Dolphins on my mind. First, this great plague that has visited them. In the past year, over 1,000 dolphins on the U.S. East Coast have been documented as having died of a measles-like morbillivirus (see photo up top). The last time such an epidemic swept the coast, in the late 1980s, it is believed the virus wiped out about half the population of coastal migratory dolphins, and this time it only promises to be worse. Already documented deaths have exceeded the toll in the 1980s, and the epidemic shows no signs of abating.

We stopped at the Dolphin Research Center (DRC) on Grassy Key during our ongoing post-Xmas Florida vacation, and the folks there are clearly concerned. I had signed up our girls for a so-called “Dolphin Encounter,” and the very first question they asked during the pre-swim orientation was whether anybody had recently been handling dead dolphins on beaches.

No one had, of course. And not surprisingly only a few people in the group were aware of the morbillivirus outbreak.

The girls had a fantastic time in the water with a 3-year-old dolphin named Flagler, who was born at the DRC and has spent all his life in captivity. This is true of all the 22 dolphins at the facility, save two, who were originally wild but were taken in as rescues. The animals live in a series of large interconnected pens that are segregated from the Gulf of Mexico by nothing more than low wire fences. It looks as though it would be very easy for the dolphins to jump these if they wanted, and the party line is they don’t because the DRC is their home and they have no desire to leave.

I didn’t get in the water myself, but as a parent I didn’t really have to. My vicarious gland was hard at work, and just watching the girls lead Flagler through his regular routines–a mock kiss and splash fight, a swim around the pen hanging on his dorsal fin, etc.–nearly brought a tear to my eye. Indeed, I was so invested in the girls doing this (it was my idea in the first place), I had what can only be described as a counter-intuitive response when a strange incident at the beginning of the encounter threatened to prematurely end it.

The girls were in a group of five, and right after they got in the water and were introduced to Flagler, the first woman in line told the attending trainer that the dolphin had bitten her leg. Not a hard bite, obviously, and the woman herself didn’t seem at all concerned, but the trainer immediately asked all of the group to get out of the water. There followed a consultation by handheld radio, and during this I wasn’t thinking–as I probably should have been–that my kids might be in danger. Instead I was worried the encounter might be aborted.

In the end, they went ahead anyway, with Flagler instead of a substitute, and everything was fine.

That very evening I happened to watch the documentary film Blackfish on Netflix, a must-see for anyone at all interested in cetaceans. It mostly tells the story of Tilikum, a wild killer whale who was captured off Iceland when he was young and has since been kept at first Sealand of the Pacific and later SeaWorld as a breeding stud and performer. During the course of his decades-long career, Tilikum has been involved in the deaths of three different people, most recently a trainer, Dawn Brancheau, whom he killed after a performance in February 2010. Footage of the incident doesn’t appear in the film, but at least one clip is available on YouTube:

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The film makes a very powerful case that it is essentially immoral to hold any sentient marine mammal in captivity. The scenes in which female orcas are shown suffering intense grief after being separated from their calves are particularly heart-rending. Another incident covered in the film, also documented in this publicly released video, where a female orca effectively tortures and almost drowns a SeaWorld trainer, is also quite chilling:

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I suppose it would be easy enough to draw distinctions between a wild orca like Tilikum and a “tame” bottlenose dolphin like Flagler, but let’s face it, slavery is slavery whether you are captured or born to it. And as a parent, in any event, my first concern after watching Blackfish wasn’t the morality of having paid to have my daughters play with a slave, but whether they might have been injured while doing so.

It may seem much easier to draw distinctions about this, in that dolphins seem inherently less dangerous than orcas, but on googling around I soon found there have in fact been a number of “accidents” during swim-with-dolphin encounters at “dolphinariums” like the DRC. Apparently none have resulted in fatalities, but there have been serious injuries involving lacerations and broken bones, and there has been at least one reported incident at the DRC itself. In one survey, over 50 percent of professionals working with captive marine mammals reported having been injured at some point by their charges.

Some of these putative acts of aggression may seem ambiguous. Witness the behavior in this video, in which a dolphin is seen repeatedly “play-biting” a swimmer’s arm:

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But in other instances, there’s no doubt about what is happening:

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Watching these, of course, I can’t help but think of that seemingly innocent incident that took place at the beginning of my daughters’ dolphin encounter, and all I can say now is that I feel deeply conflicted. Should I have pulled my girls right out of there? Was it a bad idea to put them in the water with that dolphin in the first place?

I really have no idea whether the dolphins at the DRC are happy or not. It may seem like they can leave whenever they want, but for all I know there may be other factors in play that prevent this. After watching Blackfish, I certainly don’t feel I can take at face value assertions made by people who run places like SeaWorld about the care and welfare of their animals.

Thanks mostly to those perpetual grins on their faces, it is easy to believe that dolphins are happy-go-lucky animals that love us just as much as we love them. It is what we want to believe. They are undeniably charismatic and obviously intelligent and thus are highly attractive to us. But we cannot assume that the positive emotions we feel for them are reciprocated, particularly in situations where we are effectively holding them in bondage.

Dolphins greet the crew of Brindabella during the recent Sydney-Hobart race. Photo by Carlo Borlenghi

If you really care about dolphins, it may be the best way to demonstrate this is to simply admire them from a distance. Give them a big wave and cheer when they come to cavort at the bow of your boat. And by all means we should do what we can to help them cope with this awful disease that now afflicts them. But beyond that, if we want to physically interact with them, to actually lay hands on them, perhaps we should just wait for them to come to us.

Here’s a trifecta of odd news that has lately teased my nautical mind. May as well lead with the Saildrone, an autonomous sailing robot that has recently completely a passage from San Francisco to Hawaii and is now sailing around in circles about 800 miles south of Oahu. To date it has covered some 6,000 miles at an average speed of 2.5 knots

Not exactly a record-breaking pace, but its creators are hoping these drones can become standard equipment in the world of oceanographic research and buoy maintenance. The trimaran drone is fully self-righting, measures 19 feet long by 7 feet wide, is constructed of carbon fiber, and can carry a payload of 220 pounds.

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To me it looks like it could easily be mangled by a breaking wave, particularly that trim-tab on a stick that controls the wing, and I’m also wondering about collision avoidance. But really I think it’s kind of cool. I’m imagining a future in which ocean racing consists of fat rich guys controlling super-sized drones like these on iPads while lounging poolside with mimosas in their hands.

Next up is the Underwater Jet Pack from SCP Marine Innovations. This essentially consists of a pair of bow thrusters that divers and swimmers can strap to their forearms. The battery pack is worn on your torso. The founders of SCP are currently raising money on ShareIn, a crowd-sourcing site, and hope to have these on the market selling for $5,700 a pair within a year.

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Pardon me for saying so, but this is a silly idea. This is the sort of kit you see for sale in the Hammacher Schlemmer Christmas catalogue for one season, then it disappears and is never heard of again.

Finally, the most important news: scientists have finally figured out why dogs circle around so much just before they settle in to pinch off a loaf. Turns out what they’re doing is sensing the planet’s magnetic field and are aligning themselves on a magnetic north-south axis.

No doubt people who cruise with dogs will be very pleased to learn that their compasses are now redundant.

ABSENCE ALERT: I’ll be AWOL for about 10 days hopefully starting tomorrow. Just got a gig helping deliver the new Alpha 42 catamaran, hull number one, from New York to St. John in the USVI. (First bit of the passage promises to be bitter cold!) I’ll fill you in on the details on my return.

“I can say for certain that was the best helicopter ride of my life. It was also the best shower.” –statement by Gunther Rodatz to U.S. Coast Guard airbase personnel; Elizabeth City, North Carolina; Jan. 14, 2014

THERE HAS ALREADY BEEN a lot of buzz about what happened Tuesday morning approximately 300 miles off the Virginia coast, when owners Gunther and Doris Rodatz, together with delivery skipper Hank Schmitt and myself, abandoned the 42-foot catamaran Be Good Too courtesy of a U.S. Coast Guard Jayhawk helicopter crew. As is usually the case, much of it has been speculative, and some people have complained that we need not have left the boat. True facts have been a little hard to come by. Here on my own blog, at least, I can do what I can to correct that.

We departed Liberty Landing Marina in Jersey City, bound for St. John, USVI, at about 1430 hrs on Wednesday, January 8. It was bone cold outside, and the boat had been frozen into her berth by thin ice. The marina’s pump-out boat came around to act as an ice-breaker and helped bust us loose, and after a brief stop at the marina’s fuel dock, we headed down New York Harbor under power. We unrolled the solent jib after passing through the Verrazano Narrows, but Hank didn’t want anyone on deck handling the mainsail in the bitter cold. We motorsailed south all through the first night under the jib alone, staying inside the heated interior as much as possible, as the decks outside were soon coated in a skin of ice from the light freezing spray.

Frozen in Jersey City

By the following morning after breakfast it was warm enough that the deck was clear of ice and Gunther and I raised the mainsail, taking care to stay clear of the big chunks of ice that came toppling out of the sail as it was hoisted. We shut down the engines briefly and tried proceeding under sail alone, but the wind was getting weaker and soon we started up one engine and started motorsailing again so as to keep our speed up.

