spinnaker hoist, I replaced both vents on my dorades with stylish PVC plumbing elbows. They turned out to be better at scooping in air, and they’re great ­conversation starters. 

Toward the end of our first circumnavigation, something heavy flying around our cockpit shattered our steering ­compass. So, during our second circumnavigation, we used a ball automotive compass with a suction cup, designed for the inside of windshields. It was hardly perfect, but hey, why get uptight? I could have postponed my second circumnavigation, but I’m happy to say that I didn’t.

The insides of the galley cabinets aboard Carlotta were kind of funny. To save money, I used exterior plywood from billboards that had blown down during a Boston windstorm. In the galley, if my wife opened a cabinet to grab a can of soup, the eye of the Marlboro Man stared back at her.

No, I never throw away old fenders. I slice them up for rubber gaskets, vibration dampeners and other uses. My spreader lights aren’t marine; they’re underwater fountain lights that cost $3 each and have worked for 20-plus years now. 

Ditto my nonmarine windspeed meter. I use the ones that are a quarter of the price and last two or three times as long as the marine units.

Sure, modern depth meters are a marvel, but Joshua Slocum, Capt. Cook and Ferdinand Magellan used sounding leads that, if “armed” with wax, bring up a sample of the bottom as well. 

I’m a big believer in slowing drogues. But don’t tell anyone that the drag devices I use most often look suspiciously like fenders. They’re strung together in series as the breeze increases. 

Yes, I have a nylon Para-Tech sea anchor. But it must be kept damp after use and rinsed repeatedly with fresh water afterward to prevent weakening by salt crystals. Thus, I also use a plywood sea anchor/slowing device designed by Fredric A. Fenger in the 1920s. I find it more convenient to deploy during smaller, friendlier gales. (See my book Creative Anchoring for more details and dimensions.) Oh, and Fenger’s The Cruise of the Diablesse is my all-time favorite cruising yarn, always kept right next to Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World on my bookshelf. 

Some mechanical things never die. For instance, our Pfaff sewing machine from Germany has been in various bilges for more than 50 years and still sounds like a Rolls-Royce. Since voltage converters are expensive, we swap out electric motors from any old Singer as we change voltages. (Currently we have two inverters—one for 110 and the other for 220, so, problem solved.)

Portable, battery-operated drills are popular. I like them because they won’t electrocute you if you fall into the drink with one in your hand. With a little imagination, they can be used for many things, such as electric fishing reels while trolling. A friend made a little gearbox to allow his Ryobi grinder/buffer to hoist up the mainsail on his trimaran. Hats off, dude!

While I’d never be so cheap as to recommend replacing the long run of marine-grade battery cable that feeds the anchor windlass with nonmarine welding cable, I have done it in a pinch to reach the next port with a marine electrical supply. 

We’ve lived almost exclusively in the tropics and would never want air ­conditioning aboard. We do, however, have three different wind scoops, including a light-air one with big shoulders (­hurricane-force belowdecks) and a ­narrower one for warm gales. We also have numerous custom-sewn splash guards that allow our hatches to stay open, even in rough conditions while at sea.

Need funnels of different sizes? Then don’t throw away single-use plastic ­bottles. Use them and your glue gun to adapt their screw caps to perform many, many custom functions. 

And, think about diapers. Recently, to prevent an oil-leaking transmission from staining the bilge and polluting the harbor, I diapered it so that the bilge would stay fresh until its rear seal could be replaced. 

Need to have a small lumberyard aboard to carry wood for special projects? Your boat already has one. Cut the plywood an eighth of an inch smaller than the sides and back of your hanging locker, and you’d never know that the spare wood is there. Another hint: I used a beachcombed piece of PVC pipe fastened to the underside of my deck in the cockpit locker as my “long locker” where I stow wooden dowels, threaded rod, spare stanchions, extra sail track and more.

Ever been aground and needed to attract attention from a distant passing freighter? I fly the box kite I carry in my life-raft supplies with flashing CDs for a tail. It flashes far brighter than any strobe. You can also use a hand mirror to signal a passing vessel if you don’t mind aiming it and don’t require the elevation of a kite. 

Have permission to put down a heavy mooring but don’t have much money? Wrap some rebar around a large eye bolt, and then suspend it and some chicken wire just below the rim of a 55-gallon drum from your dinghy. Fill the drum with any steel or rocks hanging about, and then pour in concrete. If you want to gild the lily, add three cheap sand screws and a few spare anchors on some heavy chain. You can hold the Queen Mary for the cost of peanuts.

Need a fast dinghy for one? I built a super-lightweight dinghy out a single sheet of door-skin plywood, and it lasted for years. It was too tippy for drunks, although I’ve found that anytime you wrestle with whiskey in a dinghy, you lose.

If you’re worried that your expensive RIB might go on a walkabout with a snapped (or more likely, improperly tied) painter, then you can leave an Apple AirTag tracker in it. Where I’m currently anchored in Southeast Asia, that would mean 6 million folks would be helping you locate it 24/7, through Apple’s Find My network.

Can’t afford an electric autopilot, and have only a windvane? Rig a cheap tiller pilot to the upper vane of your windvane, and live happily ever after. That’s what I did on Wild Card. It worked perfectly during two circumnavigations. Was it as a good as a $6,000 unit? No, but it sufficed and barely used any 12-volts because all the muscle was supplied by my vessel moving through the water. 

If you’re worried that your expensive RIB might go on a walkabout with a snapped ­painter, you can leave an Apple AirTag ­tracker in it.

Could I go on for another 350 pages? Sure, and I do in my books. But for now, that’s a taste of what a handy circumnavigator with empty pockets and a vivid imagination can pull off. 

There’s a difference between a well-funded, two-year around-the-world voyage and a work-as-you-relax circumnavigation. On my first circumnavigation, I set out with $5,000. On my second, I had $800. In my experience, DIY sailors tend to spend more time in exotic locales and have more fun networking with the locals to save money than their more-well-heeled, rushing-to-finish counterparts. Each to his own, of course.

Currently on his fourth circumnavigation, Cap’n Fatty was raised aboard an Alden schooner and never grew up. He’s lived aboard boats for 63 years and has authored a dozen books on the subject.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Opinions expressed in this column are the author’s own, are intended to be satirical in nature, and do not necessarily represent those of Cruising World.

The post On Watch: Fatty Goodlander Dabbles in Imaginative DIY appeared first on Cruising World.

Their numbers are impressive: 45,000 miles, a couple dozen countries, islands too many to count, and 16 years with five to go before sailing completely around the world. A life’s accomplishment by any measure, with enough stories and pictures to fill a closetful of magazines.

But when Sherry and Dave McCampbell talk about circumnavigating, what you more often hear is nitty-gritty — “all the mundane stuff for our visits anywhere to be fun and stress-free,” Sherry says. “If you don’t sweat the small stuff, it doesn’t get done.”

Dave adds: “We plan ahead a lot. There are cruisers who say, ‘Oh, we just go.’ But I think you miss a lot if you do that. You end up in the wrong place, the wrong season, you get hit by weather that you wouldn’t if you were just watching what was going on. We have our next year planned out. We know where we’re going, pretty much. We know what the route is, we know when to go, and all of that.”

