It’s a scenario I encounter with alarming regularity: electrical cabling routed in ways it was never meant to be. I’ve seen examples through sharp cutouts in bulkheads, over engine bell housings, around motor-mount brackets, through bilge water…the examples are nearly endless.

Achieving reliability in a marine electrical system is no small feat. The environment is obviously harsh, wet, salty, vibration-prone and, at times, bone-jarring. Add to that temperature extremes caused by the seasons and engine heat, and you have the makings of a perfect storm of electrical unreliability. However, following just a few good wiring practices can eliminate the vast majority of electrical failures and calamities.

Start by getting into the casual habit of paying attention to wiring every time you encounter it: in cabinets, the engine compartment, sail lockers, bilges and, of course, behind and adjacent to the electrical panel itself. You must be mindful of AC power sources such as shore power, gensets and inverters; if any of these are energized or running, unless you know for sure otherwise, then assume every exposed terminal is live AC 120-volt power. Using a tool such as a noncontact AC-voltage detector (always test it first on a known, live AC source before relying on it to alert you to an unknown AC source) will enable you to determine if wiring is energized.

However, even then you must use caution because an inverter that is in sleep mode and producing no power can generate electrocution potential if you touch an energized terminal.

The only way to be sure an inverter cannot harm you is to disconnect it from its DC power source, either with a disconnect switch (all inverter DC positive cables should be switched for this reason, and to deenergize in the event of a fire) or by removing its fuse. While 12- and 24-volt DC power won’t electrocute you, you can cause a short circuit, which could lead to a fire. Remove all metallic jewelry and watches before working around any electrical connections, even if you believe them to be dead.

Read more from Steve D’Antonio: Monthly Maintenance

Look for wires that lack support; American Boat and Yacht Council standards call for all wires to be supported at least every 18 inches. Look for wires that enter metallic chassis or junction boxes that lack strain relief and chafe protection, often known as cord grips. If you can pull on a wire that enters the chassis of a battery charger or inverter, for example, and impart strain on the connection within, that’s a violation of the standard, and an invitation to a failure.

Check ring terminals wherever you encounter them, and make sure the screw that supports them is tight; if you can twist the terminal under the screw head, it’s too loose. Ring terminals should be installed in size order: largest first, then successively smaller, and no more than four per screw or stud. Of course, if you see any green crustiness, then that is clearly a problem as well.

With one exception, every energized wire (i.e., DC positive or AC “hot”) must be protected by a fuse or circuit breakers. These overcurrent-protection devices have one primary mission: to protect the wire in the event of a short. Without them, a short circuit would cause the wire to rapidly overheat, and if it’s adjacent to something flammable—like almost everything we use to build boats, including fiberglass, timber and fabric—it could lead to a fire.

The one exception to the overcurrent-protection rule is the positive cable that supplies the engine starter. In an effort to avoid nuisance-tripping in the event of a weak battery (low battery voltage induces high current flow), ABYC standards exempt this cable from overcurrent-protection guidelines.

However, this means that the threshold for protection of this cable is necessarily higher, thus every inch of it should be carefully routed to prevent chafe or damage. And above all else, no part of this cable can be allowed to make contact with any part of the engine, other than the starter’s positive post. For an extra measure of protection, consider adding a split loom sheath to this cable for its entire length, which will afford it increased protection.

Steve D’Antonio offers services for boat owners and buyers through Steve D’Antonio Marine Consulting (stevedmarineconsulting.com).

The post The Dos and Don’ts of Boat Wiring appeared first on Cruising World.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a dish more versatile than a frittata, which is probably why so many cultures and cuisines have something comparable. In Spain, tortilla Española is a regular part of a classic tapas spread; China has its egg foo yung; and France, of course, is famous for omelets and quiches.

A frittata is a simple Italian dish that can be served at any time of day. It’s a favorite aboard our wooden cutter, Opus, for either brunch or an equally tasty lunch or dinner, with a green salad and a loaf of good bread. It can be made quickly if surprise guests come aboard; it keeps well and makes a great snack while underway, during any watch. It can be vegetarian, gluten-free, served hot or cold, and made with just about any ingredients you have on hand. The main thing is: Don’t overcook it! You want a creamy, custardy consistency.

Cook’s Notes

If you’d prefer a lighter frittata, consider replacing sausage with 1/2 to 3/4 cup smoked, shredded salmon; add it to pan just before adding egg mixture. For a fancier touch, make a soufflé frittata by separating egg whites and beating into soft peaks before folding into the yolk mixture.

Check out more: Recipes and Food

Sausage Frittata with Spinach, Red Peppers and Cheese Recipe

• 2 Tbsp. olive oil
• 1 cup sausage, sliced
• 1/2 cup chopped onion
• 1/2 cup chopped sweet red pepper
• 2 cups raw baby spinach (or to taste)
• Salt and pepper, to taste
• 8-10 eggs
• 1/4 cup whole milk or cream
• 1 cup fontina cheese, coarsely grated (can substitute Gouda or Emmental)

Yields 6 servings.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. In a nonstick, lightly oiled, ovenproof 10-inch skillet (cast iron is ideal), heat the oil over medium heat. Saute sausage until it begins to brown. Add onions and peppers, and saute until slightly soft. Add spinach, and cook down until wilted. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Break eggs into a large bowl. Add milk or cream and whisk lightly. Stir in 3⁄4 cup of the shredded cheese. (Reserve 1⁄4 cup to sprinkle on top.) Add egg mix to pan, and gently stir to mix ingredients. Cook on medium-low heat until edges just begin to firm up. Top frittata with reserved cheese.

Place on middle rack of oven and cook until center is just set, about 10-12 minutes. (Center might not be brown; this is OK.) Remove and let cool for about 10 minutes if serving warm. Either slide it onto a serving dish or serve from the pan. Cut into wedges and enjoy.

Preparation: at anchor

Time: 30 minutes

Difficulty: easy

The post Galley Recipe: Sausage Frittata appeared first on Cruising World.

Most boat owners would surely agree that an anchor/deck-wash system would be a useful addition to their boat’s equipment. If they anchored frequently anywhere in the murky waters of Florida’s Intracoastal Waterway, they would consider it absolutely essential. The ICW runs up the Eastern Seaboard as far as Chesapeake Bay, and is a playground for boats of every shape and size. It is well-protected from the Atlantic Ocean by a string of sometimes quite large barrier islands, many hosting waterfront towns yet with outlets every so often to the ocean.

In many areas along the ICW, the bottom is mostly sedentary thick black mud that an anchor must penetrate to find better holding beneath. Once an anchor digs in, it usually holds well; the trouble is, upon weighing it, half the bottom usually comes up, glued to the chain and anchor, in the form of a smelly oozing sludge over a layer of hard clay.

Even when wet, this ­concrete-like substance is very difficult to clean off an anchor; if left to dry, it’s practically impossible to remove from the chain. I’ve seen people trying to poke it off their anchor with a boat hook, or dipping a deck brush in the water and then valiantly attempting to wash the black crud off their chain and foredeck. My schooner, Britannia, has a bowsprit, and the anchor comes up beneath it, so it’s impossible to wash with either method. To clean the anchor, I would dangle it in the bow wake as we motored away, but that’s not advisable if you have a short bow roller because the anchor will bump against the bow. I would often pile the dirty chain on deck, then swill it with buckets of water before stowing it.

All of this paraphernalia rather removed the pleasure of getting underway—or rather, it used to, until I built myself a great deck-wash system.

You can buy complete ­deck-wash kits from ­chandleries and online. They cost anywhere from about $200 to $500, depending on pump pressure and whatever ancillary equipment they include, such as hoses, a nozzle, a filter, pipe fittings, etc. They are primarily meant to be hard-mounted below deck, with pipes or hoses from a seacock or other seawater source to a pump, then to a deck outlet fitting, normally near the bow, to which is attached a water hose and nozzle. These kits don’t usually include connecting pipework or electrical wiring, which adds to the cost of installation.

A powerful deck-wash system is highly effective for cleaning a dirty anchor and chain rode, ensuring it passes into the chain locker in a reasonably unsoiled and unsmelly condition.

Provided your hose is long enough, it can also double as an actual deck wash—but that is all it does. A fixed system cannot be used to pump rainwater out of a dinghy, or as an additional bilge pump, or to wash a bilge, or any other job for which a powerful water jet would be useful. To wash a deck—as opposed to simply cleaning ground tackle—a much longer hose is usually needed. In other words, a fixed system is not very versatile, with few other uses. The deck wash I built can be used for all these functions, and anything else you need to pump water onto or out of, including out of your boat or dinghy.

Furthermore, the equipment and assembly is simplicity itself, consisting of only a pressure pump and filter, two lengths of regular garden hose—one with a weight on the end to keep it underwater—and a hand nozzle. Operation is equally simple. The inlet hose is just hung anywhere over the side into the water, and the pump connects to a battery. The pump then sucks up seawater and shoots a powerful jet of water through the hand nozzle.

The main item, of course, is the pump, and there are many on the market to suit different budgets and pressure needs. The only communal requirements are: The pump should be self-activating (also called an on-demand pump); that is, it starts and stops when pressure changes in the line as the hand nozzle is opened and closed. This makes the operation semiautomatic and saves the need for an on/off switch. The pump must also be self-priming and with adequate lifting capacity from below the waterline, because if it is not powerful enough to suck up water, it obviously won’t work. Diaphragm pumps are preferable to impeller pumps because they are able to run dry, enabling the lines to be pumped empty after use for stowage. Also, unlike an impeller pump, a diaphragm pump has no “kick” as it starts up, which means it won’t fall over or roll off wherever you place it. On-demand deck-wash pumps are similar to those used for pressurizing freshwater systems, sink faucets and showers.

After looking at many pump specifications, I decided on the Aqua-Jet WD 5.2 washdown pump, from Johnson Pump. This is one of the more powerful pumps available, with 70 psi (about the same as a house), and it easily sucks water up my boat’s 4-foot freeboard. The pump has a detachable, easy-to-clean filter, which saves having to buy a separate in-line one. The filter also swivels, allowing the outlet hose to point forward or back, making it easier to use.