We motorsailed all through the rest of Thursday, until very early Friday morning, when the wind increased enough to shut down the engine. By sunrise we were close-reaching at 6-plus knots in 17-20 knots of southeast breeze. Not long afterward, however, the wind decreased and shifted to due south, and we spent much of the day motorsailing again, tacking back and forth, to make progress southward. After sunset the wind started building and we were able to proceed to the southeast under sail alone.

This was our best sailing during the entire trip. During my evening watch I had the boat running at 8-9 knots with spikes over 10 in 22-26 knots of apparent wind. Shortly before handing over to Gunther at 2130 hrs I took one reef in the main. It was also clear we had entered the Gulf Stream, as the water temperature had risen dramatically.

After midnight on Saturday, January 11, I noted from my berth that the boat’s motion had increased quite a bit. Coming on deck at 0400 hrs to relieve Hank I found the wind was blowing over 30 knots. There were two reefs in the main, and the jib had been roller-reefed to about half size. Waves were now occasionally falling on the center and starboard-side forward windows and some minor leaks had appeared around the edges of the window frames.

Heavy weather, as viewed from inside

Very shortly after Gunther came up to relieve me at 0700 hrs an autopilot alarm sounded indicating power was low. Gunther started up the generator, but found it was not charging the batteries. We started up the starboard-side engine, but it also was not charging the batteries. In the middle of all this, the single-line sheet to the self-tacking jib suddenly parted. We knew the sheet lead for this sail was not ideal and probably should have already rolled it up by now, given the conditions. I now immediately furled the sail, while Gunther did something, I’m not sure what, that got the batteries receiving a charge from the engine. I woke up Hank at this point and informed him we were starting to have “adventures.”

We now set up the boat to motorsail itself in a fore-reaching configuration under just the double-reefed main (there was no third reef). We locked the helm off hard to port to keep her from rounding up and were making progress eastwards at 4-5 knots. This seemed stable, though we were still getting whacked occasionally by waves on the starboard bow.

At about 1130 hrs we took a huge direct hit all across our front windows. The wave that hit us seemed much larger than the rest and was running at a different angle, such that it hit us from directly ahead instead of on the starboard quarter. Hank and I were in the saloon right behind the windows at the time. A fair amount of water squirted in all around the edges of the window panes and one large piece of trim was blown right off one vertical frame. The windows themselves, thankfully, held up fine. The wave stopped us dead in our tracks and even seemed to back us up a bit. A large amount of water surged up our stern and blew a large teak step right off its mounts.

The missing teak step

Immediately after the hit we found we had trouble controlling the boat. It seemed at the time that our loss of forward momentum had made it hard to steer, and the boat started spinning in circles, tacking and then jibing. We started up the other engine, and even with both engines running hard we could not regain control. After our second uncontrolled jibe, Hank ordered that we should drop the mainsail and lie ahull to the waves. The wind by now was blowing over 40 knots from the south and seas were running about 18-20 feet.

Frankly, this was the one point in our whole adventure where I was most nervous. I have sailed in 40 knots or more several times, but I had never before just laid to the wind and let a boat drift broadside to waves in conditions like this. I had always believed this was a bad idea and that it is best to adopt more active tactics. But the boat was very happy. The beam of the Alpha 42 (we were aboard hull no. 1, which had just been delivered to Gunther and Doris) is very wide for a cruising cat of this size, with an unusually high bridgedeck, and we had remarked earlier that the hull was very stiff and its motion was remarkably comfortable. We now were amazed at how stable it seemed lying to these large seas. The rolling was not very pronounced and only rarely did waves slap the boat or land on deck.

That afternoon we contacted our weather-router, Ken McKinley, by sat-phone and he advised that we were now south of the Gulf Stream and that we could expect the wind to increase to 45 knots before switching to the west. We continued lying to the waves through the rest of the afternoon and all of the night, during which the wind did indeed increase into the mid-40s, with gusts to over 50. Gunther later insisted he saw one hit 60.The boat, however, was still quite comfortable, and we bided our time standing watches, reading, and sleeping.

Chilling during the gale. Yes, we were very comfortable!

On relieving Hank at 0430 hrs early Sunday morning, he informed me we now had no electrical power. He had started the port-side engine shortly after midnight and found it was not charging the batteries. Meanwhile, the wind had also shifted west and was beginning to subside.

After sunrise we took stock of our situation. We first tried our engines: the port-side engine now would not start; the starboard engine would start, but wasn’t charging the batteries; the generator would not start. So we tried sailing, as the wind was now only blowing about 25 knots and seemed much more manageable. We rigged a new sheeting system for the jib, with one centerline sheet and barber-haulers on either side, and tried but failed to get the boat sailing off the wind to the southeast toward Bermuda, which now seemed like our best destination. The best we could do was effectively heave to, with the bow cocked toward the southwest as the boat drifted slowly southeast.

Our jury-rigged sheeting system. It worked very well

We did discuss raising the mainsail, but decided against it, as we had discovered that the top two full battens had become detached from their batt-cars when we dropped the sail earlier. There seemed to be no easy way to repair them, so we decided to wait for less wind before raising the sail again.

By 1100 hrs the wind, however, was increasing again, blowing over 30 knots I estimated, and curiously as it increased we found we had a little more luck getting the boat to sail. We first found we could sail on a close reach to the south-southwest at 4-5 knots. Later we managed to run off for a while on a broad reach to the southeast at higher speeds. Still, the boat was hard to control. It would periodically bear off or round up uncontrollably, do a spin, settle into a straight-line course for a while, do a spin, etc.

Through the afternoon the wind started diminishing again, and as it did the boat started spinning more and more. By early Monday morning, before daybreak, it was doing nothing but spinning in circles, so we rolled up the jib and decided to wait for daylight to see if we could figure out exactly what was wrong with the steering system.

Through all of this, too, we were now having to pump out the moist sections of the boat by hand. Water had been coming aboard continually in certain compartments for some time and now with no electric bilge pumps we had to attend to the chore ourselves. We weren’t sure where the water was coming from, and though the rate of ingress wasn’t at all alarming, it was annoying, as we had to pump for several minutes every one-and-a-half hours or so.

Come 0700 hrs conditions had become quite calm, with the wind from the south now at less than 10 knots, and at last we were able to embark on a deliberate examination of our problem. Inspecting all the steering gear, we found the port-side rudder stock was no longer connected to its tiller arm. Instead of being secured with a pin all the way through the stock, there was only one small set screw, the tip of which had broken off. There was, however, a hole through the stock for a proper pin, and after a long bit of head scratching, jury-rigging, and tiller-arm wrestling, we finally managed to pull the tiller arm up off the retaining ring on to which it had collapsed, line up the tiller’s hole with the rudder stock’s hole, and drive in an Allen wrench with a hammer.

The starboard side rudder stock and tiller arm, with intact connection between the two

Port-side rudder stock and tiller arm, before repairs

And after repairs. We had to remove the angle sensor and the connecting rod between the two tillers to do our thing. Afterwards, of course, we reinstalled the rod. With the tiller arm swinging back and forth in the swell with some force, this all took some care and patience

As you can imagine, we felt pretty proud of ourselves at this point and were confident we had solved our most important problem. Unfortunately, after we started up our one engine to see if we could steer, the boat still would only drive in circles, to port, no matter what we did with the wheel.

So now it was time to visually inspect the rudders to see what the hell was really going on down there. Gunther insisted he should be the one to go into the water to do this and soon reported that the starboard rudder blade was just spinning in place around its stock and that the port rudder blade was bent inward toward the boat’s centerline at a very large angle.

Gunther goes for a swim

In retrospect, it is hard to imagine how all this might have happened. I think it is likely that most cats would have suffered some sort of steering or rudder damage from the hit we took, but our damage seemed bizarre. Securing the tiller arms to the rudder stocks with small set screws may not be a good practice, but in this case those screws should have acted as sacrificial fuses. Confronted with the huge force of the wave stopping the boat and thrusting it backwards, you’d think the screws would break off, leaving the stocks to rotate freely so the rudder blades would be saved. Instead the starboard set screw held and the welds securing the frame armature inside the rudder to the stock had apparently failed. Meanwhile, the port set screw had failed, yet the frame somehow bent anyway.

Thinking we might still be able to steer the boat with its engines if we had both of them running, we next spent some time examining the port engine to see if we could get it started. This emitted a burning odor whenever we lit up the ignition, and we soon figured out that the starter had shorted out.

Unwilling to admit defeat, we thought we might have better luck sailing the boat now that we understood exactly what was wrong with the rudders. We were also now willing to raise the mainsail again in the much calmer conditions. So up went the main, and we tried every possible combination we could think of, playing the sails against each other and the bent rudder, playing the engine against the rudder in both forward and reverse, but no matter what we tried the essential dynamic remained the same: with no sails up the starboard engine ruled, and the boat just turned to port; with sails up and drawing, in whatever configuration, the bent rudder ruled and the boat would only turn to starboard.

We were now about 300 miles from anywhere, equidistant from Bermuda, the Chesapeake, and New York, and reluctantly concluded that we weren’t going to be able to get the boat to shore without outside assistance. We discussed the prospect of organizing a tow at some length and called Alpha Yachts by sat-phone to see if they could arrange something. Hank, an eternal optimist, thought this was a real possibility, but I was more skeptical. Thinking out how it might proceed, we realized that, even if we could get an appropriate vessel to come to us, it would take days before we could rendezvous. The tow would then have to proceed quite slowly, at say 3 knots at most, due to the bent rudder. Meanwhile, there would be a continuing barrage of routine winter gales, and during each of these–we figured one or two at least–the tow would have to be dropped and the boats would have to lie ahull separately, waiting for the wind and seas to subside again before proceeding onward.