Sailing the world is not cruising the Virgin Islands. It takes years. It takes a good boat. It takes money. “It takes somebody who knows the boat and can make repairs in out-of-the-way places,” Dave says. “You can’t get too seasick. You can’t get too scared of being a thousand miles from shore. You can’t have a lot of family issues back home.”

Stir in a thirst for adventure and compatibility, and you’ve got the McCampbells. Which explains why the Florida pair will likely join the rather exclusive club of cruisers who have circumnavigated.

Dave, 77, a former US Navy diver, hatched the dream and acquired the boat in 1996. It was a beat-up 1980 CSY 44 Walkthrough Cutter for sale at $65,000. It had been chartered for 20 years, was in “horrible” shape, and needed 10 years to replace virtually everything to cross the Pacific. He named the boat Soggy Paws for a cat that dipped its foot while drinking water.

Sherry, 66, whose US Navy father took his family on a yearlong Caribbean cruise the year she graduated from high school, later led a women’s race team while programming computers and looking for a partner with a well-equipped boat for long-distance cruising. “I dated a few guys who said they were sailors, but they were dock people,” she says. 

Theirs was a quick courtship. They met March 5, 2006, sailed together on May 19, and on June 25, Dave asked her if she would go around the world with him. After working through a neatness divide, they married in 2007 and took off. “About once a month, we invite some people over,” Dave says with a chuckle. “That ends up being a mad scramble to clean up the boat. That works for me.”

As of this writing, they are docked in Malaysia. They make an annual trip home to see family and friends, pick up boat parts, get medical and dental checkups, and take a break from the small floating worlds they’ve occupied 24/7 for 16 years. In 2015, they ­enlarged their world by buying a St. Francis 44 catamaran, paid for with the sale of the CSY and $100,000 that Dave inherited. 

The monohull was, by then, 45 years old and becoming a maintenance black hole. After sailing on a catamaran, they came to admire sailing flat, with a heel of less than 5 degrees—“a huge advantage because you don’t get anywhere near as tired,” Dave says. “When underway, I can do things that I never could before: work on a computer, relax. The equipment is much more modern. It goes faster. It has so much more room for the stuff we’ve got.” 

They transferred the name; furnished a watermaker and refrigerator/freezer; upgraded the electric system (powered by solar panels), saildrives and interior lighting; and extended the hulls at the stern to create a dive platform. They’ve made hundreds of dives in their years afloat.

With her computer and communications skills, Sherry has compiled an online circumnavigation encyclopedia that details virtually every aspect of what they’ve learned. The site has neatly organized “compendiums” with indexes by year, by country, by task. There are 82 “maintenance” entries, 53 under “Indonesia,” and several dozen “passages.” From entry procedures to pirate precautions to how to make wine from rice in Muslim countries to historic World War II battle sites (Dave’s father, David, was a flying ace and Medal of Honor winner), their site is a day-to-day, sometimes hourly, account of what it’s been like to sail halfway around the world. The site has received half a million views.

The high points for them were long, slow island hopping in Micronesia and Fiji, the first with few other cruisers, the second with an active social net. “I used to fall asleep in geography class,” Sherry admits. “But now I’m discovering geography one country at a time, one person at a time. We’ve tried to learn about 10 different languages.”

The lows were slogging passages, upwind, against a current, in midsquall: wet memories that, with time, lose their edge. Oh, and that time on route to the Solomons when one of their engines died.

With good retirement plans that have actually increased in value, the McCampbells have also been able to park their boat and travel to other countries by air. Coming home to Florida has been a culture shock, in terms of politics and wealth. “This crazy United States isn’t where we left,” is all Sherry wanted to say for the record. 

Their view of the world has also changed. “There are little things that we had no idea about,” Dave says. “The number of people who are living just fine with no money at all in some of these out islands. They’re able to survive, do their own fishing and farming with essentially no income, just barely getting by but still having a good time, smiling and very welcoming to us.”

As members of the Seven Seas Cruising Association, they carry a tub of ­supplies to trade or give away. Sherry’s first impulse to carry lipsticks and makeup was ­welcomed in French Polynesia but not in the Solomons. “They want fishing gear, T-shirts, towels, soap, things for their kids: pens, pencils, paper, stuff they could use,” Dave says. And ­eyeglasses. Inexpensive ­drugstore magnifiers. Anybody over 40, because of the sun, had cataracts and wanted glasses.

If their good health holds, Dave and Sherry plan to head for the Mediterranean this December, up through the Red Sea. According to their current plan, by the time they finally get home, 20 years will have elapsed.

“One of our worries is, we’ve been out 16 years and we’re still only about halfway around, and we need to get the rest of the way around before one of us croaks,” Dave says. 

Sherry adds: “We’re still alive. We’re still having ­adventures at our age.” 

Jim Carrier taught himself to sail on Long Island Sound in a $100 Snark he carried atop his Mustang. After it blew apart in a million foam beads on I-95, he bought a 1970 Allied Seabreeze yawl and sailed it 15,000 miles across the Atlantic and Mediterranean.

The post This Ol’ Boat: Halfway Around and Aiming to Cross Their Wake appeared first on Cruising World.

For some reason, flotilla charters seem to have a stigma attached to them, especially among experienced bareboat charter skippers.

“I don’t want to be led through the islands like a string of rubber duckies,” one sailor says. Another says: “I want the freedom to run my own boat, sleep late when I want, and stop for a snorkel.” Yet another: “Flotilla charters are just for beginners, and I don’t want to be slowed down.”

Those are three common misunderstandings that have kept flotilla charters from being as popular with North American charterers as they are with Europeans, who embrace flotillas as a great vacation choice.

The very word, flotilla, seems vaguely military and suggests a group of boats being herded along by a mothership. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, many companies now label flotillas as “social charters” because it’s a more accurate description.

Social chartering in Europe is just as popular with experienced charterers as it is with first-timers. In fact, many charterers with years of bareboating return from their first social charter asking, “Why didn’t we do this earlier?”

Here’s how a social charter works: A charter company puts together a package for a particular destination, such as the British Virgin Islands, for a dozen or so boats. An itinerary is laid out to include the most interesting stops, where special events are planned.

 All well and good, but it’s here that experienced sailors start getting antsy, because cruising along with most flotillas is a team (on their own boat) from the charter company, including a captain, engineer and host/hostess. Often called the “lead crew,” this threesome is one of the elements that makes social chartering so special.

The captain is a local who provides a briefing for the skippers every morning, going over the charts and discussing a general plan for the day. The engineer or service tech is there to make sure that everything works perfectly. And the host/hostess? They are there to take care of special events and help with individual plans.

The captain’s briefing each morning sets out the general plan for the day, but one of the best parts is the discussion of all the attractions along the way: a great lunch cove, a reef for snorkeling, or perhaps a perfect beach. The itinerary is flexible and you’re free to move as you please, but with the reassurance of having the lead crew nearby.

Do you have to sail along with the other boats? Of course not. Each skipper plans the adventures for the day, depending on the crew’s preferences.

When you arrive at the day’s destination, the lead crew will lend a hand with your anchoring (at your request) but, once settled, you’re on your own. Barbecue on board, visit a local restaurant (with reservations made by the host/hostess) or simply enjoy sundowners in your own cockpit.

It’s called social chartering for a reason. You’ll meet and mingle with other crews who all share one thing: They love bareboating. Friendships have been made during social charters that last for years, and that have led to future social charters together. I know of one marriage that resulted from college kids who met during their parents’ social charter.