Included with the pump is a hand nozzle, which can be locked in the open position. The nozzle fits on the hose with a push fitting, which is useful because you don’t have to unscrew anything when you need to remove it for a continuous flow, as when emptying a dinghy, or as an extra bilge pump. There are four large rubber feet under the base plate, so this pump can be placed anywhere on deck with little fear of it damaging anything. The pump comes with fittings for 1⁄2-inch and 5⁄8-inch water hoses, but it is best to use the larger size (which has some 60 percent greater volume) to produce the maximum water jet. This pump is available from most marine suppliers, and found online for about $140 (part No. 10-13407-07 for 12 volts).

I bought an inexpensive 5⁄8-inch garden hose, which I cut into 6-foot and 9-foot lengths, and attached them to the pump fitting with clamp-type hose fittings. Six feet is long enough to easily hang over the side of my boat. To keep the end underwater, I weighted it with two brass fittings from my local hardware store. One has a 5⁄8-inch barb for the hose, and a 3⁄4-inch NPT thread, onto which I screwed another brass nut for added weight.

For power, I found a couple of crocodile clips, like those used on car jumper cables, at my local auto-parts store; I then soldered them to a long-enough 14 AWG wire to reach any of my 12-volt batteries. Do not be tempted to use a cigarette-lighter receptacle that you might have in your cockpit. They can get quite warm and shouldn’t be used for the ­continuous current draw of these powerful pumps, which for the Johnson 12-volt unit is 15 amps on startup. An in-line fuse, with amperage as rated by the pump-motor ­manufacturer, should be installed within a few feet of the battery hookup, just to be safe.

After hanging the inlet hose over the side and clipping on the power cord, the pump hums, but nothing else happens—until the hand nozzle is squeezed, whereupon the pump starts sucking water through the hoses and delivers an incredibly powerful 15-foot-long jet, which will knock the muck off any anchor and chain. The long-reaching jet enables you to hit the chain immediately as it comes out of the water, and if you have an electric windlass, you can bring up the chain as quickly as you like. If the system becomes clogged with sucked-up debris, the filter is easily unscrewed and cleaned. The hoses can also be unclipped from the pump by hand with the quick-release connectors to empty them for storage.

With the nozzle fitted, the pump empties a 5-gallon ­bucket in just under three minutes; without the nozzle, it takes about 90 seconds.

When I want to wash any part of the actual deck, I just drop the hose over either side, connect the power, and fire away. Whenever my dinghy gets full of rainwater, I simply drop the end of the intake hose into the boat and pump it dry in just a few minutes, all from on deck, which beats climbing into the waterlogged dinghy with a hand bailer any day. I found another use as well: to empty an ornamental fountain in my backyard, which I could never get completely empty with a small bailer.

This is a deceptively simple setup that works amazingly well. Its versatility adapts to many purposes, yet it’s cheaper than a kit with a pump of comparable power. That’s something of a rarity in the marine-equipment business nowadays, don’t you think?

DIY warrior Roger Hughes frequently writes for CW about his upgrade projects aboard his schooner, Britannia.

The post How to Install a Deck-Wash System appeared first on Cruising World.

A wealthy Dutch doctor asked me a few years back, “Can I retire and cruise on 20 grand a year?”

“Yes,” I said without hesitation.

I was confident that I was correct because my wife, Carolyn, and I were cruising on considerably less at the time. But then I added this sobering kicker: “The trick isn’t to cruise into the sunset on a modest amount of money; the trick is to maintain your vessel to your personal standards as you do so.”

Ah, there’s the rub!

No one has ever starved while circumnavigating, yet many an extended cruise has come to grief on empty coffers.

Let’s take the Dutch doc as an example. He not only owned an expensive German car, he also had a full-time chauffeur to drive it between five-star eateries in Amsterdam. His wife wore Jimmy Choo heels and sported a Rolex big enough to require its own PFD. Could they live and cruise on 20 grand a year? Sure! Were they going to? Not likely.

The bottom line on offshore cruising budgets: Sailors usually spend what they can comfortably afford to, often citing the familiar refrain of “You only go around once!” Maximizing your fun is human nature, as it should be.

One thing that should be taken into account when voyage planning is that people are vastly different. Couples are different, families are different, and crews are different. And a long-term cruising budget and financial plan should embrace these enriching differences, not deny them. Example: The moment we reach a port Carolyn begins planning our shore trips, both near and far. While I love to check out the local museums and historical sites, I’m often not as keen to hop on a plane, train, or rent an expensive car to do so. Nonetheless, we’re a team, and she goes through more gales at sea than she’d like. So I tag along on more historical walking tours than I’d prefer. We’re different, and both of us need different payoffs to fully enjoy our cruising lives.

Food ashore is another variable factor. The chances of starving to death while cruising developing countries populated by folks earning the equivalent of $2 a day are nil if you eat what the locals eat. Often the regional food of Oceanis is plentiful, delicious and nutritious. However, if you sail to Madagascar and want to eat off the Stateside menu at a fancy hotel, well, it is going to cost you a pretty penny to consume imported foodstuffs.

Which takes us back to my opening hedge about maintaining your sailboat to “your personal standards.” Ashore, our Dutch doc had his chauffeur wash his car once a day, and he had it professionally detailed every month or so. It sparkled, and the good doc really appreciated that. He felt his pristine auto was, quite naturally, an extension of his personality, and that it indicated his personal and professional success.

When he moved aboard, he transferred this concept to his vessel. The result had maintenance costs that were four to five times higher than the sea gypsy anchored next to him.

Interestingly, he told me a decade later, his glorious yacht didn’t impress the people he wanted to impress. Oh, sure, if he tied stern to at Portofino in the Med amid the mega power yachts with their toy boxes open (huge doors engineered specifically to show off the owner’s glittering leisure possessions for the edification of strolling dock gawkers), his new sailboat attracted plenty of admiring landlubbers. But the folks who the good doctor now wanted to impress were the offshore sailors who regularly transited oceans. And they didn’t give his vessel a second glance. Why? Because they were interested in practical globe-trotting boats, not ostentatious displays of wealth.

I, for one, have never been impressed by owners of yachts who pay others to bring them to Haiti and then tie stern to in Port-au-Prince to watch the locals die of dysentery. To each his own, of course.

Let’s come at this from a different angle though. Race boats have to be fast because they have an obvious yardstick with which to measure their split-second success. Race boats can’t just look fast; they have to actually be fast.

Cruising vessels are more diverse in aim and application. There are no easily defined criteria. During my last boat show, I stepped aboard a half-million-dollar “offshore world voyager.” While talking with the broker, I leaned down to open a galley drawer to see how far back it went (to judge wasted interior space), and the entire front of the wobbly drawer came off in my hand. It was made of quarter-inch door-skin Meranti plywood, stapled into soft pine with too-short staples.

Yikes!

But, on the other hand, she gleamed! And had a generator, air conditioner, electric heads, Bose cockpit speakers, and a huge OLED screen mounted on the main bulkhead in case the cruisers buying the boat were feeling adventurous enough to watch old reruns of Sea Hunt on YouTube.

My current vessel, the 40-year-old, 43-foot Wauquiez Amphitrite ketch Ganesh, cost us $56,000 and a year of sweat equity. Am I saying that she’s currently more seaworthy than some of the new boats being sold today?

That’s exactly what I’m saying.

Read More from Cap’n Fatty Goodlander: Cruisers Stuck Aboard in Singapore

Here’s my viewpoint: Harbors are filled with failed fancy-looking yachts that don’t go anywhere, haven’t gone anywhere, and may never go anywhere. At the same time, right now there are dozens of happy circumnavigators aboard $20,000 to $50,000 craft in Mexico, Tahiti, the Caribbean, New Zealand, Tonga, Thailand and Madagascar who have calluses on their hands and epoxy on their sailing shorts.

“How is this possible?” you ask.

Most successful sea gypsies on limited funds have learned how to prioritize their spending. It’s that simple. Why spend money when it buys only paltry convenience? Instead, they focus their finite freedom chips on strength and safety issues—and occasionally allow marine cosmetics to briefly suffer if need be. I, for instance, don’t allow my sailboat to look like a garbage scow. It just appears to be what it is: a seaworthy vessel with a low-income skipper who can’t afford frills (let alone extravagances) because he sails more than he earns.

We haul out only once every two years, and we do all our own work. Is grinding fiberglass and inhaling antifouling fumes fun? Not really. But being able to endlessly cruise internationally is, and this is the only way we can afford to do so on my modest writing income.

Please don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying don’t maintain your vessel; I’m merely indicating that every offshore skipper should consider prioritizing their budget, and the more limited the kitty is, the more important the scrutiny.

Let’s return to the Dutch doc once again. At first, my 40-year-old “dumpster” vessel was far better prepared for offshore sailing than his $800,000 brand-new one was.

Is that my ego talking? No. Did he waste his money on a piece-of-crap boat? No, not at all. In fact, he purchased one of the three yachts I suggested to him.

Then how could this be? Well, quite understandably, Doc had little experience offshore. He simply didn’t know how to prioritize his spending, even though he had plenty of money.

For instance, our Ganesh has over 1,000 pounds of safety equipment aboard. We have a storm trysail on a dedicated track that has its own halyard. Ditto, a storm staysail. Both our main and mizzen sails have three sets of reef points. We have running backstays on both masts that we can set up in extreme weather. We have an inspected four-man life raft ever ready to tip over the side, but we also have a pristine six-man German raft below that is totally out of the weather.

Overkill?

Precisely!

Aboard Ganesh, are our three main cameras and 14 hard drives kept in humidity-controlled environments? They have to be or they wouldn’t work after a year or two. Do we carry four anchors, two of which are oversize? Yes. Lofrans windlass? Check. An all-chain rode and spare nylon rodes? Of course.

We have three electric bilge pumps, a bilge alarm, and a manual pump that can be operated from the cockpit. But we also have a large, portable Edson manual pump on board as well. And while this pump has never been used in anger aboard Ganesh, it has saved many another sinking vessel.