Finally, after listening to us bat this around for a while, Gunther reluctantly decided the only really viable option was to abandon the boat. He placed a sat-phone call to the Coast Guard in the late afternoon, and the evacuation wheels started grinding.

We assumed, of course, that we would be taken off by an AMVER vessel, as normally happens during evacuations far from shore. Hank had the audacity to suggest that we request a westbound vessel, so that we would arrive somewhere in the U.S. rather than in Europe, and the Coast Guard, to my surprise, readily assented to this, telling us that we could have a westbound ship pick us up at 0800 hrs the following morning. They also gave us a weather forecast: the wind that night would increase to 25 knots, hold at that strength through daylight hours on Tuesday, then increase to 35 knots with gusts to over 40 during Tuesday night.

Having made our arrangements, we treated ourselves to a little pre-abandonment party shortly after sunset, broke our dry-ship rule, and opened up some fine red wine. The mood was subdued, but upbeat. Gunther and Doris, in spite of the bitter disappointment of having to give up this boat they’d been looking forward to taking possession of for two years, were very philosophical about their situation, were very grateful no lives were at stake, and together we all laughed about the problems we’d confronted during our passage.

Also, at one point in the evening, a ship came to us from the west and announced via VHF radio that they were ready to bring us aboard and take us to Israel. We politely declined, insisting we had a ride west in the morning, and they went on their way. Later it occurred to us that the Coast Guard, who had seemed more worried about Tuesday’s weather than we were, had sent this ship to us hoping to get us out of there sooner rather than later. We had arranged to maintain a sat-phone call schedule with them, but initially asked for a longer interval than they wanted–eight hours instead of four–to save our phone’s battery. It may be that if we had been in contact more regularly they might have insisted, or have strongly urged, that we join the ship bound for Israel.

In any event, during our scheduled call at 0200 hrs they informed us they would be taking us off by helicopter at 0900 hrs. An MH-60 Jayhawk helicopter from North Carolina would rendezvous with a U.S. Navy warship en route to us to refuel, and then again on the way back. We would be allowed to bring with us one small bag each.

Promptly at 0900 hrs the next morning we spotted a USCG C-130 search plane heading straight toward us at low altitude, followed five minutes later by the helicopter. I can’t speak to how Gunther and Doris were feeling at this point, but Hank and I were both looking forward to finding out how this would go. Hank has thrashed his way through an awful lot of trouble on the water–two dismastings and five different loss-of-steering incidents–but had always managed to get his boats home and had never before abandoned one. As for me, I had once before abandoned a boat, but in much more sanguine circumstances, in a river in Spain to a nearby dock.

You’ll have seen the video the Coasties have posted. If not, you can watch right here:

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Hank asked me to be the guinea pig and go first, so Gunther and Doris could see what would be happening to them. This turned out to be fortunate for me, as I got to go up in the basket, all dignified and comfortable. After that first hoist, the helo crew decided to speed things up by bringing the others up in a sling, which to me looked decidedly inferior. Hank, as skipper, originally planned to go up last, but Gunther in the end insisted that he should go last instead. That cooler you see him carrying up in the video is not filled with beer, as some have suggested, but with personal possessions. I was very surprised the Coasties let him bring it along.

Doris comes aboard

Be Good Too as viewed from the chopper

Gunther on left. Rescue swimmer John Knight on right

Really the worst part of the experience was having to sit through the three-hour long helo ride to shore in soaking wet clothes. This was broken by the fuel stop aboard the U.S. Navy missile destroyer Ross, during which someone threw a garbage bag full of beef-and-onion hoagies into the back of the chopper for us to eat. They looked disgusting, but in fact were very tasty.

Navy personnel look pretty in purple

Authentic Navy chow

On arrival at the airbase in Elizabeth City we were greeted by a swarm of people, including two Red Cross workers, who were eager to take care of us. From their perspective we must have seemed like disappointing survivors, as we were perfectly healthy, entirely untraumatized, and in generally good spirits. All we really wanted was a hot shower and some dry clothes.

Disembarking in Elizabeth City. Rescue swimmer John Knight on left, hoist operator Brian Light in the center, Gunther’s back on the right

Gunther after his shower

Like Gunther, I can honestly say it was the best shower of my life. He really is an amazing guy. Shortly after he finished his shower he got a call from someone at home in Bloomington, Indiana, telling him the water pipes in his house had frozen and burst. And both he and Doris were just as chilled out about that as they were about losing the boat.

SPECIAL THANKS: Words cannot express how grateful we are to our helicopter flight crew. At a minimum, we can recognize them individually:

Lt. David Birky–pilot

Lt. John Poley–pilot

AST2 John Knight–aviation survival technician, 2nd class; rescue swimmer

AMT2 Brian Light–aviation maintenance technician, 2nd class; hoist operator

Thanks, guys! You were great!

Silly me. I thought publishing my account of abandoning Be Good Too would decrease rather than increase speculative and critical commentary among the baying dogs of the Internet. I suppose I should have known better. Unlike some folks out there, I don’t have the free time to write multiple screeds on all the sailing forums, so I thought I’d address some issues that have been raised here.

1. The most substantive point that has been raised is that it was not wise of us to attempt a non-stop passage from New York to St. John in January in an untried prototype boat. This certainly bears discussing. Gunther and Doris had been waiting for the boat for some time and were eager to get south ASAP. I am sure they are now second-guessing their decision in retrospect. They did hire Hank to help them do the passage, and that at least was a smart move.

As for Hank’s perspective, he’s a professional delivery skipper. Taking brand new lightly equipped boats into shitty weather is a big part of that job, at least if you really want to make a living at it. Some have suggested he should have tried to persuade Gunther and Doris to hop down the coast to the Bahamas instead, but in doing that he would effectively be talking them out of hiring him. I would guess that he now might be a bit more careful about accepting hull no. 1 prototype jobs.

As for me, I have some experience crewing off-season deliveries, including in brand new boats, and I knew what to expect. I knew we’d be in a gale or two and expected some things might break. I would never have done this trip with a skipper I didn’t know and trust. In retrospect I can certainly say I will be more careful in the future about doing off-season passages in prototype boats.

One interesting question to be asked is whether a mid-winter passage south is in fact more difficult than a fall passage. Winter weather is harsh, but it is more predictable. In the fall you are dancing between late-season hurricanes and early-season winter storms. In the winter, at least, you won’t have some squirrely tropical system doing something entirely unexpected (like Mitch in 1998).

There is an argument to be made that experienced sailors taking a boat south in winter are behaving more responsibly than inexperienced sailors who try to go south in the fall without professional help.

2. Many people have suggested we should have tried to do more to get the boat to shore. Most of the discussion has been about dropping the bent rudder and steering the boat without it. In this case, however, the rudders had positive buoyancy and only a couple of inches of clearance over the tops of their stocks. We did not have a 10-ton hydraulic jack (thanks for that tip, Evans), and I doubt it would have been useful if we had. We had no long levers. It never occurred to us to cut a hole in the deck over the rudder stock or to destroy the bearing tube–this, I submit, would have been a bad idea given the high likelihood of encountering another gale.

We also never discussed getting in the water to saw off the rudder. I would hope most people would understand that this idea is simply idiotic. We had no tool capable of doing it, and even if we had it would be impossible to accomplish working in the water under the hull in the open ocean.

The one interesting suggestion that has been made is that we might have removed the starboard engine’s starter when the engine was running and put it on the port engine to start it, too. Gunther actually suggested this, and Hank and I thought it sounded crazy. None of us are really diesel mechanics.

I now seriously would like to know: is this really possible? Has anyone done it? If so, please contact me. If it is possible, I’d like publish a story in the magazine on what’s involved and how to do it.

3. I have been most surprised by the comments made by Jon Eisberg, an experienced bluewater sailor I previously had some respect for. He has stated that the “deal-breaker” for him was the loss of electrical power, and that he would have aborted and headed for shore at that point. But, as I stated clearly in my account, we first became aware we were losing power after 0700 hrs on Saturday. We got hit by the wave and lost steering at about 1130 hrs the same day.

We weren’t that concerned about the loss of power in any event and spent little or no time trying to solve that problem. It may surprise Jon to learn this, but it is possible to sail long distances without any engines or electrical power. Some people even go out in boats that don’t have engines or electrical systems in the first place. All we needed to get to shore were sails and an operable steering system, so we focussed our attention on solving the rudder problem.

Jon has also criticized me personally and has suggested that our abandoning Be Good Too is very analogous to the abandonment last year of Wolfhound, about which I wrote at some length. But the two situations are obviously quite different. Wolfhound had sails and a working rudder and was getting close to Bermuda. Her immediate problem was that she had no electrical power, and her crew couldn’t navigate without it. All they had was an iPad with a low battery. We had a handheld GPS and plenty of double-A batteries and navigation wasn’t an issue. Our only serious problem, as I thought I made clear, was that we had no working rudders.