Part of the fun of social chartering is meeting up with everyone at your destination for dinners, beach picnics, or a progressive party with ­munchies on one boat and ­everything from salad to dessert on others.  

But, you ask, won’t we miss out on some destinations with a social charter? Not likely. In fact, because the lead crew is intimately familiar with this area, you’ll probably get more out of a social charter than if you were doing it on your own without their local knowledge.

Some flotilla charters are more choreographed but to your advantage. The Moorings, for example, offers several Italian Cuisine Flotillas to explore the food and wine of the Amalfi Coast. Kicked off with a pizza party, the fleet ­harbor-hops with dinners—from apéritif to tiramisu—ashore in the evenings. The flotilla also provides transfers to ­restaurants and wineries, and a cook aboard one day to teach boaters how to prep an Italian meal.

Social charters are ­perfect for kids too. They meet other youngsters to share their explorations. Some charter companies, such as Sunsail, often include a kids’ activity coordinator on social charters during school holidays. This youth leader takes the youngsters off on adventures so that the parents can have some time for themselves. Whether it’s hunting pirate treasure on an island to staging a kids-only barbecue onshore, this service is a part of a social charter.

For first-time charterers, social charters are a great way to hone basic boating skills. The lead crew is always available to help with anchoring and departures, as well as to provide support and local knowledge along the way. Freshwater pump acting up? It’s fixed in a jiffy from the spare parts and tools the lead crew has.  

For experienced skippers dipping their toes into a new charter destination, a social charter provides the benefit of local knowledge. No matter how much you’ve planned or how many cruising guides you’ve studied, nothing gives you more confidence than going over a chart with someone discussing their home waters.   

Social charters really are the perfect recipe for fun: a blend of independent bareboating with an unobtrusive support team. You enjoy the privacy of your own boat but benefit from a wealth of local knowledge provided by the lead crew.

Social chartering: It’s the best of bareboating. 

Chris Caswell is the editor of CharterSavvy, the free online magazine devoted to bareboat chartering.

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“Nighty-night. Hope the bugs don’t bite.” 

My parents used this rhyme to tuck me into bed each night. I used it with my own children. It is particularly pertinent on a boat, because there’s nothing more annoying than a mosquito buzzing around in a dark cabin, and the moment you switch on a light in the hope of squashing it, it vanishes into some small cranny—until you switch off the light again. It’s also not really ideal to spray a small cabin with insect repellent because you might be the one who gets repelled. 

The answer is to have bug screens covering all openings, particularly portlights and hatches, which you might want to open all night for ventilation. 

Most portlight manufacturers make mesh screens that fit their portholes. On my 50-foot schooner, Britannia, we also have custom-made hatch screens that clip into place under the hatches. One fits completely around the main companionway doors, but it makes it awkward to get in and out, so we don’t use that very often.

Portlight screens need to be outside the hinged window glass and within the frame of the port so that when the window opens inward, they remain in place. As a consequence, they are subject to rain, sea spray and ultraviolet light, even when the port is closed. The thin mesh screens slowly deteriorate. 

Nearly all of the 12 opening-port screens on Britannia had arrived at this deterioration stage, with some actually torn and needing replacement. 

My portlights were made by Beckson, in Connecticut, with the newer-type overcenter cams to lock the port. The fine mesh screen is glued on one side of an oval frame that fits into a groove in the gasket, forming the seal between the port body and the hinged window. Beckson sells replacement screens for $32.90 each, but with 12 to restore, I decided to look into repairing them myself.

I bought an 8-by-4-foot roll of fine mesh bug screen (used for repairing swimming pool enclosures) from my local hardware store, along with some contact glue and a quarter-inch art brush.

To remove the screen frame, it was first necessary to pull the sealing gasket completely out of its groove in the body of the port. Everything ­needed cleaning in soapy water anyway, so while I repaired the screens, my wife cleaned the hinged windows. We soon had ports looking like new. (It’s best to undertake this project on a day when no rain is forecast because once the sealing gasket is removed from the body, the window is no longer waterproof, even if it’s locked.)

Using an X-Acto craft knife with a new, sharp blade, it was a simple matter to trim the old mesh out from the frame. Then, I brushed a thin bead of contact glue all around the rim of the frame and placed it glue-side down on top of my mesh, pressing them firmly together. (It would have been a good idea to first place a sheet of grease-proof paper under the mesh so that any excess glue would not stick to the table, requiring xylene-based solvent to remove it.)

After a few minutes, I cut loosely around the outside of the frame with scissors, and then moved on to the next screen. Replacing all 12 screens in this way took me just one hour. I then left them all overnight so that the glue could thoroughly dry. 

After that, it was a simple matter of trimming the outside mesh flush with the frame, and I had nice new screens for all my ports. 

A squirt of washing-up liquid helped to ease the new screens into the grooves in the gaskets, and press the gaskets back into the groove in the portlight. I could tell if the gasket was back in place properly because the window would close like before. 

We now know that no bugs can come in through the open ports. If we also fit the hatch screens and keep the cabin door shut, it is a fair bet that the cabin will be completely free of any nasty flying bugs. Ahh, sweet dreams. 

The screens cost $32.90 each from Beckson, plus shipping and tax; that would be a total of about $450 for 12 ports. My screen material cost only $10. A quart tin of contact glue cost $7, and the art brush was $2. Total cost: $19. It’s a no-brainer for a couple of hours’ work. 

Hailing from New Bern, North Carolina, Roger Hughes has been messing about on boats for half a century as a professional captain, charterer, restorer, sailing instructor and happy imbiber. He recently completed a full restoration and extensive modification of a well-aged 50-foot ketch. Read more of his work at ­schooner-britannia.com.

The post Hands-on Sailor: DIY Portlight Screen Replacement appeared first on Cruising World.

On Halcyon, our Valiant 40, my partner, Justin, and I eat tacos at least twice a week, sometimes more. Before the two of us met in Hawaii, I’d spent years sailing the world as cook and first mate aboard boats of all sizes, power and sail. I’d also sailed in the World ARC Rally, and earned my RYA Master and 100-ton US Coast Guard licenses. Justin, a fellow captain, shares my love of Mexican cuisine. We soon we discovered that we also shared a dream: sailing the world in our own boat. 

We found the Valiant 40 for sale in Tahiti. It needed work, but we knew how to do it, and the price for this Bob Perry-designed bluewater cruiser was low. In Tahiti, we spent time on the hard doing repairs and learning the boat’s systems. The boat’s name was Halcyon. Perfect. Our plan was to live those halcyon days right now.

Those days included tacos. During my years as paid cook, making meals for people with varying food preferences, I realized that tacos, in addition to being inexpensive and easy, have another plus. Made with soft tortillas, either flour or corn, rather than hard-shell tacos, they’re versatile—a blank canvas each cook can fill with whatever’s preferred (or on hand). You can build tacos from beef, chicken or fish, or make them vegetarian. For a crowd, you can create a fill-your-own-taco bar. No matter the circumstance or the filling, tacos are always a huge hit. 

Recipes are more than lists of ingredients. They evoke memories: that beautiful anchorage where you savored the meal and the moment with friends, or the storm you weathered before eating a one-pot stew that was the best you ever tasted. 

