Tabla de contenidos para December 2018 en SAIL

There are many reasons why children take to the cruising life, and they’re all pretty much encapsulated right here in this image of Zoe Baumeister enjoying the warm Caribbean water in St. Lucia while her friends Eveline and Ruben look on. Photographer Johnson was anchored next to Zoe and her family at Malgretout under the twin peaks of the Pitons. Zoe has been swimming since she was a few weeks old and is a keen diver. Her proud dad, Brendon “Boomer” Baumeister, says she can already free-dive to more than 30ft —“and at eight years old that’s not too bad!” Boomer, Zoe and mom Chantale Begin live and cruise on Maia, their 1974 Hughes Northstar ketch. Boomer is also captain of the Florida Institute of Oceanography’s research vessel, the R/V…

No one ever said it was going to be easy, and this past fall a pair of competitors taking part in the ongoing Golden Globe Race 2018 were disabled in a major storm deep in the Indian Ocean, with one of them coming away seriously injured. The dismastings took place around 80 days into the race, when Indian sailor Abhilash Tomy and Irishman Gregor McGuckin were overtaken by a gale packing 70-knot winds and 50ft waves some 1,900 miles southwest of Australia. Tomy, sailing his 32ft ketch-rigged, Suhalireplica, Thuriya, was rolled a complete 360 degrees during which his rig not only went by the board, but he was almost completely incapacitated: to the point where it was a struggle even communicating with race headquarters via his Yellow Brick tracking unit’s…

We hit the sandspit on our way out of the harbor at something over 5 knots and went hard aground. A moment before, the bottom had risen suddenly from 10ft to now visible sand in the wave troughs just ahead of us. The sandspit lay off the northeast corner of a small island at the entrance to the Minho River in Portugal. Modest Atlantic swells were working around the island and running into each other from opposing directions, creating 3ft breaking seas that were hitting our Malo 46, Nada at the bow and stern. It was too rough to launch the dinghy and set a kedge anchor. I knew we had deeper water to port, so I put the helm hard over and throttled up to bring our head around,…

If you’re over 40 and know anything about sailing, you probably know exactly who Bill Lee is. The image is clear: bushy brown hair escaping from a Gilligan-style bucket hat, oversized sunglasses and a wrinkled flower-print button-down shirt. We (I’m 43) can also picture the rundown, wood-and-tin chicken coop atop a dusty hill four miles from Santa Cruz Bay in California, where for 20 years Lee plied his trade as a boatbuilder. A six-pack was the price of admission to the shop where Lee struck out and started a movement. Call them ULDBs (ultra-light displacement boats) or “sleds,” they were super-skinny boats that dominated West Coast ocean racing for decades. The epitome of the type, Merlin, was Lee’s personal 68-footer aboard which he set a new Transpacific Race record in…

It’s like riding a bronco with a fire hose spraying in your face: four unrelenting knots of current pushing you into 4 to 6ft smackers. Lumpy. Bumpy. A rodeo. A mistake. Anything but pleasant. When my partner, Phillip, and I were planning our first voyage to the Bahamas on our 1985 Niagara 35, Plaintiff’s Rest, that’s what people told us crossing the Gulf Stream in any kind of north wind would feel like. But we did it anyway, and our two passages across the Gulf of Mexico and the Gulf Stream taught us many lessons. Ironically, crossing with a north wind was not the bull ride we anticipated, and surprisingly, crossing back with a south wind was not the gallant trot we thought it would be either. All lessons (aka…

One common galley feature on production sailboats is a large open storage area behind the stove, typically covered with sliding plexi or wood panels. However, while this space provides a reasonably large amount of storage area, it is rarely efficiently used because of the odd shapes of most galley gear—think large plates staked only a few high. Inevitably, you end up piling many items on top of each other. Worse yet, the one you want is seemingly always on the bottom. Some boats have fixed wooden dividers, which helps, but requires that you buy gear that fits the spaces in between. With storage space in such short supply, it’s a shame not to use this space efficiently as possible. My solution was to build a plywood locker bottom that fits…

Are you out there sailing, cruising and living the sailing life? Share your experiences with other readers. Send your photos to sailmail@sailmagazine.com And don’t forget to sign up for our free eNewsletter, Under Sail, via our website sailmagazine.com All is calm, all is bright… We took this photo on Christmas Eve last year in Channel Islands Harbor from our Dehler 38. — Robert and Carol, San Diego, CA This photo is from our family vacation on a chartered Seawind 1160 catamaran in Australia’s Whitsunday Islands in May. My son Zander and I were the only early risers on this day and were lucky enough to capture this beautiful rainbow. I had no idea he was taking the shot! — Laurie Morton, St Augustine, FL It was a misty day at…

Albert Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.” For my wife, Melody, and me, the evolution began in May 2012 when we sold our home and nearly everything in it to move aboard our Cal 35. After many years of dreaming about a simpler, more fulfilling life, we jumped in with both feet, fear be-damned. For the next five years we cruised the Gulf of Mexico, East Coast and Chesapeake Bay while we upgraded the boat and saved as much as we could to feed what we called our “fantasy fund.” It was then, After the work, the saving and the adjustments made for life’s interruptions, that we reached the point where we…

Darkness had fallen and the howling wind almost drowned out the voices coming over the VHF radio. “Lights on! Blow horns!” “Make noise to alert the crew!” “Shine the spotlight on the cat by the shore, it’s dragging dangerously near our bow.” These were calls to action, not exactly in panic mode, but certainly more urgent than those usually heard. The cat was now wending its way about the anchorage, its owners alerted during their cocktails and dinner aboard another vessel. “We just lost our dinghy!” was the next shouted exclamation. A short 20 minutes earlier, drops of rain had splattered on our hull, drops that quickly became heavy, thick splashes indicating a rising gale. We quickly closed the hatches and with the first flash of dreaded lightning made a…