Does our cockpit have surround sound, which the doc’s boat has? Occasionally, especially when we invite other guitar pickers aboard for world-music acoustical jams in, say, Borneo.

Lots of modern boats have no SSB radio. We have two, one that we use primarily on the marine bands (an Icom IC-M710) and the other, an Icom IC-706MKIIG, which we use for our ham contacts. (I’m W2FAT and Carolyn is NP2MU.) And I should mention that some well-intentioned publication gave us a satellite phone, which we appreciated—at least, at first. But then, in midocean, an angry editor called us and started yelling at me. What the heck? After hanging up, I thought about invasive technology and how to harness it and not have it harness us. Why have a device aboard that allows a frustrated dirt dweller to rattle my ocean-blissed brain? That unit made a very satisfying splash 1,000 nautical miles southeast of St. Helena.

There’s something to be said for poverty. All of our winches on Ganesh are manual, and only one is self-tailing. These days, we both spend about four hours in the water per month scraping our bottom and prop of fouling. Each evening, we hand-over-hand hoist our dinghy up on davits. Ashore, we walk or ride our bikes; we almost never rent a car.

All this just because we’re cheap? No, such daily physical activity keeps us both spry and sensuous as well. Just ask the surprised mugger I encountered who was half my age. I am a man of peace, but the surprised look on his face as he went down was gratifying.

Yes, health and spending decisions have consequences. We haven’t spent our cruising lives chasing the false god of convenience, which is why I’ve been able to live aboard and sail the oceans for the past 61 of my 69 years. Or, as I smugly tell my lovely wife, Carolyn, “Isn’t it marvelous the level of international poverty I’ve grown you accustomed to?”

While weathering the pandemic in Singapore, the Goodlanders reported many restrictions during Chinese New Year festivities.

The post How to Stay Within Your Cruising Budget appeared first on Cruising World.

When cruising-guide author and voyager Diana Doyle first approached me about contributing to her citizen-science project, Birding Aboard, I hesitated. I didn’t think I was qualified, having only just gotten into birding in a very amateur, casual way. I’m a sailor, not a birder. True, I’m a sailor who likes birds, especially the pretty ones and the comic ones, but I didn’t consider myself a birder, and certainly not any kind of scientist. I’m not always correct with my identifications and have been downright embarrassingly wrong more than a few times. With few exceptions, I don’t have the single-minded passion to do the research necessary for definitive identifications of birds of which I’m unsure. If I see a loon in winter plumage and I’m not certain whether it’s an Arctic, a Pacific or a common loon, well, I’m OK with letting it go at “loon.”

For me, the fun is much more in sighting a wild creature, appreciating its beauty, and identifying and learning about it if I can, but not really in an avian-life-list sort of way. It’s a lot like my sailing: I like the actual sailing, the ever-changing beauty of the sea, the solitude, the challenges—in short, the experience of taking a small boat across an ocean. It’s not about ticking the boxes of “circumnavigation” or “high latitudes.”

Diana managed to persuade me, though, mostly by assuring me that I could just submit incidental sightings. That way I wouldn’t have to spend my watches with notebook in hand, taking down every bird sighting complete with local time and coordinates. Instead, if I saw something that interested me enough to take a photo, I could go ahead and submit that. In short, any and all sightings are valuable to the Birding Aboard project, which catalogs the birds of the open ocean that are so underrepresented in bird counts around the world for the simple reason that not very many people spend significant time offshore.

My correspondence with Diana coincided with the voyage that my husband, Seth, and I made to Alaska and the Arctic. After extensively refitting our 30-year-old cold-molded wooden cutter Celeste, we set out from Port Angeles, Washington, for a 3,500-mile cruise to Dutch Harbor, in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. That part of the world is incredibly rich in wildlife—avian and otherwise. In our very first port of call, an inlet on the west coast of Vancouver Island, we came face to face with seven—yes, seven—black bears, all intent on munching the rich grasses growing at the head of the cove. Overhead, eagles and ospreys circled on the thermals wafting up from the warm land, searching the water below for fish.

Throughout that cruise, most of our wildlife sightings—except, of course, for whales, porpoises and orcas—took place in our anchorages. We were sailing against the prevailing winds, and so we’d take “bad” weather windows to make progress west, weighing anchor whenever a low-pressure system was forecast in order to take advantage of the easterly winds that accompanied them. So our passages were pretty much all windy, rainy and cold, conditions that had us in full foul-weather gear, reefing down and changing our self-steering Cape Horn’s vane to the small heavy-weather vane. Not exactly wonderful weather for noting bird sightings. Nonetheless, we were excited to spot both Laysan and black-footed albatrosses on our Gulf of Alaska crossing, as well as northern fulmars, mostly the dark-morph sort.

As we moved farther west, we delighted in the comic little puffins—tufted and horned—and in the black-legged kittiwakes breeding in huge flocks on the cliffs of headlands and islands. The variety and beauty of the birds in the wilderness of the Great Land captivated both of us. By the time we were traversing the notoriously difficult passes between the Aleutian Islands, we were fruitlessly—but intently—scanning the waves for the elusive, endemic whiskered auklet, found only there.

Read More from Ellen Massey Leonard: Cruising the Alaskan Peninsula

On our voyage north the following summer, our first destination was the Pribilof Islands, a barren, cold, windswept place that was uninhabited (for good reason) until the Russians colonized Alaska and began harvesting northern fur seals for their valuable hides. Today a small population of Aleuts continues to live there—fishing, hunting and supporting a tiny tourism industry based on, yes, birding.

The Pribilofs is the breeding ground for enormous colonies of seabirds: murres, puffins, red-faced cormorants, several different auklets, and the endemic red-legged kittiwake. For serious birders, it’s a paradise for checking off “lifers” on their lists. The red-legged kittiwake is found almost nowhere else, and the various auklets are unique to the Bering Sea and North Pacific. Seth and I don’t have life lists, but we got unabashedly into it, lying atop the sea cliffs in the sand and high grasses, craning our necks and zoom lenses to get a good look at these beautiful birds. Even fog and high winds couldn’t keep us away; we’d tramp over from the little harbor to the cliffs, bent double into the wind and swirling dust. A fun fact about this part of the world is that 35-knot winds don’t necessarily disperse fog!

At the Fourth of July festivities in the village of St. Paul, on St. Paul Island, the largest of the Pribilofs, we met Alison, a young woman leading bird tours on the island. Not having any clients during our visit—the plane couldn’t land due to high winds and fog—she offered to show us around the island in her van. It was, of course, a bird tour. She first took us to her favorite place for seeing least auklets, where we promptly got the van stuck in the wet sand and had to place flat bits of driftwood under the tires to get it out. There were lots of the cute little auklets, though, only 6 inches tall and with strikingly colored eyes. But we quickly discovered that the seabirds nesting in the cliffs were far from the only avian attraction. There were teals, eiders and long-tailed ducks, Arctic terns, semipalmated plovers and snow buntings. Alison even found a two-day-old rock sandpiper chick.

Chatting away about birds later that evening with Alison and her colleagues, we managed to make one of the colleagues—a very serious birder—absolutely green with envy when we mentioned seeing lots of fork-tailed storm petrels on our passage north from the Aleutians. These lovely, graceful birds flit effortlessly over the gale-tossed waves of the Bering Sea and, like so many pelagic birds, had completely ignored Celeste in their midst, swooping close and then away and then close again. This poor land-bound birder, it turned out, had spent the previous two days sitting behind her telescope, staring into the 40-knot stinker of a gale—fog and sand whipping around her, getting into her hair and teeth and clothes—while she hoped and prayed for a fork-tailed storm petrel to get blown down toward her. None had.

Our next stop on our Arctic voyage was the gold-rush town of Nome, where we planned to check the ice charts and satellite photographs before continuing on through the Bering Strait. The Seward Peninsula, where Nome is situated, is also one of the few places in Alaska where one can see muskoxen, a large and distinctive Arctic herbivore that’s a kind of relic of the Ice Age. Being all-round wildlife appreciators more than true birders, we first sought out the muskoxen, and they more than lived up to our expectations. But we couldn’t help but notice the birds too. Arctic terns not only have beautiful plumage, but also the longest migration route of any bird, all the way to the Antarctic and back every year! The golden plover also migrates far, from the South Pacific to Alaska via Hawaii, and is said to have guided the first Polynesians who settled Hawaii. Our most adorable sighting, though, was the merganser with her little flock of day-old fluffy chicks swimming next to her in a tight pack.

Once through the Bering Strait and up in the Chukchi Sea, the bird life just continued. As we passed Cape Lisburne—the barren brown headland where the Brooks Range meets the sea—in a rare mirror calm, the blue sky was darkened by the huge flocks of murres, flying back and forth to their nests in the cliffs. Neither of us had ever seen such enormous aggregations of birds—such a stark contrast of vibrant, dynamic life in the seemingly lifeless, harsh tundra of the Arctic.

Point Barrow, the most northerly point in the United States and the second-most northerly point on the continent, felt the same. The tundra was as alive as it ever gets, the grasses green, red and yellow, and yet the flat, windy land felt as though it couldn’t possibly support much life. Yet every way we turned dispelled that notion. Pacific white-fronted geese waddled through the grass. King eiders in their spectacular breeding plumage dotted the gray waves of the Beaufort Sea. Once again, the sky turned black with flocks of long-tailed ducks and black brants. Phalaropes, already transitioning into winter plumage, turned their characteristic circles in the shallows nearshore. Black guillemots nested on the offshore islands, and occasionally a snowy owl would swoop across the tundra, going from perch to perch, hunting ground squirrels. Out at sea, high over the frozen Arctic Ocean on the top of the world, white-morph northern fulmars glided majestically over the drifting ice floes.

We hadn’t intended for our Arctic voyage to be focused on birds. Seth and I had simply had in mind that we would see this remarkable, little-visited part of the world from the deck of our floating home. We’d been focused on the challenges inherent in sailing up there, in the harsh, volatile weather, and the cold and ice, with few bays in which to shelter.