My fish tacos, born during the ARC Rally, always resurrect a memory. In Samoa, we’d taken aboard two fellow ARC sailors after their catamaran sustained damage in a violent squall. While their boat was hauled out in American Samoa for repair, they’d decided to sail with us as far as Tonga and Fiji before heading home to Australia to regroup. One of them, unaccustomed to the sea motion of a monohull, suffered from seasickness. A behind-the-ear patch seemed to do the trick.

Near the end of our passage to Fiji, we snagged a beautiful mahi-mahi. I had fresh ingredients for salsa, and some soft tacos in the freezer. That day’s catch became that night’s fish-taco feast. But after landfall in Fiji the next day, we were celebrating our arrival with a cold bottle of wine when our ailing guest piped up: “Are we eating the mahi-mahi for dinner tonight?”

Recipes evoke memories: that beautiful anchorage where you savored the meal, or the storm you weathered before eating a warm one-pot stew.

We exchanged puzzled glances. That’s when I noticed her ear patch: There were two of them. She had cut the patch in two and placed half behind each ear, which is not recommended, as it can lead to faulty dosing and possible side effects, including confusion. 

“Do you remember eating the fish tacos last night?” I asked. (She didn’t.) The patch halves were promptly dispatched to the waste bin. 

For the rest of that voyage, the crew jokingly called that meal “forgettable fish tacos.” But, like them, I still remember that passage and that sea tale every time I eat them. Definitely not forgettable.

Blackened Fish Tacos With Pico de Gallo Salsa (makes 8 tacos)

For the salsa

• 3 Roma tomatoes or small local
  tomatoes, diced 
• 1 Tbsp. jalapeño, diced (fresh or canned)
• ½ cup onion, diced
• Juice of one lime
• 2 tsp. sea salt
• ½ cup fresh cilantro, chopped

Seed tomatoes before dicing; if using fresh jalapeno, remove seeds. Combine all ingredients well, and let sit for 20 minutes to let flavors develop.

For the tacos

• 2 tsp. paprika
• 1 tsp. each: onion powder, garlic powder, thyme, cayenne pepper, black pepper, salt
• (or simply substitute your favorite pre-made blackening spice mix)
• 1 pound mahimahi or other firm white fish
• Cooking oil, for frying
• 2 cups purple cabbage 
• ¼ cup unsalted pumpkin seeds 
• 1 tsp. sea salt
• 8  small soft flour or corn tortillas 

Combine spices in a small bowl. Set aside. Cut fish into 1-by-4-inch strips. Blot with paper towel to remove excess moisture. Sprinkle spice mix onto both sides of strips. 

Heat an oiled skillet to medium. Cook fish strips for approximately 2 minutes on each side. Set aside and let rest for 5 minutes. (If you have a food thermometer, the internal temperature should read 145 degrees Fahrenheit.)

While the fish rests, cut the cabbage into thin strips. Set aside. 

Heat a small, dry skillet to medium. Add pumpkin seeds and heat briefly. Add sea salt to the skillet. Gently move the seeds back and forth in the skillet until they’re tinged light brown. 

Warm the tortillas briefly in a pan or microwave. Place a few fish strips on each tortilla. Top with salsa. Finish with a pinch of chopped purple cabbage and a sprinkle of roasted pumpkin seeds. Serve with extra lime wedges, salsa, and shredded cabbage on the side..

Prep time: 45 minutes
Difficulty: easy
Can be made: underway or at anchor

Cook’s Notes: For vegetarian tacos, boil 1 cup dried lentils in 2½ cups water for 5 minutes, or until liquid is absorbed. Season with 1 Tbsp. each: cumin, chili powder, oregano and garlic powder, and 2 tsp. apple cider vinegar. Add ½ cup canned sweet corn, ½ cup canned black or white beans, salt, and pepper. Stir. Fill tortillas and top with diced tomato, avocado, a squeeze of lime juice, and shredded cheese.

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.

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Speaking on behalf of the 2023 Boat of the Year team, I can say none of us could have predicted a better grand finale to our multiple days of sea trials that immediately followed the United States Sailboat Show in Annapolis, Maryland, this past October. With 17 boats in the hunt for honors, we lucked out with two days of blue skies and honking northerlies, followed by a windshift to the south that picked up where the previous breezes left off. It was the first time I can remember when every entry enjoyed such generosity from the Chesapeake wind gods. And by the time we boarded our last vessel—the handsome and rugged Tartan 365—along with designer Tim Jackett, the whitecap-covered bay was the ideal venue for a performance cruiser to, well, perform.

I’ll let my colleague Herb McCormick, describe the scene: “On a sporty Chesapeake Bay day with choppy seas and gusty winds—the sort of conditions where prudence might’ve called for a reef or maybe two in the main—we instead opted for a full-hoist mainsail and were treated to one of the best test sails in our entire Boat of the Year sea trials. 

“With the efficient double-­headsail Cruise Control Rig, we dialed up the staysail, which provided plenty of grunt going to weather and ample horsepower off the breeze. At the wheel, the helm was light and exact; down below, out of the fray, all was tight and quiet. The 365 certainly wasn’t one of the larger boats in the contest, but the size and dimensions seem just about ideal for a cruising couple, and it was clear that the boat would happily take you just about anywhere you wished to go.”

Alrighty then. Once we’d all taken a turn at the wheel and confirmed the agility of the boat pounding to weather, we cracked off, furled the working jib, and rolled out the big reacher—a convenient way to shift gears using the Cruise Control Rig. With breeze abaft the beam, we headed for the United States Naval Academy and the mouth of the Severn River, the 365 trucking along as though riding on rails. And once we learned that it was Jackett’s first time aboard the boat under sail, we turned over the helm to its creator. We sat back and enjoyed what turned into a flat-water ride to remember through a long New England winter.

Tartan has been building boats in Ohio since 1960, and Jackett has been at the drawing board, initially in collaboration with Sparkman & Stephens and later with an in-house design team, since 1977. The decades-long ­collaboration has resulted in a long run of fine-sailing cruising sailboats, with deck layouts, equipment, and interior accommodations designed to meet the needs of owners who often sail shorthanded or with occasional family and guests aboard. Several models have won top honors in Cruising World’s Boat of the Year contests, including the 365, which was named 2023 Best Midsize Cruiser.

The company was purchased by Seattle Yachts in 2020, and during the pandemic, manufacturing was moved from Fairport Harbor to a new facility in Painesville, Ohio. Besides being chief designer, Jackett now also manages production.

The 365’s fiberglass hull is foam-cored and infused using epoxy vinylester resin; the deck is cored with balsa and infused with epoxy. Hull and deck penetrations are through solid-glass windows; aluminum plates are added to the laminate where hardware is mounted. The primary bulkheads are foam-cored too, with rich wood veneers on exposed surfaces. The boat we saw in Annapolis had a light-cherry interior and solid-wood furniture; teak and maple are also options. 

The layout and fit-and-finish of the interior are as upscale as they are practical. The owner’s berth is forward. In the salon, a centerline drop-leaf table sits just abaft the mast, with settees to either side. A galley is aft and to port; a full nav station sits opposite. There’s generous counter space for a boat of this size, and deep fiddles will keep dishes and ingredients where they belong underway. Abaft the companionway, there’s a double-berth guest stateroom to port and a head to ­starboard, with stowage behind. All told, there can be berths for six to seven crew.