Given recent events, I thought maybe I should tell you about what happened last time I did a cat delivery with Hank Schmitt. This was seven years ago, in January 2007, and the short version of the story is that I ended up getting arrested. The boat–a brand new Scape 39 Sport Cruiser built in Cape Town, South Africa–belonged to a man named Wayne. He had hired Hank to skipper the delivery all the way across the South Atlantic to Grenada and was willing to pay airfare for one extra crew member to fly into Cape Town, which is where I came in.

Hank and I crawled off the plane, nearly jet-lagged to death, to be greeted by Wayne and a litany of his woes: 1) the boat, already over six weeks late, was not finished yet; 2) Wayne’s wife, who had come to attend the launching and sea-trials, had broken her leg and had to fly home again; and 3) the apartment they were renting had just been destroyed in a fire.

During the next week, while we impatiently twiddled our thumbs waiting for the builder to give us the boat, this list only grew longer.

Our Scape 39, Doubletime, on the left, lying on a dock below Table Mountain

First the South African Maritime Safety Authority (SAMSA) questioned whether Hank was competent to skipper a yacht delivery across the South Atlantic and hinted they might not let us leave. After several ineffectual encounters with a lesser officer, we were at last granted an audience with the agency’s director. He made it clear he had no respect at all for Hank’s U.S. Coast Guard license and after some discussion finally admitted there was no other license or certificate, other than one issued by his agency, that he would ever consider valid. In the end, however, after putting the fear of God in us, he cheerfully granted us permission to sail anyway.

The immigration office, meanwhile, announced that they couldn’t let Wayne leave the country, as he no longer had permission to be in it. Unfortunately, he had forgotten to renew his visa, which had expired several weeks earlier. Again we had several bizarre conversations with government officials, who decided to levy a huge fine of several thousand dollars, but ruled that Wayne only had to pay it if and when he ever returned to South Africa.

A mad scramble to finish the boat so we can sail away on it

Finally one morning, after several Groundhog Days in which tomorrow was supposed to be the day we left but never was, we actually provisioned the boat, even as the builders were still rushing around completing several last-minute jobs. Not long afterwards we at last pushed them all off on to the dock and headed for open water.

And yes, of course, things immediately started to break. We roared out of Table Bay on a fast reach, tore past Robben Island (where Nelson Mandela had once been imprisoned), and then heard a huge THWACK of a noise underneath the leeward hull. Just behind us we saw broken bits of a daggerboard floating in the water. There followed a mad scramble as we checked for ancillary damage. But the daggerboard case, the saildrive, the rudder and steering all seemed OK. A pregnant pause then as Hank and I looked to Wayne, but for him now there could be no turning back. No way was he going to pay that huge immigration fine just so we could get a new daggerboard.

Wayne bids farewell to South Africa

This might seem crazy, but in fact the South Atlantic is a very calm and boring ocean. It suffers no tropical storms, normally contains no part of the greater Atlantic’s inter-tropical convergence zone, and carries very little commercial traffic. Once we were well away from Cape Town we expected nothing but mild tailwinds, empty water, and fair current all the way to Brazil, and we reckoned we could handle all that just fine with our one remaining daggerboard.

We did have other technical problems. The starboard engine made strange vibrations and developed a large oil leak. The fresh-water system also developed a large and mysterious leak, such that we lost a third of our supply in a single day and had no idea where it had gone. Also, quite suddenly, six days out of Cape Town, about 600 miles from the nearest land, the steering failed completely.

This, we quickly figured out, was because the master link in the steering wheel’s drive chain had fallen apart. Most of the link was easily recovered, but the most important bit, the little clip that held it together, was nowhere to be found. Finally, I remembered a mysterious little piece of metal we’d found on the cockpit sole the day before we left Cape Town. Fortunately, Wayne had saved this and, indeed, it proved to be the missing clip. We could only marvel that it took over 1,000 miles of sailing for the master link to at last work loose and fall apart without it.

Interior of the starboard hull. The boat had limited living space, and we had to store many of our provisions in boxes in the starboard head, right next to the tiny galley

Wayne shaves on deck. The only mirror we had onboard was the extracted hard drive from a dead computer

Our fresh-water problem, meanwhile, was finally solved when we took an interest in bathing and found a huge leak in the transom shower installation at the back of the starboard hull. Each time the fresh-water lines were pressurized, it turned out scads of water had been flowing straight overboard through an aft locker drain. This at least was very easy to fix, though we had no such luck with the starboard engine’s oil leak. Fortunately, of course, we did have a spare engine in the port hull.

Shooting Clouds

Though the South Atlantic was boring, the clouds drifting over it were remarkably dramatic. I have always enjoyed watching clouds at sea, as it feels like such a privilege, being able to see the world as it truly is, a vast realm of water and vapor and light co-mingled in infinite variations. But these clouds were something else…

They were utterly fantastic, like cathedrals of vapor in the sky. I spent part of each day trying to take pictures of them, but this was inherently frustrating, like trying to photograph dreams.

If nothing else it helped deconstruct the ego. These clouds, so ephemeral, were nothing abstract; they were real, the only reality. We ourselves were as nothing, less than nothing, mere specks of finite life adrift on a tiny raft, the only solid object in an endless flux of liquid and gas.

Tomb Raiders

Nine days out of Cape Town Wayne showed us his chart of St. Helena. This proved to be a tourist map of Ascension Island, 700 miles to the northwest, that had been copied off the Internet. Wayne explained it looked similar to a map he’d once seen of St. Helena, so he thought it might prove useful.

The following morning we approached the island through a series of beautiful rainbow-studded squalls. The coast was composed entirely of very high corrugated cliffs, utterly barren and desolate, with no evidence of habitation or even foliage.

Finally, however, we came to a port, on the island’s northwest side. This was Jamestown, a thin scar of dwellings and greenery that runs down to the sea through a deep ravine. Before it lay an open roadstead with a handful of fishing boats, three yachts, and an enormous orange LNG tanker flying a Norwegian flag. This, we soon learned, was the world’s largest “energy ship,” which had just been launched and was laying here awaiting her first assignment.

Approaching the anchorage at Jamestown

The harbor launch, with Doubletime and the world’s largest energy ship in the background

Jamestown as seen from the top of Jacob’s Ladder, a 699-step stairway that leads up the face of a cliff overlooking town

St. Helena, with a population of about 3,000 souls, is one of the most isolated communities on earth. There is no airfield, though the British government is constantly promising to build one

We spent only 28 hours on St. Helena. Landing late on a Sunday afternoon at the town dock, which was nothing but a concrete wall with ropes overhead for swinging ashore on, we found all government and financial offices were closed. On wandering inland, however, we were greeted effusively by everyone we met and were immediately offered all the food and drink we wanted on credit. Next morning, having abused our credit as best we could, we cleared both in and out with customs and immigration, changed money and paid our debts, then re-provisioned the boat.

That afternoon Hank and I took a truck ride with Reggie, father of Craig, who ran the launch that serviced the anchorage. Despite the coast’s very barren appearance, the island’s interior, we found, was a veritable garden. The road, lined with thorn trees and gorgeous purple flowers, wound through small forests of cedar and eucalyptus, stands of tall Norfolk pines, enormous clumps of wild flax, and steep cow pastures.

The lush interior

Yes, there is such a place as Fairyland, and you should not litter there

What St. Helena is most famous for, of course, is Longwood House, where Napoleon Bonaparte was exiled after being defeated at Waterloo in 1815. A sprawling, low-slung affair, the house is surrounded by acres of flower beds, laid out so that the deposed emperor could wander through them without being seen from the road.

Napoleon’s crib

After he died in 1821, Bonaparte was buried nearby in a valley of willow trees. Hank and I walked down to the now empty tomb (the emperor’s remains having been removed to Les Invalides in Paris in 1840) and communed with its absent spirit.

Hank takes a break

Afterwards, on the ride back into town, Reggie shared with us a great deal of salacious gossip concerning the French consul, who had been sent to oversee both the house and the empty crypt.

Low on Water

Sailing west from St. Helena, we fell to arguing over our sail configuration. In planning the trip we’d hoped the South Atlantic’s southeast tradewinds would blow at least as hard as the northeast trades in the North Atlantic. But we were crossing the South Atlantic in January, at the height of the southern summer (something one would normally not do in the north, for fear of meeting tropical storms), so the trades in fact proved much weaker. To make the most of what we had, Hank and I favored flying both the main and the asymmetric spinnaker while tacking downwind on a series of broad reaches. Wayne, meanwhile, wanted to fly the spinnaker alone at much deeper angles. The latter tactic, in fact, is generally favored by the crews who deliver fat charter cats to the West Indies. We were told they often don’t even bother to bend on their mainsails, but instead make the entire passage from Cape Town under genoa alone.

Wayne at the helm, with main and A-sail flying

In the end we did a bit of both and were never sailing as fast as we hoped. We did see many more squalls passing through. At first they were small and moderate, with easterly winds briefly spiking only as high as 15 knots. But then, 11 days out of St. Helena, we got hit one afternoon by a huge line squall packing southerly gusts as high as 28 knots. It also brought a great deluge of rain, for which we were extremely grateful. Wayne had been too cheap to buy bottled water in St. Helena, and it turned out the water we’d taken aboard from the public tap was mostly foul. We’d long ago run out of sweet water to drink and were now down to rations of one can of soda a day each.