Both of us had been looking forward to the mammal life: muskoxen, whales, various seals, maybe even walruses and polar bears. We’d been interested to meet the people native to this tundra land and hear how their lives have both changed and remained much like that of their parents and grandparents. And all of that (except, sadly, for the lack of walrus and polar bear sightings) had gone beyond anything we’d anticipated: the people more welcoming, the whales and muskoxen more numerous, and weather both worse and more rewarding than we’d wanted to believe. But to find a world so alive with so many beautiful birds was an unexpected and wonderful dividend to the voyage. And to find, when we submitted our sightings to Birding Aboard, that we’d seen a variety and quantity of birds to impress any life-list type of birder was rather more gratifying than we as amateur bird nerds really should have found it.

Writer and photographer Ellen Massey Leonard has sailed nearly 60,000 miles on rudimentary classic boats, including a circumnavigation by age 24, a voyage to the Alaskan Arctic, and two more crossings of the Pacific. She and her husband, Seth, were the 2018 recipients of the Cruising Club of America’s prestigious Young Voyager Award.

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Contemporary electronics can add a lot to a cruising sailboat. For starters, the gains often include easier-to-understand information, and therefore better situational awareness and increased safety. The catch, however, is that new plotters, radars and other instruments can be expensive, both to purchase and have installed. And then there’s the issue of getting new equipment to interface with older-but-still-functional gear. Because of this, plenty of cruisers manage just fine with older electronics that—while dated—still work and help get them from here to there.

But, as with all things marine, even once-high-end equipment eventually reaches its endgame. Trouble is, determining when checkmate is inevitable isn’t always obvious, so I reached out to two experts—Nigel Barron, sales and marketing manager at Seattle’s CSR Marine (csrmarine.com), and Rufus Van Gruisen, owner of Cay Electronics in Portsmouth, Rhode Island (cayelectronics.com)—to learn more about when it’s time to (literally) pull the plug on old kit. In doing so, they also helped shed light on the performance and safety gains that can take the sting out of new-equipment purchases.

“Electronics typically work or don’t,” Van Gruisen says, adding that shy of a catastrophic event such as a lightning strike, obsolescence is the biggest gravedigger for most marine instruments. For example, Van Gruisen points to chart plotters: “New charts often don’t work on older plotters because they take up too much memory. A lot of products become obsolete because they can’t load modern software. A cruiser would need to find old, out-of-date charts to make it work.”

This might suffice in places such as Maine, where the seafloor is generally stable and where up-to-date cartography sometimes relies on old bathymetric surveys, but this certainly doesn’t hold true for places such as Chesapeake Bay or the Bahamas, where seafloors morph with storm events and time.

Another vintage-equipment killer, Van Gruisen says, is that manufacturers eventually stop supporting updates for older electronics. For example, older chart plotters can eventually stop working with current GPS configurations.

Barron agrees that obsolescence can be a problem; seven years, he says, is a reasonable life span for most electronics. He points to issues such as inconsistent data from sensors or transducers, speed information failing to display, or screen pixels going dark as signs that it could be time to upgrade. Plus, he believes, seven years is enough time for the market to offer significantly better products. “A cathode-ray tube television might still work, and an older radar might still work, but there are way-better products available that offer better reliability, lower power consumption and new features.”

Prime examples of this are digital, solid-state Doppler-enabled radars that depict dangerous targets in one color (typically red) on a chart-plotter display, and stationary or benign targets in another color (typically green or blue). This functionality not only makes it easier and more intuitive to read a radar display, but these radars are also designed to overlay this imagery atop cartography on a chart-plotter screen, thus improving the user’s situational awareness.

“In 2010, radar was analog,” Barron says. “In 2021, it’s digital.”

While these technological gains are to be celebrated, especially by cruisers who have plied waters shrouded in Down East pea-soup fog or Pacific Northwest rain, adding a modern Doppler-enabled radar to an older marine-electronics ecosystem isn’t usually a plug-and-play possibility.

“If an owner wants a new peripheral sensor attached to the chart plotter, they might need to replace the plotter,” Van Gruisen says. “It’s sometimes hard to replace one piece of electronics because it might not integrate with other equipment on the boat.”

Because of this, both Barron and Van Gruisen point to a new chart plotter as the place to start for refits both mighty and modest. “If you’re on a budget, you can buy a plotter and add sensors later,” Barron says. “It all starts with the plotter.”

Another common roadblock to easy upgrades involves data networks. While the older NMEA 0183 network protocol allowed discrete instruments to share some data, newer NMEA 2000 (commonly referred to as N2K) data backbones make it easy for owners to add new equipment to their network with considerably less fuss. Moreover, most new equipment is designed and built to work with N2K networks. While manufacturers still commonly support NMEA 0183 by making equipment “backward compatible” or by making an NMEA 0183 version of a new piece of equipment, this could change as N2K becomes increasingly dominant.

The problem, Barron says, is that converting to N2K “isn’t something that’s done in a vacuum. It’s part of a larger installation. There are upfront costs, but it will save you money down the road because it makes it easier to add new equipment.”

Another game-changer that both Barron and Van Gruisen agree on is the advent of the automatic identification system, or AIS. While recreational-level AIS has existed since 2006, recent years have seen a massive embrace of this technology by mariners of all stripes.

“The rate of uptake took us all by surprise,” Van Gruisen says. “AIS is now more useful than radar. It won’t protect you from all targets in pea-soup fog, but it’s easier to read than radar.” This is especially true if AIS targets can be overlaid atop cartography on a chart-plotter screen. (Or better still, overlaid atop radar and cartography.)

“AIS is a fraction of the cost of radar,” Barron says, adding that AIS costs roughly $1,000, while a new radar can fetch $3,000. Moreover, he says, falling prices have also encouraged mariners to embrace newer technologies. “The price difference between an AIS receiver and an AIS transceiver has become so narrow, why not transmit your position?”

While AIS and Doppler-enabled radar are two great examples of modern technologies either usurping older gear (such as analog magnetron radars) or revolutionizing marine safety (in the case of AIS), there are other gains to be had by upgrading, especially as prices on no-longer-bleeding-edge technologies fall. Some examples of this include forward-looking sonar, side-scanning sonar, thermal-imaging cameras, and bigger, easier-to-use screens and user interfaces.

“For Alaska cruising, it’s nice to have something more than a numerical representation of depth,” Barron says, noting that more adventure-minded cruisers are investigating forward-looking sonar. Van Gruisen agrees, adding that some Bahamas-bound clients who want to navigate through skinny waters have been gravitating toward forward-looking and side-scanning sonar.

Other new technologies worth a look include Raymarine’s ClearCruise AR (the “AR” stands for augmented reality), which uses cameras to place AIS-like tags above aids to navigation and other targets on a video feed that’s displayed on the chart plotter. And then there is B&G’s SailSteer, which takes numerical instrument data—apparent wind angles, true wind direction and course over ground—from the boat’s nav system and creates an easy-to-read onscreen graphical representation of the wind, which can make sailing easier and safer.

“I don’t see people coming in saying, ‘I want ClearCruise AR,’” Van Gruisen says. “But when it’s time for an upgrade, that’s the kind of technology they’re looking at.”

Ultimately, Barron says, sailors typically upgrade their electronics for two reasons: “Things break, or they go out on their friend’s boat and realize that it’s time to get out of the Stone Age.”

Should either of these descriptors apply to your sailboat, the good news is that today’s electronics offer far-better user interfaces, situational awareness and safety features than old-school gear. And while there’s no escaping the associated upgrade costs, this investment should deliver a significantly better time on the water.

David Schmidt is CW’s electronics editor.

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I’d never leave the Sunshine Coast. All there is up there are bears and bad weather.”

Having sailed Keala, our Jeanneau 44i, from her birthplace, La Rochelle, France, across the Atlantic, we found ourselves talking to a gregarious fellow sailor at a yacht club in the warm, protected confines of Sidney, British Columbia, in the lee of Vancouver Island. I told him of our intended voyage, up the inside of Vancouver Island with my sister and her family to Port McNeill, where we’d meet my father, now 94 years old, and his lady friend, Christine, for a cruise north to the next island chain, Haida Gwaii. I’d make the return trip doublehanded along the rugged west coast of Vancouver Island with a surfing friend from Hawaii.

“Lots of fog up there too,” replied our new friend.

In a life of sailing around the world, my father, Donald, has wrung more salt water out of his socks than most of us will ever see. He dislikes sitting in the harbor. The world is full of “harbor-sitters,” as he calls them, trading “horror stories” of deadly gales over drinks while waiting for perfect weather conditions to leave the dock. Although he has been called adventurous, or even reckless, over the years, depending on the observer, I’ve always known him to be a very cautious captain who took my brother, sister, mother and me safely across two major oceans to places as varied as Norway, Turkey, the Philippines and Vanuatu. In all those miles, I can’t recall ever being in a dangerous sea. As kids we missed a lot of school, but we came back with skills such as celestial navigation, and the experience of standing a night watch with the safety of everyone aboard in our young hands.

Among the many places we visited together, one of my father’s all-time favorites was the First Nations reserve of Gwaii Haanas on Moresby Island, part of the Haida Gwaii archipelago, where ancient totem poles still stand sentinel over majestic Haida village sites. When my father told me he wanted to make one more trip out there with Christine, I pulled out the charts. Vancouver Island’s system of ferries, roads and air service would allow me to rotate my crew among three generations, as well as several old friends from voyages past.

My father may well be right about not listening to those dire dockside warnings about bears and bad weather, but our fellow sailor actually did have a point: Why leave the safety and comfort of the inside route? There are cruising grounds enough in the Inside Passage to keep a cruiser busy for a lifetime. Most of the thousands of mariners in places such as Seattle, Washington, and Sidney, don’t leave protected waters, because they don’t have to. With a few notable exceptions, it’s possible to sail through the intricate network of islands and fjords of the Inside Passage from Tacoma, just south of Seattle, to Alaska’s panhandle, without encountering much open sea. And the weather really is better. Summer temperatures in places like the protected Sunshine Coast, to which our friend referred, range in the 60s and 70s, and water temperatures get up to the 70s in long, fjordlike inlets. Swimming is actually a thing.