It was “Sonar month” at the Noroton Yacht Club in Darien, Connecticut, this past September, as it hosted not only the Sonar North American Championship regatta but the class’s team-racing Kirby Cup. Both events were also attended by famed Sonar creator Bruce Kirby, who is also a Noroton YC club member. Winning this year’s nationals was the Noroton YC’s Karl Ziegler at the helm of Spitfire, making it his third time taking the title. Ziegler also won the Sonar world in 2015. Nearly 40 boats took part in the 2018 regatta. Winning the Kirby Cup was a team from the New York Yacht Club, with Vineyard Haven coming in second and a pair of teams from the Norotan YC coming in third and fourth. Just as interesting as the racing,…

Each November, cruising boats start leaving California for “a winter of fun in the sun down Mexico way.” And having spent the summer and autumn on a leisurely passage down the West Coast on board Distant Drummer, our Liberty 458 sloop, my husband, Neil, and I were now in San Diego and ready to do the same. Not only that, but after cruising for a few months in Mexico we planned to hop along the Central American coast to Costa Rica and Panama, where we would spend the summer cruising safely below the hurricane belt The west coast of Baja California is a rough and rugged out-of-the-way corner of Mexico that only yachtistas, fishermen and 4WD explorers get to visit. Unlike the eastern coast, where tourist development has restyled the…

Sitting at the helm in a light breeze, my arms crusted with a fine rime of salt, my skin so dry I’d lost my fingerprints, I heard a clatter and a curse from below. There were only three of us a thousand miles from shore and only one on watch at a time. Usually the off watch lay asleep in their berth, exhausted, but McCarthy was awake and agitated. “What the hell?” I yelled from the cockpit. McCarthy had discovered the mouse several days after an unseasonable storm had driven us south from our northerly course into the stagnant air of the North Pacific High. Not the mouse, exactly, but evidence of the mouse. Small teeth had gnawed the corner of a box of macaroni and cheese. Then a bag…

Russell Coutts and Larry Ellison may have lost they America’s Cup back in Bermuda in 2017, but it appears they are intent on stealing a march on current Cup-holders Emirates Team New Zealand with the launch of what they are calling the SailGP sailing circuit. Announced in early October with all the fanfare only one of the world’s richest men could muster, the circuit will feature six international teams competing in five locations: beginning this February in Sydney, Australia, then moving on to San Francisco; New York City; Cowes, England; and Marseille, France. Racing will take place aboard a fleet of re-engineered AC50s—now called F50s—and include such former Cup stars as U.S. sailor Rome Kirby and UK helmsman Chris Daper. As was the case in Bermuda, stadium-style inshore courses will…

I arrived in Rockland, Maine, on an early afternoon in July with a backpack, my camera and little else. Though traveling to an unfamiliar place to race with a crew of strangers has been a common theme in my sailing career, I had no idea what to expect from the massive wood and steel windjammers taking part in the 42nd Annual Great Schooner Race. Fiberglass is more my scene. Fortunately, I wasn’t left to figure it out on my own. Marti Mayne, the affable and deeply knowledgeable events manager for the Maine Windjammer Association greeted me as soon as I’d stepped out of my car and led me down to a lobster boat captained by Mike McHenry. McHenry also happens to be the former owner of the windjammer Angelique—the boat…

Without much reflection, I recently replaced my broken bilge pump with a slightly larger model. after all, I thought, surely an 800 gallon-per-hour (gph) pump will outperform the previous 500gph unit? Well, yes, but that’s no reason to feel much safer, as I soon discovered. The reason is that no pump is designed to deliver its rated output for long—at least not in real-world scenarios. And even a modest breach in the hull is likely to overpower the pumps supplied with most boats—just look at ingress rates on the opposite page in the Fig. 1. Small wonder that the Coast Guard attended over 1,100 distress calls last year to vessels taking on water. Part of the problem is that boatbuilders simply aren’t required to supply a system that can deal…

There’s no doubt last year’s hurricanes caused a major upheaval within the Caribbean charter industry. Nor is there any doubt that it has rebounded well. The biggest and most obvious obstacle—after rebuilding bases and other infrastructure—was boat availability. But a year down the road many fleets have already been largely rebuilt. And it’s not just the heavy hitters, like Sunsail, the Moorings, Dream Yacht Charter and Horizon Yacht Charters—which lost hundreds of boats between them—that are replenishing their fleets. CYOA Yacht Charters in Frenchtown, St. Thomas, for instance, recently took delivery of 10 new cats and monos, with more in the pipeline. (In fact, CYOA’s fleet largely survived Irma’s blasts, although the USVI’s infrastructure was hard hit.) Meanwhile, Sail Caribe, whose Puerto Rico-based boats miraculously survived Hurricane Maria, has opened…

What does it say about bluewater sailing that its most intriguing facet in the popular imagination is the post-shipwreck survival drift? I was wondering this while watching the movie Adrift, Hollywood’s latest addition to a seemingly burgeoning genre. (Beware, spoilers ahead.) The film is based on the story of Tami Oldham, who in 1983 spent 41 days drifting alone on a ruined 44ft yacht after it was dismasted and her fiancé was lost overboard during a Category 4 typhoon. This may sound inherently dramatic, but the cinematic visuals consist mostly of a young woman, actress Shailene Woodley, staring anxiously at the horizon. To liven up the story the screenwriters had to keep the fiancé aboard as an injured hallucination. Adrift, at least, was much better than 2013’s All is Lost,…