“We’re rich!” we shrieked gleefully as we caught cool delicious rainwater off the double-reefed mainsail. In all, we filled five 2-liter jugs in less than 40 minutes.

We arrived at Fortaleza, on the northeast coast of Brazil, just two days later, early on a Sunday morning. First we spotted a low wall of high-rise buildings on the horizon, then a line of rolling dunes and a bright stripe of beach to the east. Then, emerging at last from the grey haze, dark hills in the distance behind the city.

Arriving in Fortaleza

And then finally, all around us, the silhouettes of rafts. Some were just that–mere slabs of wood with piles of cargo and people aboard, powered by long sculling oars. But many were sailing vessels. They flew dark lateen sails on long, elegantly curved spars and looked very much like one-winged butterflies dancing gracefully across the surface of the water.

Bureaucratic Epilogue

Because of the week we lost in Cape Town and our slower than expected passage times, I had to leave the boat in Fortaleza. We spent most of that Sunday re-provisioning, then the very next morning Hank and Wayne cast off and headed north toward Grenada without me. Relying on the advice of South African delivery skippers who routinely make this trip, they never formally checked in or out, as the harbormaster running the docks at the Marina Park Hotel was happy to turn a blind eye to such comings and goings if greased with a bottle of booze.

Doubletime lies side to the dock at the Marina Park Hotel

In fact, however, Americans do need visas to enter Brazil, and I didn’t have one. The federal police were very upset with me when I presented myself at their office on Monday afternoon seeking permission to enter the country so I could leave the next morning on a plane. Fortunately, I had contacted my wife by sat-phone before we landed, and she had purchased me a plane ticket and had discussed my situation with the U.S. embassy in Brasilia. As it was, however, I was detained for several hours before the police finally found someone who’d been in touch with the embassy.

After some pleading and groveling, I was at last issued a 24-hour “emergency visa” and was allowed to leave without paying a fine. The cop who busted me was pretty upset about this, but the higher-ups in his office were inclined to be magnanimous. Later I learned that if I had instead simply tried to board the plane home without first clearing in, as I first planned to do, I most likely would have been detained for a week or more.

FOR THE RECORD, the complete list of problems we had on this trip (leaving aside my legal woes) ran as follows:

1 broken daggerboard

1 bad oil leak, starboard engine

1 leaking fresh-water system

1 busted steering system

1 chafed halyard in mast

1 broken halyard sheave at masthead

1 leaking stanchion base

1 non-functional CD player

1 non-functional AC inverter

1 cleat pulled out of the deck

I spent much of last week at the Hawk’s Cay Resort in Florida hobnobbing with a large clutch of my fellow marine journos (a.k.a. the “hacks”) and an even larger clutch of brand and tech gurus from Navico, the marine electronics conglomerate, courtesy of PR mavens Rus Graham and Andrew Golden (a.k.a. the “flacks”). It was, I think, the largest marine-industry junket I’ve ever attended, with a total of 24 hacks running around in nine different test boats being chased by two different photo boats. And, yes, of course these chaperoned love-fests are inherently incestuous, but they are also exceedingly educational.

Navico, in case you hadn’t noticed, has been in serious PacMan mode and has gobbled up a number of marine-electronics companies over the past several years. In the process it has made itself into the largest player in the recreational market and has distilled what were once seven rather diffuse brands into a pure nucleus of three well-established power brands: Lowrance, Simrad, and B&G. The idea moving forward is that each of these will develop and market products specialized for their respective niches, as in Lowrance = smaller fishing boats, Simrad = larger power cruisers and sport-fishing boats (and also commercial vessels up to 300 gross tons), and B&G (of course) = sailboats.

Navico’s CEO, Leif Ottosson, has set a blistering pace re product development, and the company as a whole is now geared up to introduce at least one new product to the market every 20 days. In the not-so-distant future they are confident they can ramp this up to one new product every 15 days. In any other industry this would seem like gratuitous flack-speak, and you’d expect the “new” products to be only slight variations of older ones, but in electronics generally the market really does evolve that quickly. It seems that Navico’s real goal is to haul the once somnolent realm of recreational marine electronics that much closer to the larger industry’s bleeding edge.

The Navico mythos, as interpreted by clever flacks in a video shown to us gullible hacks

What I was most interested in, of course, was the kit from B&G, particularly their SailSteer and SailTime instrument and plotter displays, which lay out nav data in very sailor-specific ways. I had played a small part in the process that saw these products top the list in SAIL‘s 2014 Freeman K. Pittman Innovation Awards, but I hadn’t yet had a chance to play with them on the water.

It’s very cool stuff. What it does basically is take the sort of hi-tech graphics you saw on your TV screen while watching the America’s Cup last summer and translate them to a display mounted on your boat, so you can actually make use of them while sailing.

In our case we were sailing a borrowed J/111, fresh from Key West Race Week, and ran a series of mock starts off a start line that had been laid out for us. We wheeled around either side of the line during the pre-start, pinging the marks, and once we’d done that had this very useful graphic to help us set up for the gun:

Here in one compact format we see numeric values for shortest distance to the start line (center top), plus the distance to either end of the line (top left and right). The graphic you see running across the middle of the screen represents the start line itself, which in this case is a green arrow pointing right, telling us the starboard end is favored. The wind barb to the right shows the wind speed and relative wind direction; the blue arrow to the left shows which way the current is running. The numeric values on the bottom are self-explanatory, save for the one in the lower right-hand corner, which tells us how much of an advantage we’ll have starting at the starboard end of the line versus a boat starting at the port end–in this case 9.1 boat-lengths.

Pretty nifty, no? Being a lowly cruiser, I normally have no idea what’s going on during a race start, but with this display in front of me I might just have a fighting chance.

During our beats up to our windward mark (also laid out for us by some Navico buoy elves), we turned our attention to this display:

Ingenious this. Here we see in one graphic the true wind direction and angle (the green triangle with the T in it on the outer compass ring), the bearing to our mark or waypoint (the green dot), our own compass heading (the boxed number at the top of the ring), our course-over-ground (the gold triangle just left of our heading), and the current direction and speed (the blue arrow in the center of the display). Most importantly, we see our starboard- and port-tack laylines (the green and red dotted lines) AND the zones within which recent wind shifts have varied (the green and red cones surrounding each dotted line).

In this case, we can see at a glance that the tack we’re sailing on is not favored, but that we are pointing above the layline. Once the green dot lines up with our port-tack layline, we can safely tack over, and if we anticipate a lift or a header we can see exactly how much room there is to play with either side of the layline. Note, too, this is real-time data. The dotted laylines will immediately shift with the wind. And as an added bonus, the time and distance to waypoint values you see on the right are “real” values that account for the tacking you have to do to get there.

Of course, all this runs the other way, too, and shows you jibing angles when sailing off the wind.

You can also see this laid out on a conventional plotter display, like this:

And to help you track what the wind is doing more precisely, so that you can differentiate temporary shifts from trending shifts, you can look at your wind data comme cą:

I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that much of this information will also be valuable to cruisers just looking to get somewhere in time for a sundowner. Personally, I’m thinking it would be especially handy on an offshore passage, where you can really get bent doing tacking angles and wind trends in your head over very long distances.

See? I told you this was incestuous. This is me old pal Ralph Naranjo, formerly of SAIL, previously with Cruising World, and now with Cruising World once again, taking a turn at the wheel. Looks like his new titanium spine is working great!

That’s me brother-from-another-mother Ben Ellison, formerly with Ocean Navigator, previously with SAIL and Power & Motoryacht, formerly with Yachting and Cruising World, but currently now with SAIL and Power & Motoryacht again (and also SAILfeed!) doing the steering. That’s B&G product manager Rob Langford-Wood in the white shirt to the right of him; Ralph again with the camera in his crotch; and B&G global brand manager Jim Deheer in the green shirt in the foreground

That’s B&G’s Jim Deheer again on the left next to Brad Faber, owner of Utah, the J/111 we borrowed. Thanks for the great ride, Brad!

That’s B&G’s Rob Langford-Wood on the left again, with me compadre Dave Schmidt of SAIL and SailWorld

The other Navico product I was very interested in getting some exposure to was Insight Genesis, their user-created mapping system. This is a $99-a-year subscription service that allows you to record your sonar data while running your boat, then upload it to Navico, who will send you back an electronic chart displaying corrections based on the data you gathered.

This is aimed primarily at fishermen, who are acutely interested in bottom features, so I had to go out on a Lowrance boat with Gordon Sprouse, Lowrance’s global brand manager, to see it in action.

Gordon prepares to record our sonar data

But actually, when you’re running your boat, there isn’t much action. You just hit a button marked “record” and then go off and do your thing. So I got to see Gordon showing off a bunch of amazing Lowrance sonar products that not only show you where the fish are, but also show you what they’re thinking and what they had for lunch.

As I remarked to Gordon: “Man, the poor fish don’t stand a chance.”

To which he replied, proudly: “No, they don’t!”

Later, at the final dog-and-pony presentation, we were shown a chart with all the sonar data all us participating hacks had collected while scribbling about Duck Key on our various demo runs. The new data, with very detailed bottom contour lines, which also includes features like vegetation cover and bottom composition, is overlaid on top of existing off-the-shelf Insight cartography. There are various parameters to control for data quality. Only data collected at speeds under 20 mph is utilized (5 to 7 mph is the ideal survey speed), and all data is automatically corrected both for tidal variations and unique events like wind-driven tides and storm surges (via links to public buoy data).