This is not to say that cruising the inside route isn’t without its challenges. First among these are strong tidal currents. The more-constricted passages turn into turbulent rapids with currents in double digits. Since it’s impossible for sailboats and other low-powered vessels to negotiate these rapids, it is essential to arrive at slack water. When possible, we also try to plan for slack ebb or flood so as to carry a favorable current as far along our course as possible. Another challenge is an astounding number of logs. Logging is a major industry in British Columbia, and loose logs, some barely submerged, can disable a small boat, so a constant lookout is required. Tugs towing thousands of logs in huge “booms” may require the entire channel to maneuver, as we found when forced into an impromptu jibing drill first thing in the morning on our way out of port. Common practice is to keep a watch on VHF 16 in narrow channels, and wait your turn after the last oncoming vessel uses the end of the tide to get through. Large car ferries also commonly cross the channels at oblique angles, traveling at high speeds. They always have the right of way, a fact of which they seem well aware.

As our friend forecast, fog became a challenge the moment we emerged into Queen Charlotte Strait, north of the protection of Vancouver Island. It was often very thick in the mornings, which meant keeping an eye on the AIS, radar, nearby fishermen, ferries and logs all at the same time. Most days saw the fog mercifully burn off by midafternoon.

The highlight of the entire route inside Vancouver Island for my sister was sailing into nearby Broughton Archipelago. For once we had favorable wind, and we had sailed 25 miles inland up the Tribune Channel, which became like a fjord between immense rock cliffs. Suddenly a gray whale blew to starboard, while a pod of hundreds of fast, agile Pacific white-sided dolphins reached nearly across the entire channel, surfacing in quick succession. They raced past as a group, so in rhythm that they looked like a breaking wave, much to the delight of my 16-year-old niece, Molly. Furling our sails at the head of the channel, we found the friendly little floating dock at Kwatsi Bay Marina nestled in a steep bowl of mountains. A group of veteran cruisers were surrounded by food and drink, well into the local happy-hour tradition.

Tracy Dixon, a surfing friend I’d met as kid while cruising in the Philippines, met the boat near the old fishing town and First Nations community of Alert Bay, at the north end of the Vancouver Island. After a distinguished career defusing bombs for the Navy, Tracy had just completed a degree in anthropology at the University of Hawaii. He’d already learned about Alert Bay’s famous U’mista Cultural Center, a cutting-edge modern museum that houses a treasure of elaborate and wondrous dance masks of the local First Nations group with the nearly unpronounceable name of Kwakwaka’wakw.

Many of these ancient masks have made epic journeys, only recently making their way back home to this museum. The giving of gifts at great “potlatch” ceremonies was a cultural tradition during which chiefs gained status through their ability to give offerings to the people. This of course put the Kwakwaka’wakw directly at odds with their new capitalist masters. The potlatch was outlawed in 1884, and many irreplaceable works of art were confiscated by the government. Some were sold to private collectors and museums overseas. For the locals, bringing these treasures home to their own land is akin to the return of a long-lost relative, and for us it provides a great opportunity to see masks that hold tremendous power and embody the imagination, artistry, and beliefs of the past and also the living native people. We were also fortunate to see an impressive dance performance by the local Tsasatla group, in which local youths take on the character of traditional masks and costumes of animals and fantastic creatures.

The southern section of Haida Gwaii, on Moresby Island, is a Haida Heritage site called Gwaii Haanas. Home to the Haida for over 1,500 years, the area was abruptly abandoned when smallpox decimated the population. Today there are village sites with large communal houses gradually returning to the forest, and elaborately carved totem poles are still standing. Haida guides called Watchmen, many of them descendants of those who first lived in the villages, now live in cabins at the sites, working as historical interpreters. These are fascinating people, living links to the past. While it’s a privilege to see such archaeological treasures, talking with someone whose ancestors lived here is even better.

The Watchmen appear to enjoy having visitors, and thanks to a permit system, the number of guests is regulated, so they aren’t too swamped by arrivals. We had some great interactions with the Watchmen. An old friend of mine from Santa Cruz, whom I’ve known since my days teaching sailing there during college, Burke Murphy, flew all the way from France to join us. Burke is a shipwright who lives and works in the south of France, where he does fine woodwork on classic sailing yachts. He was astounded to learn that the Haida use Sitka spruce—in his world a prized boatbuilding material—mainly for firewood. The Watchman casually offered to sell him a few ancient trees from the protected reserve, something so ridiculous that we burst out laughing. Like many island cultures, the Haida appear to value a good joke.

Read More from Tor Johnson: Chartering is Raiatea

For us, the old whaling station at Rose Harbor was particularly interesting. On the southern tip of Gwaii Haanas, Rose Harbor is actually the only privately owned area in the reserve. A small group of young people provide home cooking from a rustic cabin to the hungry kayakers and sailors who pass through. One of the people working there told us of a Haida war canoe in the forest, which we found after some searching through the huge cedar trees. It appeared as though the canoe was under construction when it was abandoned, possibly with the arrival of smallpox. The tree had been expertly felled to allow access from below and above so that carvers could shape the hull. The inside of the canoe had been only partially hollowed out, leaving the middle section as solid wood. We later learned that it was common to leave much of the inside intact to retain as much strength in the hull as possible for the precarious task of moving it to the sea. Finding a piece of history like this in its native setting was somehow moving, and in the quiet of the trees we could imagine what this canoe might have been, with a full complement of proud Haida warriors.

My father enjoyed the solitude of the remote anchorages we visited, surrounded by immense trees, sea otters and soaring eagles, while Christine, an accomplished artist, made amazing drawings of the scenes. My father has always been the captain who did it all, the first one to tackle any job, easy or hard, so it bothers him that at 94, he isn’t able to do the heavier work of sailhandling. I try to remind him that after all, that’s what he trained me for. I’m just lucky to still have the chance to sail with him.

British Columbia has large numbers of black bears, and the impressive grizzly (Ursus arctos horribilis, or simply “brown bear”) can be found up several inlets, such as Knight, Rivers and Bute. We knew we were in bear territory when we stopped at the friendly, family-run North Island Marina in Port McNeill, the preferred reprovisioning stop for the Broughton Archipelago and environs. The marina’s garbage drop had been literally ripped apart, great gashes in the plywood siding attesting to the formidable power of the bears’ claws. That said, we found most bears to be shy of us humans, the most dangerous of all predators by a long shot.

My shipwright friend Burke was an excellent lookout, and he was keen to see a bear. He picked up the binoculars whenever he sighted anything even remotely bearlike on shore. It wasn’t until we were motoring in to Rose Harbor that he finally sighted a large black bear on the beach. It was a nice sunny day, and we watched as the husky bear ambled down to the water, waded in for a cool bath, shook off, and ambled casually back up the beach and into the forest. We felt as though we’d been shown a little slice of bear life.

Generally, we had fantastic weather. That said, it would be unusual not to experience at least a few powerful North Pacific low-pressure systems during the course of a summer as far as 50 degrees north latitude, and our trip was no exception. Having crossed the notorious Hecate Strait to Haida Gwaii from the British Columbia mainland, we heard gale warnings forecast on the VHF, and headed for narrow Sac Bay, which is almost completely surrounded by steep hillsides, close in to mountainous Moresby Island. Thankfully, both the Canadian and US coast guards regularly broadcast a fairly accurate forecast via VHF, which is updated several times daily. Unfortunately, our perfectly sheltered anchorage turned out to be subject to powerful downdrafts and torrents of rain that created new waterfalls as we watched. Beginning to feel a bit trapped in the prison of our own choosing, we spent our time visiting other boats also hiding from the weather, and ended up making friends with “sailing royalty,” an experienced sailing couple aboard Kinetic, their Beneteau First 47.7, on which David Sutcliffe has skippered no less than five Victoria-Maui races, as well as the Sydney-Hobart. We chatted in their diesel-heated cabin while munching on cake that his wife, Gaylean, had just baked, and listened to buoy reports of steep seas in Hecate Strait. Because it is so shallow—less than 30 feet in places—and open to the south, open-ocean swells tend to pile on top of themselves in chaotic seas. As we listened, reports came in of 15-foot seas at 4.5 seconds. In these conditions, the Hecate would be mostly white water.

As the gale passed with more torrents of rain, I began to wonder if perhaps the surrounding mountains weren’t creating their own foul weather, so we left without waiting for the rain and wind to abate. We found much milder conditions farther off the mountains, just offshore near Hotspring Island. We soaked in the divine hot springs while looking back at Sac Bay, still covered in a hard rain surrounding the mountains, and congratulated ourselves on such a good anchorage choice.

One thing the Pacific Northwest is not famous for is great sailing. Winds are often light and variable, especially in the more-protected areas popular with cruisers. The running joke is that most sailboats here sail with their sail covers on, which actually seems kind of true, or that a sailboat is just a powerboat with funny sticks. It’s really not by chance that the power trawler is the boat of choice for the Northwest. That said, when the wind actually is right, the sailing among rugged peaks covered in evergreens can be utterly magical, somewhat like sailing in an endless mountain lake. We try to get the sails up whenever we can, even if that often means furling them after a few minutes.

British Columbia has such a complex coastline and so many potential anchorages that a good cruising guide is essential. We had the Waggoner Cruising Guide in hand at almost all times, and having Active Captain—Garmin’s crowdsourced, up-to-date electronic guide—on our chart plotter was also a huge help, with many firsthand recent accounts to read. Don Douglass’ several guide books of the area also come recommended.

The anchorages were spectacular, some tucked into the mountains and trees with an inlet only a few feet wider than the boat, with the feel of a serene lake. Others were protected within groups of small islands sheltering them from the open ocean. The Waggoner guide was accurate about one group in particular: the spectacular Bunsby Islands, where we had perfect swimming weather. Waggoner advises that it is essential to stop because other sailors who had done so would inevitably ask if you’d visited, “and you don’t want to disappoint them.”