I really liked the look of the cherry furniture and ­aqua-colored cushions set off against a white cabin top. The interior popped.

Tartan makes its own carbon-fiber masts and booms, both of which come as standard equipment. Jackett says that they add to the vessel’s inherent stability because they reduce weight aloft and the tendency for hobbyhorsing in a seaway. The 365 in Annapolis sported an optional Leisure Furl boom that worked flawlessly when we set sail. The single rudder has a carbon-fiber shaft, held in place by Jefa bearings, making the twin-helm Edson steering butter-smooth.

If I had a need to pick a nit, it would be the cam cleats used to secure the furling lines for the headsails. They are located along the lifelines, just outside the port cockpit coaming, where they can be inadvertently released, as we found out during one of our upwind tacks. A cleat or other positive locking mechanism would be an easy fix, I’d guess.

Otherwise, I thought that the topsides ergonomics worked quite well. Hardware and electronics from Harken, Raymarine and the like were top-notch, and sails were by Sobstad. There was plenty of room abaft the wheels to work, seating forward in the cockpit was comfortable, and the wide side decks going forward were easy to traverse. Overall, the feeling was snug, I noted, which it should be on a cruising boat, where the crew wants to sail safely and stay rested for the long haul.

Perhaps my fellow judge Ed Sherman summed up the Tartan 365 most succinctly: “First class all the way here.” 

Tartan 365 Specifications

Boat of the Year judge and CW editor­-at-large Mark Pillsbury is a die-hard sailor who has owned a number of sailboats, including a Sabre 34, on which he lived for 15 years.

The post Sailboat Review: Tartan 365 appeared first on Cruising World.

The mainsheet on our new Sabre 30 didn’t look right. It was the middle of a hot, airless July week. We’d bought the boat barely a month earlier, and now we were attempting to get it from New Jersey to Maine. Because of the lack of wind, the mainsail sagged as we motored up Long Island Sound. I had plenty of time to look at Ora Kali’s boom but not a lot of incentive to solve any problems. 

Then one day, we were tied to a mooring in the harbor at Scituate, Massachusetts, cheek by jowl with another Sabre 30. Wow, I realized: Our ­block-and-tackle arrangement is just wrong. 

The weight of the boom and pressure on the mainsail on a small boat are light enough that the connection between boom and hand can be direct, but a boat of any size requires an arrangement of block-and-tackle to make it manageable.

Block-and-tackle reduces the forces necessary both to hold something in place and to lift it. In terms of mainsheet tackle, a block-and-tackle system makes it easier for the person in the cockpit to steady or control the boom and to sheet in the sail when there’s wind.

Ora Kali has three blocks in her mainsheet tackle. While the arrangement on the port side was fine for holding the boom in place, it did not take full advantage of the power for sheeting in. I took down the blocks and rearranged them. The correct arrangement gives a 3-to-1 advantage on the aft block-and-tackle, and employs the forward block mostly for turning.

The sloppy mainsheet tackle setup shouldn’t have been a surprise. This was not the first instance of the boom being rigged wrong. But Ora Kali was in such good shape for a 38-year-old boat when we bought it that I assumed something this basic would be correctly run. 

When the seller bent on the sails the day before the sale, I was still dazzled by our good fortune in securing the boat and didn’t take careful notice of what he was doing. A week later, we took down the mainsail before we sailed off to inspect it for wear that might need repair and noticed that the tack cringle was hooked onto one of a pair of hooks normally used when reefing the sail. It became obvious why this was done: The gooseneck fitting was set up backward, putting the attachment point for a tack shackle behind the hooks. Useless. In fact, it turned out there was no tack shackle. It was a simple matter to reposition the reef hook/tack assembly, and I eventually found a tack shackle that fit. 

Another puzzle we chose to work around in the interest of setting off for Maine was a barely functioning outhaul. An outhaul is used to tension the foot of the mainsail and attaches to the clew or clew car, then runs to the after end of the boom and around either an internal or external sheave and forward, where it can be adjusted. If the sail is fixed to the boom with slides or bolt rope, as it was on Oddly Enough, our Peterson 44, then an outhaul isn’t crucial for setting the general sail shape. In fact, we rarely touched ours. 

With a loose-footed main, the outhaul has more work to do. The Sabre 30 is the first boat I’ve owned with a loose-footed main, and I didn’t understand what the rig was. The rope that attached to the clew car was not the same rope as emerged from an exit plate forward on the boom. When we tried pulling on either end, the car would budge only so far, and we never were able to fully stretch out the loose foot. I assumed that the outhaul had broken and a knot someone had made to add new rope to the original was jamming inside. 

During the spring refit, I looked up in-boom outhaul rigs and saw that they usually include a block-and-tackle to add purchase for adjusting the mainsail foot. This is fixed midway by a bolt through the boom. I took Ora Kali’s boom end off and discovered that the bolt holding the block had been run right through it rather than through a shackle, keeping it from swiveling. The two pieces of line were too big to run alongside each other freely. Between a seized block and the friction built up in the lines, the outhaul was useless.

The tricky part of this rerigging was snagging the shackle. I used a messenger line to pull the block-and-­tackle into ­approximate position inside the boom, then ran a ­screwdriver through holes in the boom and the shackle.

The last piece of boom ­rigging that bothered me was the topping lift. On Ora Kali, this was a fixed length of ­7-by-19 wire rope attached at the masthead with a small block at the other end. A Dacron rope ran from a shackle on the end of the boom, up over this block, down to the boom end sheaves, then inside to an exit sheave.

This is a fairly common way of rigging a topping lift, but I’m not a big fan of using wire in running rigging. 

The primary purpose of the topping lift is to take the weight off the boom when the sails are furled and for reefing. On my previous cruising boats, I had topping lifts that doubled as a spare main halyard. 

To fulfill both of these needs, I replaced the system with a single rope outhaul, shackling one end of the new topping lift to the after end of the boom, leading the other end over an unused masthead sheave, and installing a halyard exit plate at the bottom of the mast for the topping lift to run out and be adjusted. The lift is simpler, which I like, but running it over a masthead sheave puts it more in the way of the mainsail leach. To make sure we ease it when the sail is raised, I plan to bring the bitter end of the topping lift back to the cockpit to an existing set of sheet stoppers and a winch on the coachroof beside the main halyard and the mainsheet.

All in all, I now have a cleaner, more rationally rigged boom. 

Ann Hoffner started sailing when she was 9 years old. Along with her husband, Tom Bailey, she spent 10 years cruising on their P-44, Oddly Enough, in the South Pacific, Australia and Borneo. Ora Kali, a nimble, shoal-draft Sabre 30, is now teaching them the joys of Maine coastal cruising.

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In the ongoing history of production-yacht construction, one of the more astonishing lists covers what seemed like iconic, top-notch sailboat brands—Little Harbor, Alden, Valiant and Tayana, to name a few—that have simply ceased to exist. But then there’s the story of shipyards such as Sweden’s Hallberg-Rassy, named for the founding boatbuilders Harry Hallberg and Christoph Rassy. In one iteration or another, it’s been knocking out boats for 80 years now. After splashing nearly 10,000 yachts, it shows no signs of slowing. 