The big kicker is that it will soon be possible, via a system Navico is calling Social Mapping, for Insight Genesis subscribers to share all their data with each other. This opens up the possibility of a brave new world of true crowd-sourced charts, where everyone everywhere who is running a boat with a depthsounder becomes part of a vast global community of chart surveyors.

Example of a user-generated Insight Genesis chart

It really is a bit staggering to think about.

Of course, again, it will be fishermen who most profit from this (at least as long as there are fish out there for them to catch), but it is also a technology that can benefit many cruising sailors, particularly those who like to explore places like the Bahamas, where shoals and channels are poorly marked and are constantly moving around.

And this is only the tip of the berg when it comes to what Navico is up to these days.

Someday, no doubt, Gordon Sprouse will be able to control the world with his Pebble watch and his iPad, thanks to Navico’s GoFree wireless network and innumerable indepedent app developers

To follow it all in detail, I recommend you keep an eye on Ben Ellison’s Panbo blog at SAILfeed. Plus, you should obviously keep clicking on those Lowrance, Simrad, and B&G websites every 20 days or so.

Is there a cruising sailor anywhere who doesn’t dream of having a tender that can double as daysailer? The only problem with this dream is you really need to have a hard dinghy to make it come true. And hard dinghies–let’s face it–aren’t nearly as useful and convenient as inflatable ones. They’re nowhere near as stable, can’t carry as much stuff, are much too heavy, and are hard to stow.

But hold the phone sports fans… the DinghyGo 2, a Dutch-built inflatable sailing tender that will hopefully appear here in the U.S. in the next year or two, may be just what we’re looking for.

It certainly checks most of my boxes. The size is perfect–9 feet long, exactly the same length as my last three inflatable tenders; it doesn’t weigh very much–just 66 pounds; you can roll it up, which is something I always insist on in an inflatable (no RIBs for me, thank you very much); AND you can leave the sailing rig off and run it with an outboard engine (up to 8 HP) if you want.

On the beach, masquerading as a normal outboard-powered dinghy

There are just two features that seem less than ideal to me. First, the floor (except for a couple of hard bits around the daggerboard and mast step) is inflatable instead of solid. Second, the hull fabric is not Hypalon. According to Ian Thomson of Nestaway Boats, which just started selling the boats into the U.K. last year, the fabric instead is a polyurethane/PVC hybrid known as Balnex, which he admits is not quite as durable as Hypalon, but can be welded instead of glued at the joints. The fabric should, however, be more durable than plain old PVC and is also lighter (and less costly) than Hypalon. Of course, the inflatable floor, though not as stiff as a solid floor, also reduces weight, which is something, frankly, that seems more and more important to me as I get older.

You’re looking at 43 sq.ft. of sail area. Plus the rudder and daggerboard seem plenty big enough to do the job

If you want you can remove the center thwart and forward mast-partner thwart when you’re not sailing the boat

One nice feature of the DinghyGo is that it doesn’t look like it’s any more trouble to assemble than a regular roll-up inflatable, as you can see in this video here:

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Another very nice feature is that it’s not egregiously expensive. Ian tells me the price in the U.K. is now £2249, including the sailing rig, which translates to $3,687 USD at today’s exchange rate. Subtract the British VAT included in Ian’s price (20%) and that works out to about $2,950 USD. Compare that to the $2,800 I paid for my current Apex inflatable, sans sailing rig, and it seems pretty reasonable.

One big question, of course, is how well does it sail? The British comic Sailing Today published a review of several inflatable craft last October and described the sailing performance of the DinghyGo as “sedate,” but noted that it does make “decent headway” to windward and is a “true all-rounder,” in that it sails reasonably well and also motors and rows reasonably well. Which, as far as I’m concerned, is about all I’d ever hope for in a dinghy.

If sedate sailing just won’t do it for you, you can instead take a look at the French-built Tiwal 3.2, which was introduced into the U.S. market at Annapolis last fall. This is more of a dedicated inflatable sailboat, with a flat PVC inflatable hull under a rigid metal frame, and is cleverly designed. It can’t really function as a tender, but according to the Sailing Today crew it does kick butt and is “startlingly stiff and exciting” to sail.

It’s also about twice as expensive as the DinghyGo. The current price is $5,950, which includes a sailing rig with a 58 sq.ft. sail. If you want the bigger 75 sq.ft. sail (and who wouldn’t?) you have to pony up an extra $1,200.

Thank goodness I was off having my own misadventure when Stanley Paris announced in his blog that he was abandoning his solo circumnavigation attempt and pulling into Cape Town. Otherwise there’s a good chance I might have stepped in it like my SAILfeed compatriot Andy Schell did when he read the news. It seems that what set Andy off was a single phrase in Paris’s announcement: “that the design of the rigging attachments to the yacht were inadequate for ocean sailing.” My reaction when I read that was pretty much WTF too.

Andy made some critical assumptions and statements based on that statement and promptly got slapped down by Patrick Shaughnessy at Farr Yacht Design, the firm that designed Paris’s boat, Kiwi Spirit. The implication in Shaughnessy’s response, as published by Andy, is that the phrase in question refers not to the original design of the “rigging attachments,” but to the design of some jury rigs created by Paris.

One big problem in trying to figure out exactly what happened on Kiwi Spirit is that Stanley Paris is not very good at blogging. From his blog we can learn little or nothing about the rigging failures he experienced and how he tried to make repairs. On his Kiwi Spirit Facebook page I did find one post put up by his shore team, on January 9, with photos they’d received of damage to Kiwi Spirit‘s staysail furling rod and the staysail stay’s deck attachment.

According to an e-mail that Paris sent Andy, this damage was caused after “a spinnaker halyard wrapped around the top of the furler at the head and the furling torque caused the separation.” According to Shaughnessy’s e-mail, the C-clamp jury-rig seen in the lower photo was necessary because the “retaining nut” for the pin securing the bottom end of the stay had been lost.

We know also from Andy’s correspondence with involved parties, and from a Florida News4Jax TV report posted on the Kiwi Spirit Facebook page, that Kiwi Spirit‘s main boom suffered major damage during an uncontrolled crash jibe. In his e-mail to Andy, Paris says the boom itself was cracked and that the “boom end pulleys” (the sheaves, presumably) for the preventer, first reef clew line, and outhaul were also damaged. He concedes he had no preventer rigged at the time, but notes he doesn’t think it would have made a difference if he had. In the News4Jax report, Paris also states that “the block that holds [the boom] to the boat” (a sheet block presumably) was broken and cracked. Shaughnessy references damage that sounds somewhat similar to this in his e-mail to Andy and further mentions that the mainsail suffered some broken battens, that these battens had been replaced with fishing rods, and there was concern going forward that the boom damage would lead to still more battens breaking.

Evidently, Paris sent photos of all relevant damage to interested parties on shore for appraisal, but so far no photos, save for those two above, have been shared publicly. (I note now that the original January 9 post containing the two staysail photos is no longer on the Kiwi Spirit Facebook timeline, though the pix themselves are still accessible.)

According to the News4Jax report, Paris fell while trying to repair the boom damage and cracked two ribs, but this may be inaccurate. (I know from my own recent experience that TV reporters aren’t always very careful with their facts when covering yachting mishaps.) According to a blog post by Paris dated January 4, what sounds like this injury occurred on January 1, as Paris was recovering “a light headwind sail” that had blown out during the night. He states that he had been scared during the night as the wind increased, and that he’d had to handsteer the boat as the sail was overpowered. After the sail tore, he says he could not take it down in the darkness, but could only watch it “self destruct” until dawn came.

It is interesting to note that Paris makes no mention of this event or of his injury in his January 2 blog post, which is a perfectly boring anodyne account of passing a ship at night.

Kiwi Spirit‘s route to Cape Town

It is also interesting to note that even as I am drafting this post, Paris, who is now back in the U.S. (he’s letting a delivery crew bring Kiwi Spirit back from Cape Town as far as the West Indies), has just made another post on his blog stating that he will now “have extensive meetings with the sail maker, designer, builder and others to determine the best course of action that will restore my confidence in the boat and its fittings.” Which implies to me that his problems with the boat may have involved more than just a couple of isolated rigging failures.

When I last blogged about Paris, my operating assumption was that all the money and expertise he had available to throw at this project pretty much guaranteed its success, barring something unforeseen happening. I mean, hell, according to the story I read in the February 2013 issue of Cruising World, Paris was going to carry “a second carbon-fiber rig that will be stowed below in several sections in the event that the first fixed one fails.”

This denotes an extremely high level of preparedness. And now we’re supposed to believe that he had to stop because of a crash jibe, a halyard wrap, a lost retaining nut, a broken block, and some busted battens?

Kiwi Spirit‘s sailplan. Paris told Cruising World magazine that Bruce Farr designed an extra rig to be stowed onboard

I’m guessing there may be more to this story than has been shared so far.

Here are a few of the questions that come to my mind:

-Were there no spare battens, retaining nuts, or boom sheaves on board? If so, why was it not possible to use them?