That said, the British Columbia coast is also a great place to ignore the cruising guides. There are thousands of potential anchorages available, with reasonable depths and good holding. And we found that our Navionics charts were quite accurate but, of course, not infallible. So it’s feasible to find one’s own anchorage, based on the current and expected conditions. My favorite anchorages were those that we chose simply because they looked interesting on the chart, and many turned out to be magical. There is something special about finding your own place, without knowing exactly what you might find there—a little like the first explorers but with a plush yacht.

Our descent of Vancouver Island’s west coast was late in the season (September), so most of the fishing lodges had emptied, and the few cruising boats that travel the west coast had mostly moved on. Our first stop on the outside was Guise Bay, on the extreme northwestern tip of the island, just inside notorious Cape Scott. Although untenable in southerly winds, it’s a paradise in northerlies. As proved the rule on the west coast, we found ourselves the only boat anchored off an immense crescent of white sand beach. In fact, we rarely saw another boat.

Yuquot—or Friendly Cove, as Capt. James Cook nicknamed it—was fascinating as a place where First Nations and Europeans have long collided. An old church represents this long struggle, with stained-glass representations of treaties between Spain and England asserting their influence over the area.

At Hot Springs Cove, a half-hour hike along a boardwalk paved with treads carved with the names of visiting yachts from all over the world, brings you to a small and magical hot spring with a hot waterfall you can stand under. It’s essential to catch it before hordes of tourists arrive from Tofino via high-speed boats around 8 a.m., or after they all leave at 6 p.m. Tofino is BC’s surf mecca, and while it is a quaint town with amazing beaches, it’s so full of marinas, high-speed RIBs and seaplane traffic that it feels more like Miami than the secluded west coast of Vancouver Island.

We encountered rough seas a few times on our trip down the outside coast, usually when we put to sea a bit hastily at the tail end of a gale. The thousands of off-lying rocks necessitated careful navigation, even with the excellent digital charts for the area. Being bluewater sailors, we didn’t have a problem with the near-constant Pacific swell, which conversely helps the navigator by marking shallow rocks with plumes of spray.

Keala hosted several generations on this voyage around Vancouver Island—my sister and her family, several sailing friends from around the world and, of course, my dad and artistic Christine, in some of the world’s most pristine cruising grounds. It looks like the years have failed to dull my father’s enthusiasm for cruising. He still feels the same about sitting in the harbor and could barely sit still for a day, even during gale warnings. He prefers to carry on, despite the bears and bad weather.

Tor Johnson is a marine photographer based in Hawaii. You can view more of his work on his website (tjhawaii.com).

The post A Family Sailing Adventure in British Columbia appeared first on Cruising World.

Clive Strickett is a rugged guy, so it takes strong arms to winch him aloft to the masthead. But that’s exactly where you want him: eyeball to halyard sheave, looking for problems. He’s a veteran rigger with a keen eye and a background in ocean racing on the competitive Maxi circuit. On the island of Lanzarote, where I first encountered Strickett, he has a reputation for detail.

We were on the dock at Marina Lanzarote in a fresh breeze of about 20 knots. It was sunny and warm, the sort of weather you’d expect when you’re about 400 nautical miles off the coast of Morocco. These Canary Islands, of which Lanzarote is the farthest north, are a staging area for boats embarking on a trans-Atlantic crossing.

Strickett had just been lowered to the deck of a Bavaria 41 by the boat’s skipper after checking the spreaders, and was now shaking his head. Problems. There are always problems. This time it was mismatched metals. “It’s rare to find a boat that has nothing wrong with it,” he said.

Never mind the Atlantic—the first leg of the trip from the United Kingdom and Europe to the Canaries can be brutal on gear. And that’s before the 3,800-nautical-mile downwind crossing to the Caribbean. It’s wise to have a guy like Strickett check your rig before you leave. “I’ve been doing this for a few years now,” he said. “I might see a problem that the owner missed. They weren’t looking for it, or weren’t looking where they should have been. 

“You never know what’s going to happen on boats. Even on new boats,” he continued. “A friend of mine had a new catamaran, a big one, with a carbon-fiber mast. One of the genoa clutches ripped right off the mast. Brand new boat, right from the factory. We had to get the OK from the factory in France to make a repair. We fixed it, and he crossed the Atlantic.” 

Minor rig problems compound quickly under pressure. Strong winds funneling through these volcanic islands can mimic trade-wind sailing, but that doesn’t mean that every boat is ready for the crossing. According to Strickett, safety lies in the details, and he points out where to look for potential problems in your rig. Here’s what Strickett is looking for as he inspects a spar, from top to bottom.

Masthead: “Be sure the sheave axles are secure. Sometimes the holes elongate or even crack. And then halyards can get mixed up. One boat that came through here from Tenerife was using the wrong halyard. They were using the spinnaker halyard instead of the genoa halyard. When I went up to look at it, the sheave box was completely gone; the rivets were all loose. The holes had elongated because the halyard was at the wrong angle. They didn’t even realize it. It’s tough to see what’s happening aloft when you’re on deck.” 

Working down the mast on a fractional rig, there might be additional sheave boxes fitted for internal halyards. “Make sure all the rivets are tight. Anything fitted with bolts or rivets should be double-checked.”

Spreaders: “Inspect the spreader tips; make sure they’re OK and there’s no corrosion. Whenever you get stainless steel and aluminum together, there’s corrosion. One fleet of charter boats here had put 8 mm stainless bolts into the aluminum spreaders with no protection. Now the spreaders are corroding—the holes get bigger and bigger. But not only that, the spreader was already weakened by putting big holes in it to begin with.”

Shrouds: Broken or damaged wire rigging is the most common problem. “Most cruising boats use 1-by-19 stainless wire. Inside, one strand can let go, then another. When you get up to four broken strands, the wire gets weaker and weaker, and eventually fails. If you’re underway and that happens, then you have a big problem.”

You also don’t want extra weight aloft. “Some people use Dyform, or compacted wire, which uses triangular-shaped strands around a core. If you compare a 10 mm Dyform wire to a 10 mm 1-by-19 wire, the Dyform is stronger. I once changed a 12 mm 1-by-19 wire to a 10 mm Dyform wire. It’s the same strength, but I saved some weight aloft. 

“You can’t take anything for granted,” he continued. “There was a boat getting ready to head to the Mediterranean from here, which is a long slog to windward. He was all ready to go. Just as an afterthought, the owner had me look over the rig. Good thing. I found some broken wires in the forestay. The whole mast could have come down. So have a close inspection just to make sure there are no broken wires, and that the terminals don’t have any cracks in them.”

Boom: “Once again, closely inspect the rivets. Loose padeyes on the boom get looser and can easily rip right out. The same goes for the gooseneck fittings. Check every bolt, every rivet for the slightest elongation of the holes or any loose rivets. I can’t emphasize that enough. The padeye is usually secured to the boom with 5 mm Monel rivets, but those can pull loose after a sharp pull like a jibe. They can get yanked right out of the boom. Then what? As insurance, I usually remove the 5 mm rivets and replace them with 6.3 mm rivets, which are the largest you can use. If you’ve had a big jibe and the boom hits a V1 (lower shroud), it might break or bend the boom. We fix booms at our engineering shop. They’ll straighten it, put a patch on, weld it and then paint it. That makes it strong enough. New booms delivered to Lanzarote come from France, and the delivery fee alone can cost up to $3,500.”

Read More: Check your Boat’s Rig

Turnbuckles: “Some people don’t like to tape turnbuckles; they like to see what’s going on with them. Fair enough. I wouldn’t tape it all the way closed though. Just a little tape around the split pins so that they don’t grab a sail or your ankle. On one boat that I inspected, the guy had taped up the whole thing. When we untaped it, it was all manky, which means pretty disgusting. The dirt will always get in somehow. If it’s all taped up like that, you can’t oil or lubricate it. I tell people: Now and then, service your turnbuckles. Take some turns off the turnbuckle. Make sure it’s clean and then put a little Teflon gel on it, or some MolyKote grease. Then tighten it back up. 

“When you haven’t done it for some years,” he added, “they seize up and you can’t undo them. Especially a small turnbuckle. They’re chrome-plated over bronze, and when you put a big spanner in there and turn it, it’ll snap. And what you don’t want is for a wire to snap when it’s under load. It’s just preventive maintenance. Do it every six months. It takes only a couple of hours.”  

Headsail Furlers: “On some ProFurl furlers, there are four black bolts that go into the furler: two that hold the cage on and two that hold the plate. On the older ones, the bolts are made of titanium, and they seize into the aluminum. I don’t know how many I have had to drill out. But you have to drill them out properly. If it’s a 6 mm bolt, first you drill straight down the middle of the hole with a 3 mm drill, then with a 4 mm, then a 5 mm, then a 5.5 mm. Hopefully it will come out with the heat and friction. ‘Easy-out’ [screw extractors] don’t work. These things are seized together. Even heat doesn’t work.”

Chain Plates: “I inspected one boat with the chain plates so loose, they were actually moving. You could see where they had scratched the paint around the hull. Down below, look carefully at the chain plates. Make sure there’s no cracking in the hull, no movement on the bolts. You can see where a bolt has bent a little, or if it’s been pulled up or down. You’ll see little scratch marks on the hull or the bulkhead.”

Mast Step: “There’s a fine balance between the shrouds being too tight and too loose. There was a good-size catamaran that left here and got into some rough seas, rolling around. The shrouds were too loose, and on one roll, the mast jumped right out of its mast step. It was just for a moment, but in that moment, the mast went overboard.”

With the inspection on the Bavaria completed, as we walked up the gangway toward the marina office, I had one last question: “If something breaks underway, can a rigger or a boatyard be held responsible?” 

Strickett answered, “Sometimes. We have a basic form that says something like: ‘Rig checked. All found to be in good condition at the time of inspection.’ And I sign it. So as far as I’m concerned, everything was OK when I signed it. But if along the way, say it blows up to 40 knots and the crew still has their spinnaker up and the mast comes down, well, they might try to come back to us. So in my opinion, it boils down to this: If you’re not up to sailing the boat, then you shouldn’t be there. You just never know what’s going to happen.”  