There are lots of reasons for this longevity, a major one being that once a sailor has owned a Hallberg-Rassy, at some point he or she will likely trade up or down for another one. Quality, after all, begets quality, and it’s a testament to the brand that there are so many repeat customers. 

Another strong ­reason is that, with the ­brilliant Argentine naval architect Germán Frers driving Hallberg-Rassy’s design efforts for several decades, the company has continued to evolve. 

At no time has this been more evident than with Frers’ latest creation: the aft-cockpit, twin-rudder, performance-­oriented Hallberg-Rassy 400. (A sistership, the Hallberg-Rassy 40 C, shares the same hull but has the center-cockpit configuration that’s synonymous with the company.) As a judge in our 2023 Boat of the Year competition, I was part of the unanimous panel that named the 400 our Import Boat of the Year. 

With its integrated bowsprit, triple-spreader Seldén rig, rectangular hull windows and dual helm stations, the 400 at first glance appears to occupy the same sort of territory we’re used to seeing from all the hot French naval architects who dominate contemporary sailboat design. Yet here is an important difference: no chines. In the pursuit of a seakindly ride and good manners offshore, Frers has instead gone with a rounder hull form, not a V-shape—a most effective approach. 

With the plumb bow, Frers has also maximized the waterline, which is something you notice as soon as you step aboard: The 400 seems like a much larger vessel than 40 feet. But don’t fret, Hallberg-Rassy aficionados: Frers has kept one of the line’s signature features, the nifty windshield that accents the front edge of the cockpit, with the traveler and a pair of solar panels stationed just forward. 

It’s a beamy boat (another reason for the sense of volume and space on board). That beam is carried well aft, a fact that necessitated the twin wheel/rudder setup, which also provides the benefit of total control when well-heeled under sail. The double helms and a split backstay allow easy access to the optional drop-down swim platform aft. While a self-tacking jib is also an option, the standard headsail is slightly overlapped, about 110 percent, which is big enough to provide plenty of power but is still easily tacked. The sheet leads run between the inboard and outboard shrouds, giving the skipper very tight sheeting angles to optimize closehauled upwind performance while making egress unimpeded when moving forward or aft along the side decks. I’m having an extremely difficult time understanding why every builder doesn’t do this.

The hand-laid laminate construction includes a Divinycell PVC foam core for insulation and a favorable strength-to-weight ratio, and what the company calls an integrated “keel stiffener,” an internal reinforcement that runs longitudinally and fore and aft, and is laminated to the hull, as is the hull/deck bond, capped by a formidable bulwark. The result is a strong, robust, monolithic structure. The stiffener negates the need for a central bulkhead in the interior, and this, along with the deck-stepped mast, truly opens up the inviting central salon. 

Mahogany is standard for the interior furniture, though our test boat had the inviting European oak option. The joiner work is nothing less than exquisite; the Swedes are certainly craftsmen of the highest order. Tankage (two fuel tanks and three water tanks) is centralized in the hull, again in the interest of optimizing performance. 

There is a trio of different layouts, the major differences being the choice of one or two staterooms aft, one or two heads, and three designs for the owner’s stateroom forward. Options include a ­dishwasher, washing machine, extra freezer, lee cloths, TV and so on. Our test boat had retractable bow and stern thrusters, electric furling for the main and jib, electric winches, and air conditioning, all optional. 

Interestingly, our test boat lacked a generator (the owner, who was aboard for our sea trials, laughed and said, “I don’t want to service two engines”). Our in-house tech guru and Boat of the Year judge, Ed Sherman, definitely approved. “This boat was one of several in our group that has taken a no-generator approach,” he said. “Using Mastervolt lithium batteries and both 12- and 24-volt electrical subsystems, this fully equipped cruiser will regenerate battery voltage via the 60 hp main engine when needed. It was beautifully executed.”

Our test sail got off to a ­disappointing start, as the wind on Chesapeake Bay was nearly imperceptible. But it slowly filled in, and while the breeze never topped 10 knots, the performance was eye-opening, especially when we unleashed the code zero headsail tacked to the bowsprit and reached off at nearly 8 knots, an impressive number given the conditions. Those twin wheels with ­rack-and-pinion steering provided exact fingertip control, and the sightlines sitting well outboard were terrific. It’s a boat built to go places with style and efficiency. 

Frers has been at this game for quite some time now, but clearly, he hasn’t lost his fastball. Hallberg-Rassy has built its reputation on tough boats that fare well under sail in the stormy northern seas, and the 400 ratchets up the performance side of the equation. That’s what you get when the worlds of tradition and advancement collide. 

Hallberg-Rassy 400 Specifications

Herb McCormick is former editor-in-chief of Cruising World and the yachting correspondent for The New York Times. An author of five nautical books, he’s owned several sailboats, including his current Pearson 365 and Pearson Ensign.

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Most propulsion engines (and gensets) on sailboats are located at or below the waterline, making them ripe for seawater flooding, which can occur for one of three reasons. First, the engine is not installed in accordance with the manufacturer’s instructions. This can allow a siphon to develop, fill the exhaust, and then flood the engine’s cylinders. When the engine is idle, a bad installation also can push in water through the exhaust discharge in a following sea, and from there through open exhaust valves and into the cylinders. Second, an anti-siphon valve malfunctions. Or third, the engine is cranked excessively while bleeding the fuel system. With each revolution, the raw-water pump moves a small amount of seawater into the exhaust system, which eventually overflows back into the engine and through an open exhaust valve.

If your engine floods with seawater, do not operate it again until you have identified and remedied the source. For an engine equipped with a turbocharger and aftercooler, the latter might fill with seawater as well. It would also need to be drained of water, flushed and cleaned. If flooding has occurred within the past 24 hours, then follow these steps. First, open or turn off the start battery switch, and second, turn off the fuel supply. Next, put on safety glasses. Remove the injectors or glow plugs, if you have them in your setup, and then cover the exposed holes with rags and remain clear of them. You can then turn over the engine manually, a task often called barring, by engaging a socket wrench with the alternator pulley. You might need to press down on the slack side of the belt to keep it from slipping. Slowly make at least two full revolutions. If you feel any resistance, stop, because a valve might be seized. If the engine turns freely, you can then crank the engine using the starter for five to 10 seconds, then reinstall the injectors or glow plugs. 

That brings us to step eight: Drain the oil, and replace it and the filter. Remove the valve-cover oil-fill cap to let water vapor escape more easily. Start the engine and allow it to run for about five minutes. Then, drain and replace the oil and filter again. The oil might be milky in appearance if water leaked past the piston rings and into the crankcase. Once that’s done, start the engine and let it idle with no load for five minutes. After two no-load runs and oil changes, carry out an additional oil change, and run the engine under moderate load, now with the valve-cover cap in place, ideally achieving an oil temperature of 200 degrees Fahrenheit, or as close to that as possible. Last, carry out one final oil change. At this point, the oil should not have a milky appearance. Run the engine normally thereafter, and check the oil frequently for any signs of moisture.

