Table of contents for July - August 2017 in PassageMaker

Switlik OPR Liferaft If you read PassageMaker regularly, chances are pretty good that you’re either an accomplished long-range cruiser, or you’re an aspiring longrange cruiser interested in serious coastal trips or transoceanic passages. Either way, a serious investment in safety gear should be configured into the cost of any boat purchase, and far too many boaters take this lightly. We’re not talking about properly sized and rated PFDs—because, duh— for this exercise, we’re talking about everything else: Personal locator beacons (PLBs), AIS-equipped man overboard devices, and satellite phones are just a few of the extras you could acquire to ensure, as best as possible, anyway, the long-term safety of you and your crew. The grim reality of pleasure boating is that sometimes it is far from pleasant, and there are…

Wild storms make for wild seas, and for hundreds of years sailors have returned to harbor with tales of encountering huge waves in the ocean. They may be called rogue waves or freak waves, but these are really extreme waves that deviate dramatically from the regular wave pattern. Once considered to be the product of imaginative sailors’ minds, extreme waves earned credibility as authoritative reports started to emerge. Dramatic photos reinforced the reports. Today, sophisticated wave-measuring technology and satellite observations help detect these waves, and a 100-foot monster wave has now been experienced—and verified—in the Atlantic. For the cruising skipper, rogue waves are something to take into account when planning a passage. Calculations from the British National Institute of Oceanography, using a random process formula, suggest that if you take…

Throughout my time working with boats, people have asked me to assign a definition to the word “yacht,” and I’ve always struggled to find a one-sizefits- all definition. Is the demarcation line between a yacht and a boat strictly monetary, or does a certain quality of interior finish matter? Perhaps a boat over 60 feet is a yacht; under, a boat. But we’ve all seen 60-footers that couldn’t possibly qualify, and plenty under 60 that feel yacht-like. Regardless of the line, most often my response was, “you’ll know it when you see it.” And with the Outer Reef 580 Classic motoryacht, that line is a distant memory. Outer Reef Yachts—from the recently released Trident series to the Classic line that extends upwards of 100 feet in length— maintain the look,…

As a teenager, I worked summers on a lovely wooden sailboat named Rosa II. She had a traditional teak deck of solid, 1 1/8- inch thick planks, with cotton pounded into the seams and thick black caulking payed over the cotton into the seam to keep out water. Every spring began with the painful process of chasing leaks until the decks finally swelled tight. On sailing ships, the crew payed the seams with hot pitch. They called the seam closest to the outboard edge, where one might most easily fall overboard while paying, the devil seam. That led to a popular play on words among sailors: “You’ll have the devil to pay and no hot pitch.” Modern teak decks keep out the water far more effectively. Nonetheless, seams still must…

The Aspen C120, Knot Wafflen’, is ready to begin an epic journey with her new owners, David and Sue Ellen Jenkins. With the help of Aspen owner Larry Graf and the expertise of the couple’s brother-in-law, Blake Eder (who will serve as captain), the Jenkins have planned to take their boat from Anacortes, Washington, to Alaska, and then down to the Sea of Cortez. At that point, the boat will be loaded onto a trailer, and trucked eastward to launch once more in the Gulf of Mexico. The final leg will take Knot Wafflen’ to Annapolis, Maryland, via the Gulf Coast of Florida and the Bahamas. The Jenkins have decided to go big, to say the least, for their first significant cruise and delivery of this 40-foot powercat. They are…

We purchased Dirona, a Nordhavn 52, with a plan for world cruising and rigged the boat with that in mind. In the years before placing the order, we built a long list of desired equipment and functionality garnered through reading, attending boat shows, experience on our previous boat, and discussions with other cruisers. We equipped the boat with most of the gear on our list prior to leaving Seattle in 2012, have used almost everything since, and have made relatively few upgrades along the way. Of the few items on our list that we didn’t install, we later learned that some of these choices probably would have been a bad call. This is the third article in a three-part series describing our trip around the world on Dirona. The first…

ANTARCTICA, the legendary continent beyond the southern tip of a crowded world, still beckons and thrills. This white land has never been inhabited, and while researchers return every summer, few stay through the winter. For the small-boat adventurer, the season lasts about three months—December, January, and February. Getting there can be a challenge. Between South America and the Antarctic Peninsula stretch 600 miles of Drake Passage, swept frequently by extreme weather systems spinning unimpeded around the globe between longitude 50 south and longitude 60 south. Forewarned, we watched weather trends in Ushuaia, the southernmost city in South America and the supply port for yachts, as well as cruise ships, bound for Antarctica. The harbor had already been closed to shipping twice due to high winds when at last we escaped…

More than 400 years ago, Sheffield, England, became renowned for its steel-working, fine cutlery, and swords. Over the decades and centuries, local artisans continued to refine the process of converting iron ore into workable alloys. In the early 1900s, a research lab in Sheffield worked on finding ways to eliminate rust in gun barrels. The head of the laboratory happened to notice that, unlike the other samples, a discarded sample from a previous test had not rusted yet. They quickly determined that by adding chromium to the steel alloy the metal could be made far more resistant to rusting than ever. Two months later, in the summer of 1912, they produced a stainless steel casting for the first time. Initially they called it “rustless steel” but for marketing reasons, soon…

Among high-latitude junkies, the Russian icebreaker Kapitan Khlebnikov is a legend. Built in Finland in 1981, she has spent much of her working life taking intrepid travelers to the ends of the Earth. I join this venerable ship at Kangerlussuaq, in southwest Greenland, following a charter flight from Ottawa, Ontario. She has arrived here from Vladivostok, by way of northern Siberia, Svalbard, Iceland, and the east coast of Greenland. My fellow passengers are mostly inveterate travelers who seem to have visited every country imaginable. We number around 90, comprising 18 nationalities. Without question, the person who has traveled the farthest is Chris Hadfield, who has made several trips into space, commanding the International Space Station in 2013. Like most of those on board, I share a desire to visit remote…