David Bond, a regular contributor to CW, is a writer, teacher and cruising sailor currently based in Germany.

The post Sailboat Rigging Tips from a Pro appeared first on Cruising World.

I grew up watching my dad and grandpa use these tools,” Casey said, as he unpacked. “It was always my favorite place to be: in the shop, at their side. Even when I could hardly see over the workbench.” I was 19, working as a liveaboard deckhand on a schooner, and Casey had just arrived as the new captain. He had recently inherited those tools and had them shipped to him, cross-country, in a series of flat-rate boxes. Even though it was more than he would likely need in his new position, having them close by made him feel prepared for anything. I still remember looking over that collection of wrenches, sockets, pliers and hammers. Tools that generations had lovingly oiled, their carved initials darkened into the worn handles.

Tools are personal. For sailors, they are at our side, hour after hour, day after day, as we go about re-forming a tiny piece of the world into the shape of our dreams. They are in our hands in our most desperate moments, when emergency strikes and hearts skip a beat. They are in our stories, when we tell of our challenges, triumphs and adventures. Seeing an old tool can spark miles of memories, and transport us back to a time, a place or people long left behind. Peer closely into a tool bag and you can see a whole life story: where we’ve been (those stubby metric wrenches from my first motorcycle kit); who we are (the fiberglassing scissors for boatbuilding projects); and where our dreams and fears lie (the giant bolt cutters that I bought in anticipation of crossing oceans).

I can perfectly remember my first set of tools. It had initials carved into the handles too: I-K-E-A. It was one of those $7 orange tool kits the Swedish store sells: hammer, crescent wrench, pliers, screwdriver and Allen key (of course). My mom bought it for me, and it still makes me feel lucky to have the kind of mom who, when helping her daughter get ready for her first semester at college, threw a toolkit in the cart alongside the throw pillows, flat-packed birch desk and tea candles. Maybe even back then she sensed that her suburban, soft-palmed daughter would veer off into the world of docks, boats and calluses. Or maybe the toolkit itself was to blame, its “Fixa” name revealing its ambitions toward me all along.

I have never known boats without tools; the two appeared and remain side by side in my life. Maybe this means I’ve been hanging out with and loving the wrong kinds of boats. But some of this is inherent to the pursuit itself. On boats, we use tools more often—and often more desperately—than onshore. In our small boat spaces, we literally live among our tools, emptying precious lockers to accommodate them, sleeping with them directly under our bunks. We become brothers in arms with our tools. As we cruise—jumping between anchorages, bouncing between boat projects—we bleed, repair, patch and improvise…together. We sailors collect sunburns, our tools collect rust, and the sea stories pile up.

My first little orange toolkit was the start of a story, and parts of it survived well into my evolution as a boatwright. Pulling out Ikea tools wasn’t exactly helping to clear the path of skeptics: Already I was showing up to new jobs decades younger and much more female than most expected. I remember a female client warning me jokingly about my Ikea-size Ikea hammer: “You should get a real hammer. No one is going to take you seriously with that little toy!” But I had a soft spot for my little Swedish half-soldier and stayed loyal to it up until its very end. Maybe it was just my stubbornness, or maybe it was camaraderie with something else that was a bit unexpected in its surroundings. The hammer finally met a predictable demise when its little head was torqued from its plastic handle by my boss at the boatyard. I had offered it up to him, and this large hulk of a man, his glimmering blue eyes happily focused on the challenge at hand, hardly noticed the death of my companion as he tossed it aside and muttered about needing “something bigger.”

Check out more: Sailing Gear

Through the years, many tools have passed through my hands, and the orange snap case has long since given way to a tool bag of more-conventional proportions and coloring. My toolkit today reflects my continuing work as a traveling boatwright, and also as a cruising sailor. After years of service in a marine environment, my tools look far removed from the Father’s Day and Black Friday displays I picked them from. Which is fine. From all that I’ve seen, the best toolkits are hardly ever shiny. Like fur worn off a Velveteen Rabbit, well-used tools look rough in all the right ways. They become real when you’ve spent enough time with them.

My tools have seen boats at their best and worst. They’ve been loaded into dinghies and lifted up ladders. They have crossed borders and made passages, been rained on, dropped, lost, and covered in strange substances. They have competed in competitions and made miracles happen after midnight. Running through a mental list of them feels like remembering the names of old friends. Let me introduce you to some of my favorites.

Drill and driver with lithium rechargeable batteries: The drill is pretty straightforward, but let’s talk about the driver. I don’t see these in many boat toolkits, but it is one of my top-used tools. With a screw bit, the driver zips screws in and out at lightning speed. If tightness needs to be precise, I’ll finish up with a screwdriver, where I can better feel the torque being applied.

Snap a socket-bit adapter into the driver, and you get even more functionality. Removing nuts or bolts with this setup is not only much faster than using a wrench, but it also can fit in places where a wrench doesn’t have swing room, or where swinging a wrench would involve a lot of knuckle bloodying. Importantly, it also helps in those times when you can just barely reach a fastener, maybe only with your fingertips, but not in a way that makes you able to apply any strength to it. Pass the driver through to this spot, maybe even using an extension or jointed extension, and often all the strength you need is to push a button. Hose-clamp removal and installation is also super-fast with a small socket on the end, although be careful not to overtighten and damage the hose.

This setup also can help in removing stubborn fasteners by pulsing the driver at short intervals to break free corrosion bonds. I also use it as the first thing to try for one-person, through-deck hardware removal. Often I can zip off nuts from belowdecks while the sealant bond still keeps the bolt or screw from moving, or with a Vise-Grip clamped on the bolt from above if the nut is really stuck.

Mechanical calipers: I have digital ones too, but they are delicate and are stored in a case, not in my tool bag, and I don’t use them too often. Most of the measuring I do is to confirm hose or thread sizes, and measure thread depths and material thicknesses or shaft sizes. I’m typically not looking for thousandths-of-an-inch accuracy, and so this little guy is perfect. It is durable enough to live in my bag, and it never needs batteries. Apparently, it does need a cleaning though.

Oscillating multitool: The oscillating multitool sees a lot of use. It fits in all sorts of spaces because you can rotate the blade relative to the body. Because it just vibrates, it’s also very safe and easy to use, a definite plus when working in remote anchorages where a catch or lurch from a circular saw or reciprocating saw can have added risk. It’s easy to make cuts in delicate or small areas (such as where there are hoses or wires nearby) because you have so much control.

This tool is also my preferred way to cut round things, including plastic through-hulls that I need to trim down, or any hoses that are too big for my cable cutters, such as sanitation or exhaust hoses. Cuts come out straight, clean and fast. If the hose has reinforcing wire, I cut that with cable cutters after.

I also use this to make very clean and controlled cuts for finish work, such as when you’re cutting into teak down below to install a new panel or gauge or to add a trim piece. You can also easily make blind cuts, like if you need to create a small recess for a hinge or panel frame to sit flush. By marking and scoring a line, or by clamping down a straightedge, you can make long, straight cuts. With a variety of blades available, you can cut through all sorts of material. I’ve cut through fiberglass, copper, bronze, aluminum, wood, plastic and rubber.

Label-maker: This is a nice organizational tool to have on board. I label everything. I like to tag electrical wires at their origin and termination points with a little label flag, saying what it’s for, where it runs to, if there’s a fuse or connection in-line, and any other useful notes about it that I might not remember in a few years when I next look at it. I hate having to work out what a toggle switch, seacock, valve, strainer and so on is for, so I label them. I sometimes label hoses, which is especially handy for complicated fuel-polishing or -transfer systems. Since labels don’t stick to hoses very well, I slip clear shrink-wrap over them.

Hose puller: For stubborn hoses, this is a great additional tool. For a hose I can’t get off by hand, my first step is normally to try to get it to twist using a pipe wrench. Once I have it twisted, if it still won’t come off, I’ll slip the hose puller under one side and then try to work off the hose. Be aware that the hose puller does have a sharp end, which can dig into the side of the hose. This is no problem if the hose you are removing is getting replaced, but this isn’t good if you are planning on reusing the hose and there isn’t enough play in the run to cut off a few damaged inches.

The old straightened wire hanger: Simple, but when you need it, it’s a godsend. For short runs of wires or hoses through blind areas, lead the wire through first. Tape off the leading edge so it doesn’t damage or snag.

Black stir sticks: I always have a few in my bag. They are great for applying glues and sealants, removing sealant around newly bedded hardware, mixing and applying epoxies and adhesives, wrapping sandpaper around to sand into flat sides, cleaning off old sealant from surfaces you don’t want to scratch (wrap the stir stick in a small rag dipped in thinner), and for using as protection for nice finishes if you have to pry off something. Bang in the plastic stir stick first, then bang in your metal spreader between the stir stick and the piece you’re removing.

Rubber strap wrench: This is great for removing all kinds of filters and housings, things that are irregularly shaped, that are bigger than any wrenches or channel locks you have aboard, or that you don’t want scratched. On our boat, we have different filter wrenches for oil filters, fuel filters, watermaker pre-filters and freshwater carbon filters. When I don’t want to pull out those (or as a backup if we lose one), I use the strap wrench. I also use it to remove our older-style Racor filters, and to remove our wheel because it is held on by a nicely polished tapered nut that anything else would scratch. The strap wrench definitely has its limits for how much torque you can apply with it—it is rubber and plastic—but I love having it as an option.

Screwdrivers: I’m currently missing a few—ones borrowed and not yet returned. Be mindful of using the right size because using the wrong size makes stripping the head much more likely. Also, if your Phillips fastener head is starting to strip, you can sometimes save it by moving up a size. I prefer screwdrivers with square shanks or somewhere I can attach a big crescent wrench. For very stuck fasteners, such as ones you often find on masts or on winches, I lean my entire body weight onto the screwdriver and then turn the crescent wrench (or for very, very stuck fasteners, have another person turn the crescent wrench). I also have a tiny screwdriver set, which I increasingly use for small electronics stuff. And I carry a few stubby screwdrivers, as well as ratcheting and fixed-right-angle screwdrivers.