-I’ve noticed that Kiwi Spirit when she set out from St. Augustine had fixed furlers for her jib and staysail and a removable continuous-line furler for her inner staysail.

Earlier in her brief career she had continuous-line furlers on all her headsails.

Why was this change made? Were the sails on continuous-line furlers being carried as spares?

-When did the damage to the staysail furler and stay attachment occur? Was this related to the “light headwind sail” incident on January 1?

-Exactly what “light headwind sail” was it that blew out on January 1? Wasn’t it on a furler? Why couldn’t Paris simply roll up the sail before it was damaged?

-Was there really a whole spare rig onboard? Did that include a spare boom?

-Why was there no preventer on the boom when the boat jibed?

-Is the jibe that caused the boom damage the same as the one described in Paris’s December 26 blog post? This involved what sounds like a serious injury.

-How many times was Paris injured? Was he more badly injured than he has let on?

-Were there other problems with the boat that we haven’t been told about?

Some larger questions I have include:

-Is Paris having second thoughts about his “green voyage” goal? The whole notion of burning hydrocarbons up the wazoo to build a super-sophisticated boat, then pledging to burn none at all on a voyage around the world–while relying on gear like electronic autopilots, microwave ovens, and electric stoves–seemed a bit disingenuous in the first place. Judging from Paris’s blog posts, the green goal turned out to be both a distraction and potentially counter-productive.

-Is Paris wishing he had a smaller, simpler boat?

BOTTOM LINE: And I mean this–Dr. Paris is to be APPLAUDED for stopping when he did. I am sure, given all the preparation he and others put into this, that it was not an easy decision to make.

I do also think, however, given all the effort that was put into publicizing this project, that we are owed a more complete and coherent account of what happened.

The National Transportation Safety Board released its report on the infamous October 2012 loss of HMS Bounty yesterday, concluding “that the probable cause of the sinking of tall ship Bounty was the captain’s reckless decision to sail the vessel into the well-forecasted path of Hurricane Sandy, which subjected the aging vessel and the inexperienced crew to conditions from which the vessel could not recover.” No real surprise there. But on reading the report in full, I did find one bit I hadn’t expected, which is that the five-member review board also determined that the captain, Robin Walbridge, was not actually under any pressure to make the ship’s next appearance in Florida and that the ship could still have reached St. Petersburg on schedule if it had waited out the storm in Connecticut.

If you believe that, the bottom line to this disaster is that Walbridge was just a cowboy, risking his vessel and crew for no good reason at all.

I discussed the Bounty with Coast Guard personnel in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, during my recent visit there and they had a lot to say on the subject. Rescuing the ship’s crew (they recovered 14 of the 16 people aboard after the ship sank) was a major fire drill for them, requiring the deployment of one C-130 search plane and three Jayhawk helicopters at night and in truly horrendous conditions. They felt Walbridge had needlessly jeopardized their flight crews by failing to provide the Coast Guard with accurate and timely information as to the ship’s status.

You can take another glimpse of the CG rescue viddy right here:

You can also read this official Coast Guard account of the rescue, which is surprisingly hair-raising, given how dispassionate it is.

If you want to reprise the whole disaster in detail, there is now a book available, Gathering Wind: Hurricane Sandy, the Sailing Ship Bounty, and a Courageous Rescue at Sea, by Gregory A. Freeman, and also a Kindle Single, The Sinking of the Bounty: The True Story of a Tragic Shipwreck and Its Aftermath, by Matthew Shaer.

Don’t know if you’ve been watching the North Atlantic weather charts this winter, but FYI Ireland and the UK have been taking direct hits from storms as strong as hurricanes on a weekly basis for some time now. And I don’t know if you’ve been following the Red Bull Storm Chase series, which I blogged about when it started in Ireland last January, but the series recently wrapped up with an amazing session right in the middle of one of those storms in Cornwall, England. Thomas Traversa of France was declared the winner of this grueling triptych of events (there was another session in Tasmania last August) and is now officially the craziest, most bad-ass windsurfer on the planet.

As your attorney I advise you to pop a Red Bull and watch this viddy right here:

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After watching it myself a few times, I’m wondering if they shouldn’t have given prizes to the guys who wiped out the most.

From left to right: Marcilio Browne (Brazil, 2nd place); Thomas Traversa (France, 1st place); Leon Jamaer (Germany, 3rd place)

As to the weather, this is the kind of mess I’m talking about right here. Check out that fierce fist of low punching right through Ireland.

It’s been like watching a marathon kick-boxing fight. Plus we’ve been getting vivid descriptions from my father-in-law in County Kerry of all the damage there.

“The worst in living memory.” It’s one of his favorite phrases, as he has that classic Irish penchant for the dramatic, and now he gets to use it every week.

Here’s hoping the worst is over for now.

PS: Be sure to check back on that Red Bull link tomorrow, as they should be posting a full-length viddy with highlights from all three Storm Chase sessions!

PBS has aired and released its great three-part video series, Chasing Shackleton, which follows the exploits of five modern-day adventurers as they seek to recreate Ernest Shackleton’s amazing small-boat voyage from Antarctica to South Georgia Island in 1916. Follow this link here, and you can watch all three 1-hour episodes for free. Don’t dawdle! I’d be surprised if they leave these up for long.

For sailors, the story inside this story is that one of the five crew aboard Alexandra Shackleton, a very accurate duplicate of Shackleton’s lifeboat James Caird, was Australian Paul Larsen. Just weeks before embarking on this grueling survivalist nightmare of a voyage deep in the Southern Ocean, Larsen had been in Namibia triumphantly shattering the world sailing speed record aboard Vestas Sailrocket 2. This was the culmination of a 10-year personal quest, during which many had ridiculed Larsen and his revolutionary boat.

Even better, Larsen’s job aboard Alexandra, arguably the most important and most difficult one, was navigator. Not only did all the crew wear accurate period clothing, but Larsen had to do all his navigation strictly by sextant. One miscalculation and the boat would either end up on the rocks of South Georgia… or miss the island altogether. Larsen was also one of the three crew who hiked across the unmapped interior of the island after landing in the lifeboat.

Accommodations inside Alexandra Shackleton. The only way to stay warm was to cuddle with shipmates (Photo by Ed Wardle)

Larsen aboard Sailrocket (Photo courtesy of Vestas Sailrocket)

Larsen in the period Shackleton gear he wore during his 800-mile voyage across the Southern Ocean (Photo by Ed Wardle)

Landing on South Georgia Island on the same beach where Shackleton landed a century earlier (Photo by Jo Stewart)

Anyway, I’m not going to spoil the viddies for you by giving anything away. Watch them first, then take a look at this story in Classic Boat, which describes the voyage aboard Alexandra in some detail. Then saunter over to this Sailing Anarchy discussion forum, where Paul mixes it up with the peanut gallery and answers lots of questions about the boat and the passage.

Finally–please, please, please–can someone tell me why Larsen never received any kind of sailing award for this amazing doubleheader of unique accomplishments?

Well informed sports fans will recall that SAIL‘s publisher, Josh Adams, abandoned his career in sailing journalism back in August 2012 to assume command of the U.S. Olympic sailing team. Our loss was the Olympic team’s gain, and they seem to be recovering nicely from their zero-medal performance in the 2012 London games. Last month they scored six podium finishes at the ISAF Sailing World Cup Miami regatta, including a gold medal for Paige Railey in the Laser Radial class.

Following the recent U.S. Sailing Leadership Forum in San Diego, Josh was cornered and interrogated by Sailing Anarchy‘s Alan Block (a.k.a. Mr. Clean) in a hotel lobby.

The interview is well worth watching. Josh does a good job of not demonstrating contempt for Mr. Clean and provides lots of insight into the team’s prospects moving forward toward Rio de Janeiro in 2016.

For more discussion on sailboat racing and how to publicize it, you can watch some sailing journos (including Mr. Clean and SAIL‘s Kimball Livingston) mix it up in this video from the Leadership Forum:

I’m thinking about this (again) after watching an exciting video (see below) of a sailboat wiping out trying to enter an inlet at Zumaia in northern Spain. The photo above shows a different boat entering the same inlet successfully, which should give you an idea at a glance of how hairy this can be when conditions are uncooperative.

I can’t make out what type of boat this is in the video:

Velero volcado en Zumaia from Gabi on Vimeo.

But it looks like they’re just coming back from a race. They’ve got laminated sails, a spinnaker pole poised on the foredeck, and a large crew. Presumably they’ve run the inlet many times before, judging from the cavalier disposition of the crew, which is sprawled all over the deck.

Running through breaking surf like this, there’s always a fine line between totally screwing the pooch and just having a close call. For example, that boat in the photo up top (a Beneteau Oceanis 46), did end up broaching like the one in the video in almost exactly the same spot:

But was lucky enough not to capsize. (For the full sequence of pix check out Voiles Et Voiliers.)

FYI, here’s an aerial view of the entrance:

Watching videos of successful inlet runs in breaking seas can be just as entertaining:

But don’t necessarily show you how to do it safely.

Get lucky a few times, and I’m guessing it’s easy to get complacent, particularly if you routinely have to transit an inlet like this. The winter I kept my boat Lunacy at Oyster Pond in St. Maarten, which has a sometimes surf-ridden entrance, I was amazed that the charter boats there were running in and out in conditions I considered untenable. I was thinking I was just a big chicken, but sure enough one of the boats wiped out one day coming in after the Heineken regatta. The crew was badly injured, and the boat was lost.