If the engine has been flooded with water for more than 24 hours, corrosion may have already begun to set in within the cylinders. In that case, repeat steps one through four from above. Then, remove the valve cover and inspect for visible damage to the valve train. Next, pour a generous quantity of kerosene, light motor oil or automatic transmission fluid over the valve train. Using a light plastic-head hammer, tap each rocker arm over the valve, and watch to see whether the valves and rocker arms move freely. If any rocker arms or valves seem sticky or don’t move immediately when tapped, there is a possibility of valve, valve train and piston damage if the starter is ­engaged. At this point, a ­decision must be made ­whether to remove the cylinder head. If all valves and rockers move freely, and if the engine turns freely when it’s barred over, then disable the run function by holding the stop button or equivalent to prevent the engine from starting. Turn on the battery switch, and spray fogging oil into the air intake (remove the air filter if it’s present) while cranking the engine with the starter for 30 seconds. After that, you can continue from step eight. If this scenario is caught early, in most cases it can be resolved with no permanent damage. 

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

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If there was one thing we’d learned in our first couple of weeks in Costa Rica, it was that the country is absolutely brimming with life. All kinds of life, in all kinds of places. 

Our water tanks, for example, were being colonized by ­disconcerting white algae that had taken hold in the tropical climate. Black-and-white mold speckled the bottoms of ­cushions, the edges of books, and the damp corners into which breezes rarely ventured. On one memorable evening, as the last of the day’s sun diffused across the hazy horizon following an incredibly torrential downpour, a fledge of termites descended and covered the just-rinsed decks in a disgusting layer of insect ­paraphernalia. They dropped into the boat through the open hatches until we gave up and closed everything. We found them crawling up our legs, clustered in the corners of the settee ­cushions, and absolutely coating the cockpit, plastered down by rain. For days afterward, we found termite wings littering the boat, like stray confetti after a party.

We first arrived in Costa Rica in June following a monthlong passage south from Mexico’s Sea of Cortez. Wild Rye, our 32-foot 1971 Wauquiez Centurion, was coated in a stubborn layer of salt and dust, remnants of northern Mexico’s desert-type climate. My partner, Liam, and I were feeling equally grubby after the passage, our faces sunburned and clothes stiff from sea spray. The cool rains that greeted us in Costa Rica were divine. Having arrived at the start of the rainy season, we had no doubt that there would be more where that came from. For the next several months, our small world would be shaped as much by fresh water from the skies as by the salty ocean that held up our floating home.  

We started our explorations in Bahía Santa Elena. A bay within a bay on the remote northern edge of Santa Rosa National Park, protected from the southwest swell by its orientation and from the gusty Papagayo winds by the high hills to the north, it was a haven of stillness after a long month of constant motion. The only noise was the rush of wind over the hilltops high above and the constant background chatter of the jungle. Howler monkeys roared, tropical birds called, and, at dawn and dusk, enormous flocks of parrots filled the air with their strange, rambunctious conversation.

Paddling up the estuary in the dinghy on the rising tide was like entering another world. Light filtered through the mangroves, and the harsh midday sun softened to a dappled glow. Blue morpho butterflies winked in the trees like bright jewels, and colorful land crabs scuttled along mangrove roots suspended over the water. We spent hours drifting and listening to the unfamiliar birdsong, our ears transporting us even when our eyes couldn’t pick out the wildlife tucked away in the dense greenery. 

Another day, we hiked up to a ridge overlooking the bay. Our guidebook had an old map of hiking trails in the national park, but when we finally found the start of one, it clearly hadn’t been used for some time. The dirt road had been obscured by fallen trees and heavy curtains of climbing vines. Liam seemed to intuit, rather than actually see, the path under our feet; I crossed my fingers and followed. 

After an hour of serious bushwhacking, stopping every so often to pick small spines and burrs out of our clothes, we came around a corner and encountered a trail crew. The sight of two men with machetes and an Isuzu Trooper towing an ancient grader was decidedly surreal. We stretched our legs with pleasure on the crisp, newly cut swath, kicking up clouds of dusty red earth and admiring the strange mix of cactuses and deciduous canopy cover that characterizes the tropical dry forest in northern Costa Rica. On the return trip, we passed the trail crew again; they had made it about 300 feet farther into the dense growth before the grader overheated. Based on how many times my ankles had been snarled by strong, spiny vines, I was not surprised. The tireless growth of the tropical forests strikes me as a life force that far outmatches any human efforts to tame it.

For a tiny country, Costa Rica packs a mighty punch when it comes to ecological diversity. Although it makes up less than one-tenth of a percent of the Earth’s surface, it is home to nearly 6 percent of global biodiversity. Due in part to its geographical position—sandwiched between North and South America, as well as the Pacific and Atlantic oceans—and in part to its mountainous topography, the country contains a wealth of ecosystems and microclimates, from chilly, high-altitude cloud forests to coastal mangroves and everything in between. With more than 25 percent of its landmass protected in the form of national parks, reserves and refuges, Costa Rica has become something of a symbol of biodiversity.

As we meandered south, we visited as many of these protected areas as we could, enjoying the gradual transition from the tropical dry forest to muggy, muddy rainforest. For two Canadian gringos who have spent the majority of our short lives north of the 49th parallel, this land of eternal summer with creatures such as the tapir and tamandua, the kinkajou and bushy-tailed olingo, hummed with opportunity for new sights and experiences.

In the Curú Wildlife Refuge, on the southern edge of the Nicoya Peninsula, we stepped softly through groves of fruit trees and coconut palms left over from the area’s agricultural history. Feisty capuchin monkeys threw down half-eaten mangoes to defend their territory, and the air was heady with the scent of fermenting fruit. In the dim purple twilight, a coati sashayed past, tail held high, nose scuffling the forest floor. 

Farther down the coast, we anchored in front of Manuel Antonio National Park—the country’s tiniest and one of its most visited parks—and spent a day watching the local sloths as they blissfully alternated between snoozing and munching on leaves in the forked branches of cecropia trees. More than any other animal we were lucky enough to see, the sloths seemed to embody the mellow pura vida lifestyle for which Costa Rica is known.

With their goofy, blissed-out grins, I imagined them to be saying, “Take it easy, man, life is good.” And it sure is.  

On the Osa Peninsula, Corcovado National Park grows increasingly popular for its lush biodiversity; it’s one of the most biologically intense places on Earth. Instead of paying the steep park fees, we explored the fringes of the peninsula’s intensely humid rainforest. We anchored in Drake Bay to make use of the public hiking trail that runs for 10 miles along the coast, all the way to the San Pedrillo ranger station on the edge of Corcovado. 

We saw brilliant blue-and-yellow gartered trogons, and a family of capuchin monkeys, one mother still with a tiny infant clinging to her back. We hid from the daily deluge of rain under the broad, leafy canopy of a gnarled old tree, having foolishly declined a friendly fisherman’s offer to join him under the tarp shelter of his panga. We plunged through ankle-deep mud in our rain boots. Although we had anchored in Drake Bay with jungle exploration in mind, I instantly fell in love with the anchorage for its beach, as well: a wide, sandy crescent bisected by several creeks running down to the sea, with a high green hill at its back into which the town disappeared. The ocean, at its front, was as calm as a millpond.

The rich, life-filled wildness of the Costa Rican jungle is not ­limited to parks. Everywhere we went, we were struck by the denseness of the trees, which grew unchecked right down to the tide line. Even the largest coastal towns were half-hidden within a leafy embrace and hard to spot from the water, buildings further camouflaged by their tin roofs, which oxidized to a pale, mottled green. Every beach we visited was lined with verdant growth, trees wreathed in mist in the early mornings, and pools of shade in the heat of the midday sun. From their thick canopies came the strident song of kiskadees and the high, fluting calls of toucans. From overhead, I imagine the country looks like a sea of green, with canopies ruffled by the wind like waves on water. An ocean of trees.