Wire strippers, ratcheting crimpers, regular crimpers, small snips: Increasingly there are a lot of little wiring and electrical jobs on boats, and having the right tools makes it easy to do a great job and not have to revisit things later. I carry ratcheting crimpers as well as nonratcheting ones because, while the ratcheting tools do a nicer job, they don’t always fit into tight spaces. The small snips are crucial for cutting away jackets in bundled wires without any damage. In addition to the normal selection of 10-12 yellow, 14-16 blue, and 18-22 pink AWG connectors you commonly see on marine-store shelves, I also carry 22-26 yellow AWG connectors that I often use with small new electronics wiring tasks, like making up data cables, or adding small in-line fuses or regulators.

Cellphone: I use my phone to make part lists and write notes, to take pictures of things before I take them apart, to keep track of time, and occasionally as a flashlight if I don’t have my headlamp. I also take photos of places where I can’t get my eyes; it’s also invaluable for that model number written on the backside of the pump, or for things too far away to see (zooming in on a picture has saved me a trip up the rig before). Mine is in a waterproof case because things happen.

These are some of the tools I carry; there are many more that I didn’t have space for here. While my entire collection is probably more extensive than most due to my work fixing boats, nothing is terribly exotic. It typically doesn’t need to be. Whether working on a hydraulic dinghy hoist on an 80-foot luxury motoryacht, a hatch installation on a 14-foot rowboat, or a systems overhaul on a cruising sailboat, the basic tools I use are largely the same.

Assembling a great boat toolkit doesn’t happen in stores. It happens in the engine room, on the foredeck, at the top of the rig. Looking to assemble a new kit? My advice: Buy a bag and start a project aboard. Change the oil, rebed a cleat, service a winch. Pay attention to the tools you’ve used and pack them in, taking note of which ones can be used at anchor versus ones that require you to be at a dock. Look at your critical systems and run through common problems you might encounter. Do you have wrenches big enough to adjust your packing-gland nut? Do you have the deep socket you’ll need for that bleed valve? Remember that once you’re on the water, there are really only two types of tools: those that are on board, and all those wonderfully handy, theoretical ones that aren’t.

Tools are like any instrument: They need practiced hands to make them really sing. The more you engage, the more powerful and effective you and your toolkit will become. There will be challenges: a corroded head that snaps or a rookie mistake that you swear you won’t make again (and again). But your hands will get smarter, your patience will grow longer, and today’s calamities will turn into next week’s sundowner stories. Before you know it, that new empty bag will look perfectly full, and rough in all the right ways.

Who can predict what unique toolkit you’ll eventually create, and what stories it will have to tell? You never know—it might even be the beginnings of a new family heirloom. A collection your daughter will one day lovingly unpack in front of her new crew, looking on as their new captain reveals…what’s in her bag.

Marga Pretorius is a traveling shipwright and cruising sailor. She lives aboard her 1977 Kelly Peterson 44, Dogfish, and is currently based in Mexico. For more on her work and travels, visit her website.

The post Sailing Tools and Accessories to Have Onboard appeared first on Cruising World.

Like clockwork, each fall for the past decade or so, Dufour Yachts has arrived in Annapolis, Maryland, with a new sailboat (or sometimes two) that somehow looks remarkably just like its predecessor—only different.

One year, the builder introduced the galley-forward concept, which puts the stove, sink, fridges, and counterspace adjacent to the mast and bulkhead, leaving the widest part of the boat open for entertainment and lounging. Another year, large ports in the cabin top over the forward galley were added to let light pour into the interior. One fall, they made a splash with an outdoor galley built into the transom, where a propane grill and sink can be put to good use by a cook standing on the fold-down swim platform while still being part of the party. These features not only were incorporated in subsequent models, some are now being copied by other builders as well.

But then came fall 2020, which was notably different from other years in so many ways, not the least of which was the cancellation of the US Sailboat Show—the coming-out party, if you will, for new models introduced to the North American market. But still, Dufour, now under the direction of the Fountaine Pajot Group, sailed into town with yet another new Grand Large—the 530—that continues the evolution of the company’s nine-boat range.

The lineup’s DNA is not by happenstance. For more than 15 years, Dufour has relied solely on Umberto Felci of Felci Yacht Design and the team back at the Dufour yard in France.

As well as a resemblance among models, this long-term collaboration has had one more benefit: The Dufours all sail like proverbial witches, thanks to Felci’s very slippery hulls and sail plans to make them scoot.

The 530 bears the same plumb bow and stern as its siblings, an easily recognizable low-profile cabin house, ample beam carried all the way aft, and a single rudder—the latter almost in defiance of the twin foils that are quite the rage these days. Below, the boat’s galley is forward with large ports overhead which, along with multiple hatches in the owner’s cabin forward, plus three long ports in either side of the hull, let in tons of daylight and provide lovely views of the great outdoors. And yes, this Dufour has—as do all—the trademark wine cellar beneath the saloon sole, and a lift-up cover over a crumb tray in the galley to make sweeping up easier.

Still, the 530 is, indeed, different, primarily due to a few new features introduced in the cockpit. So let’s start there. First and foremost is the simple solution they’ve found to solve the age-old sailboat conundrum: how best to move from the cockpit to the deck, a challenge compounded by the contortions needed to dodge Bimini and dodger frames while stepping up and over coamings. Just forward of the 530′s twin wheels, designers have placed a step between the helms and the cockpit seats. As noted: simple. Up one step and you’re on deck. And the risers do double duty as line-storage bins with lift-up lids, right below the cockpit winches. Designers then further refined this solution by adding a split Bimini so crew doesn’t need to duck or dodge when going forward.

With a little more than 16 feet of beam, there’s a fair amount of space between the helms, a portion of the transom that on most boats goes unused. On catamarans, this space is often put to good use with a bench, where one can sit and enjoy the ride. And it is here that designers added a large sun bed, and they did it in a way that still allows an easy passage from wheel to wheel when underway. I liked it.

The remainder of the cockpit is fairly straight-forward, with a large, fixed drop-leaf table between the seats, allowing for plenty of room to either side when moving forward to the companionway.

Wide side decks make it easy to move about the topsides. Forward of the mast, the cabin top tapers quickly to a broad foredeck that would be a pleasant place to stretch out and enjoy the breeze at anchor. There’s also a large sail locker that provides access to both the thruster below and the big anchor locker (which can also be fit out as a skipper’s cabin). The bow sprit does double duty as a place to stow the anchor and tack down off-wind sails.

Speaking of sails, when purchasing a 530, there are decisions to make, starting with rigging and sail-handling hardware. The Easy version comes with a self-tacking jib, and all lines are led to clutches and a winch at each helm, leaving the cabin top by the companionway free of clutter.

The Ocean package adds a winch to either side of the companionway, and that’s where halyards, vang, and reef and furling lines are led.

Both of these versions include a traveler that spans the cabin top forward of the companionway; the rigs can be configured with either conventional or in-mast furling mains, and either a self-tacking or slightly overlapped genoa, the latter with fairleads that can be adjusted from the cockpit.

A Performance version for regatta-prone skippers is also available. Rather than midboom sheeting, the mainsheet is anchored to the cockpit floor just ahead of the helms; there are six winches to handle main, genoa and downwind-sail control lines; backstay and vang are hydraulic; and the mast and boom are lengthened to provide roughly 215 more square feet of sail area.

The 530 we sailed during Boat of the Year sea trials this past fall was set up with an in-mast furling main and genoa. Personally, I’d have gone for the conventional main with a boom pouch, but still, we had a great time out on the water. In 10 to 12 knots of breeze, we skipped along at just under 8 knots closehauled, and hit a solid 8 peeling off to a beam reach. In one near-20-knot puff, I saw 9.3 on the speedo—not too shabby for a roomy cruiser.

Below, the galley forward allows ample room for a large dining table to port, with seating for eight or more thanks to a centerline bench. There’s a settee opposite with an aft-facing nav station at its end.

Counters in the galley are Corian, including a backsplash to protect the bulkhead. There’s plenty of storage and fridge and freezer space, and lots of room for a cook and helper to prepare meals.

An owner’s cabin is forward, with room to either side of the queen-size berth. In the configuration we saw, the head and shower compartments were separated.

There are multiple layouts available, depending on how many crew you like to sail (or charter) with. The basic layout is three cabins, three heads. On the boat we sailed, the starboard head was replaced by a fourth cabin with bunks. Up to six cabins are possible.

The price of the Dufour we sailed—delivered, commissioned and ready to go—was $550,000. For that you get a lot of options from which to choose, and remember, a witch to sail.

Mark Pillsbury is CW’s editor.

SEA TRIAL

WIND SPEED: 10 to 12 knots

SEA STATE: 1- to 2-foot waves

SAILING: Closehauled 7.9 knots; Reaching 8.0 knots

MOTORING: Cruise (1,900 rpm) 5.9 knots; Fast (2,600 rpm) 7.4 knots

SPECIFICATIONS

LENGTH OVERALL: 53′6″ (16.31 m)

WATERLINE LENGTH: 50′10″ (15.49 m)

BEAM: 16′4″ (4.98 m)

DRAFT: 7′6″ (2.29 m)

SAIL AREA (100%): 1,518 sq. ft. (141 sq. m)

BALLAST: 13,361 lb. (4,700 kg)

DISPLACEMENT: 35,706 lb. (16,196 kg)

BALLAST/DISPLACEMENT: 0.29

DISPLACEMENT/LENGTH: 121

SAIL AREA/DISPLACEMENT: 22.4

WATER: 195 gal. (738 L)

FUEL: 116 gal. (439 L)

HOLDING: 26.4 gal. (100 L)

MAST HEIGHT: 75′2″ (22.9 m)

ENGINE: 75 hp Volvo, Saildrive

DESIGNER: Felci Yacht Design/Dufour Design Team

PRICE: $550,000

For more information, visit: dufour-yachts.com

The post Dufour 530 Boat Review appeared first on Cruising World.