Next to the lush forests—but in a way intimately connected to them, because it is the rain, in part, that fuels that verdant growth—what I will remember most about Costa Rica is water. At the end of our first week, we were running desperately low, a result of having placed too much faith in other cruisers’ assurances that it rained all the time. With only 2 gallons left in our last tank, we anchored in front of the small fishing town of Junquillal, just east of Bahía Santa Elena, and dinghied in to ask around. 

Feeling a bit shy after weeks of solitude, we approached the fishing dock and waved at a group of surly-looking fishermen playing cards in the shade. In response to our slow, heavily accented Spanish request, a fisherman walked over, grinned and said: “I like your little boat. And sure.” He shouted something in rapid-fire Spanish, and another guy walked over, dragging the end of a well-used and abused hose. The two men stood chatting with me (I used the word liberally; I probably caught about one word in five) while I filled our jerry jugs, and then they helped me lug them all back to the dinghy. As we cast off, dinghy loaded to the gunwales, the group wished us well with shouts of “Pura vida!”

We never ran low on water after that. Docks at every fishing pier and coastal resort, no matter how decrepit or luxurious, all seemed to have a water hose, and everyone was happy to share. As we headed south and the rainy season established itself, we reveled in the torrential afternoon rains that could fill our tanks in an hour. There was the cool relief of cloud cover as towering thunderheads built, fueled by the heat rising off the land; the crisp freshness of rain, washing away the salt of sweat and sea spray, delightfully and tinglingly cold on our skin; the relief as rain drove away the afternoon heat, and the equal relief as the next morning’s sun chased away the lingering dampness. Everything we had read and heard about Costa Rica during the rainy season indicated that it would be too wet and ­uncomfortable. The reality was that we absolutely loved it. 

Looking back, what we appreciated above all was the sense of transition, through ecosystems as well as seasons.

Looking back on our three months in Costa Rica, what we ­appreciated above all was the sense of transition, through ­ecosystems as well as seasons. As we floated south, we moved toward the rain in space and time: from drier to wetter forests, lower to higher average rainfall, and toward the wettest months of the year, which are August through October. It was a continuation of the transition we experienced when leaving Mexico’s arid heat and venturing into the humid tropics, which is itself the mirror image of the transition we experienced when we made that first big leap from Canada. As people whose home is forever on the move, it might seem like we’ve abandoned the seasonality of Canada for eternal summer, but we are moving through seasons, all the same. It’s just that the motion is geographical more than temporal. 

Now, as the rainy season approaches its zenith, we start to look ahead to the next change, the next place. Perhaps from here, Wild Rye will find her way out of the tropics and back into the higher latitudes. After a few magical years of endless summer, we think it might be nice to see some snow again. And so, the cycle will continue, until one day our season of travel comes to its natural end, and the next change, the next adventure, will be found back home where we started. 

Hilary Thomson and her partner, Liam Johnston, have been living and traveling aboard their 1971 Wauquiez Centurion 32, Wild Rye, since 2019. Their eastern Pacific journey encompassed points northward to Haida Gwaii, in northern British Columbia, and southward to Panama City.

Weather and Sailing Conditions

Costa Rica’s Pacific coast has two distinct seasons: dry, from December to May; and rainy, from June to November. The driest weather is in Guanacaste province in the north, and the rainiest part of the country is the Osa Peninsula. 

During the dry season, there will be more-consistent wind for cruising, but the country is affected by the Papagayo gap winds: strong, intermittent northeasterly winds that commonly blow 30 or 40 knots, with gusts up to double the forecast windspeed. They are strongest from December through March, when the northeast trade winds are at their height in the Caribbean. To sail through the Papagayos, follow the shoreline carefully to avoid the fetch that builds farther out to sea. 

During the rainy season, winds tend to be light. Take advantage of the regular afternoon onshore breeze if you want to cover any miles under sail. Rain squalls bring short-lived periods of stronger wind, often accompanied by lightning and heavy rain that can obscure visibility. The storms are most common in the late afternoon and early evening. 

Costa Rica sits on the southern edge of the Northern Hemisphere hurricane zone, which affects Pacific Central America and Mexico as well as the Caribbean. However, Costa Rica is far enough south that the risk of a hurricane landfall is low.

Anchorages

Many anchorages on the Pacific coast are fairly exposed to southwest swell; be prepared for a lot of rolling, especially from May to October, when the southwest swell is at its largest. Setting a stern hook to hold the bow into the swell will help keep the boat comfortable. Exposure to swell also makes for sporty (or occasionally ­outright dangerous) dinghy landings. Expect to navigate many surf breaks, and watch the local pangas for an indication of the best approach. To escape the swell, consider exploring the Gulf of Nicoya and Golfo Dulce, which are sheltered by Costa Rica’s two large peninsulas and have many interesting anchorages. 

In the dry season when the northeast trades and Papagayos are blowing, swell will be less of an issue, but protection from northerly winds and fetch will be important. 

The Pacific coast of Costa Rica has significant tides (­generally around 8 feet), so plan your shore arrivals accordingly, and make sure to tie your dinghy well.  

Formalities

Upon entering Costa Rica, cruisers are given a 90-day cruising permit. Extensions are no longer permitted at the expiration of the cruising permit, and it is not possible to reenter Costa Rica for three months. When we were in Costa Rica in 2021, all cruisers were required to use an agent to check in because of the pandemic. For us, the use of an agent made an otherwise-­lengthy process easy. I was quoted prices between $375 and $450 for the check-in service, with a significant discount (around $100 off) for members of the Panama Posse, a go-at-your-own-pace cruising rally between Southern California and Annapolis, Maryland, via the Panama Canal.

Ports of entry in Costa Rica include Marina Papagayo, Playa del Coco, Puntarenas, Caldera, Quepos and Golfito. Marina Papagayo is the northernmost port of entry; customs and immigration officials are located in Liberia, and the port captain is in Playa del Coco, each about 25 miles away, so hiring an agent might be cost-effective compared with the taxi fares and time required to do it yourself. Golfito, the southernmost port of entry, has several marinas with immigration, customs and the port captain located nearby, so clearing in or out here on your own is straightforward. Our exit clearance, which we were able to complete ourselves, cost about $15. Many officials in Costa Rica speak English, but don’t count on it. All marinas will have helpful English-speaking staff.

Cost

We found daily items such as groceries, beer and fuel to be cheaper than or on par with American prices, while tourist-oriented items such as marinas and dining out were often more expensive. Marinas ran from $2.50 to $3.50 per foot per night; beers were about $1 each. Dining out was variable; the cheapest meals were reliably found at soda restaurants (much like American diners). Free potable water is available nationwide, and hoses can be found at most docks.

Guidebooks and charts

We used Sarana’s Guide to Cruising Pacific Costa Rica and Panama(2015) by Eric Baicy and Sherrell Watson. It’s an affordable e-book with useful sets of waypoints for ­approaching anchorages and navigating tricky areas. Also available is Charlie’s Charts: Costa Rica by Margo Wood. We found Navionics to be fairly ­accurate throughout the ­country; however, many hazards are uncharted, and we would not recommend traveling this coast without a detailed guidebook. —HT

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