Bottom line: being a chicken may not be admirable, but you are less likely to get hurt. Because even when you’re very careful, these inlets can bite you.

Check out this viddy here:

Then check out the back story. The owner of this boat, a Perry 43 catamaran, was highly experienced, had run many inlets before, had even attended an inlet-running school, and waited 18 hours before making this attempt.

And yes, he was successful, but that wave he surfed in on did catch him by surprise. And if you watch again you’ll see there was one instant where he did come close to losing it.

We have already discussed an early elite cruising vessel, Cleopatra’s Barge, and the development of high-end yacht design in the 19th century. Now it’s time to turn to the “hoi polloi,” the unwashed mass of middle-class (and upper middle-class) sailors who were also determined to enjoy “messing about in boats,” and who, ultimately, had a much bigger impact on the development of the sport.

One important pioneer was a stern British stockbroker named Richard Turrell (R.T.) McMullen, who, in 1850, at age 20, decided to teach himself sailing and commissioned the construction of a 20-foot half-decked cutter named Leo. Over the next 41 years he cruised throughout the British Isles and across the English Channel in a series of purpose-built vessels, the largest of which, a 42-footer named Orion (see image above), was a classic deep-draft, narrow-waisted British cutter.

McMullen’s career as a yachtsman, described in meticulous detail in his book Down Channel, was significant both because he was not a wealthy tycoon or aristocrat and because he was acutely interested in sailing for its own sake. He cared nothing for racing or yachting society, but was instead fascinated by the minutiae of boats and boat-handling and by the aquatic environment itself. He set strict standards and ultimately became competent enough to handle his vessels singlehanded.

McMullen’s first solo experience was aboard Procyon, an unusual 28-foot shoal-draft lugger with a cat-yawl rig and a short centerboard, or “drop-keel” as he termed it. He also once sailed the much heavier Orion singlehanded from France to England after dismissing a crew he deemed incompetent. His last vessel, the 27-foot Perseus, was, like Procyon, a yawl-rigged lugger conceived specifically for singlehanded cruising, except that she carried a headsail and had more draft and no centerboard. In 1891 McMullen was found dead, alone, aboard Perseus in the middle of the English Channel, apparently a victim of heart failure.

Another important figure was a Scottish attorney, John MacGregor, who in 1865 embarked upon a tour of Europe in a 14-foot canoe he called Rob Roy. The book he wrote about his adventure–A Thousand Miles in the Rob Roy Canoe on Twenty Lakes and Rivers of Europe–was published the following year, and its success quickly led MacGregor to make more canoe voyages in Scandinavia (1866) and the Middle East (1869).

John MacGregor receives some “local assistance” while canoe-cruising on the River Jordan

MacGregor’s canoe trips were not really cruises in the proper sense of the term, in that he hauled his boats by train or carriage from each river or lake he wished to explore and always found lodging for the night ashore. Nor were his canoes much akin to what we now think of as proper cruising boats. They were, in fact, mere kayaks, or “double-paddle canoes” as some then called them, a design concept MacGregor freely admitted to having cribbed from the North American “Esquimeaux.” But MacGregor’s adventures did serve to open the public’s eyes to the concept of recreation afloat and demonstrated in a very palpable way that the expense need not be prohibitive. MacGregor himself was, more than anything else, an indefatigable showman and expert propagandist with an unfailing instinct for garnering and exploiting publicity. His books and popular lectures were highly influential and led to the creation of “canoe clubs” throughout Britain and Europe.

Early canoe cruisers under sail and paddle

In addition to his canoe trips, MacGregor also engaged in one “proper” cruise in 1867 aboard a 21-foot yawl (also called Rob Roy) that he designed himself. This was much more a standard (albeit miniaturized) yacht with a ballast keel and a hull form roughly similar to that of larger British yachts of the era. It lacked a cabin (nights aboard were spent under a cockpit tent) but did feature such clever amenities as a tiny galley that folded into a cockpit locker.

The yawl Rob Roy

Galley arrangement on Rob Roy

MacGregor’s little yawl was seaworthy enough to take him across the English Channel from England to France, up the Seine River to Paris, and back again. The ostensible purpose of this voyage was to spread the gospel about canoeing (and the Protestant faith) at a French boating exhibition sanctioned by the Emperor Napoleon III, who, like many others, had been inspired by MacGregor’s writing. MacGregor’s book about the cruise, The Voyage Alone in the Yawl Rob Roy, led many who yearned to set sail on vessels more substantial than canoes to mimic his example.

MacGregor’s American counterpart, Nathaniel H. Bishop, is no longer as well remembered but was also influential in his day. Inspired by MacGregor, Bishop first went cruising aboard a small paper canoe he called Maria Theresa. Subsequently, in 1875, he cruised down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and along the Gulf Coast to Florida aboard Centennial Republic, a Barnegat Bay sneak-box he had built for just $25.

Lines and rig of a Barnegat Bay sneak-box

The sneak-box was a specialized centerboard spritsail skiff designed for use by duck hunters in the shoal waters of coastal New Jersey. Bishop’s boat was 12 feet long with a beam of 4 feet and weighed just 200 pounds. The book he wrote about his experience, Four Months in a Sneak-Box, was well received, and in 1880, again following MacGregor’s example, he helped form the American Canoe Association, of which he was the first commodore.

Remembering Nathaniel Bishop

It is difficult to say how many would-be cruisers immediately followed in the wakes cut by men like McMullen, MacGregor, and Bishop. This sort of unobtrusive sailing–small voyages for pleasure undertaken by ordinary people in modest craft–was not of immediate or compelling public interest. The high-profile exploits of the rich and famous, by comparison, whether conducted on shore or aboard their yachts, were always grist for the popular press. Unless they were willing to tell their stories themselves, common cruisers had to be, and were, content to do their sailing in obscurity.

But something powerful was at work here–a seductive fantasy of autonomy and adventure that cruising under sail somehow promised to make real. MacGregor himself summed it up neatly in his account of his cruise to France. “Often as a boy,” he wrote, “I had thought of the pleasure of being one’s own master in one’s own boat; but the reality far exceeded the imagination of it, and it was not a transient pleasure.”

What we do know is that from the late 19th century onward, the number of middle- and upper-middle-class people engaged in cruising aboard their own small boats steadily increased, and gradually this aspect of the sport of yachting became just as significant as the nautical doings of the upper classes. By the early 20th century, there were enough London-based middle-class amateur yachtsmen cruising the coast of southern England that railway companies saw fit to offer them special fares. These open-ended round-trip tickets made it possible for sailors who were office-bound in London during the week to take a train south to one town on the English Channel on a Friday evening, spend the weekend aboard their boat sailing to some other town, and return to the city on Sunday night in time for work on Monday morning. In this manner, over a series of weekends, a persistent cruiser might hopscotch his way along a fair portion of the coast.

Small-boat cruisers, like their blue-blooded predecessors, also formed clubs. The first was the Cruising Club, which held its inaugural meeting in the office of a British lawyer, Arthur Underhill, in 1880 and soon afterward was officially ordained the “Royal” Cruising Club. There followed the Little Ship Club, another British club formed in 1926, and in the United States the Cruising Club of America, which first met in a Greenwich Village speakeasy called Beefsteak John’s in 1922.

These and several other cruising clubs that sprung up at the time focused on educating their membership in the vagaries of seamanship and navigation. In various ways–via newsletters, lectures, and lending libraries–members of these clubs sought not to assert their social status but to share information and expertise. This same impulse, leavened, of course, with pride of accomplishment, also led some to write and publish accounts of cruises they had made. This growing body of literature served both to disseminate knowledge among those practicing the sport and to attract new practitioners.

In our next installment in this series we’ll explore in detail the sorts of boats this new breed of cruisers set sail in.

Who wouldn’t want to be Alex Thomson? He’s suave and sophisticated and has enjoyed the longest running full-on sponsorship in professional sailing. Hugo Boss has been financing his racing career since 2003 and recently re-upped with a new four-year deal. Alex was so pleased he scored a fancy new suit and went for a walk:

I don’t really follow fashion, so maybe someone out there can tell me what kind of suit it is. I think I’d like one just like it. ;)

I’ll take one of those boats, too. What really blows my mind is what a good job they do sailing it literally on its ear while Alex sashays up the spar.

Compare this stunt to the last one from a couple of years ago, when Alex decided to go for a stroll on his keel, and you’ll see they have definitely improved their technique.

Thanks to Hugo Boss, Alex has a pretty nice schedule in front him: the 2014 Ocean Masters New York-Barcelona Race, the 2014 Barcelona World Race, and of course the 2016 Vendee Globe.

I’m sure he has a few more cool suits in his wardrobe as well.

Major bummer here. D. Randy West, the well known West Indies multihull maven, is struggling to salvage his new ride, the Peter Spronk-designed Cat Ppalu (see photo above), which he bought and renovated last year after a 20-year quest.

Major coincidence here, too, as Randy was in St. Maarten racing on the Gunboat 62 Tribe at the Heineken Regatta with, among others, Tribe‘s creator and original owner, Peter Johnstone, who has been resolutely ignoring some e-mails I sent him last week asking questions about the new Gunboat 60. I had just figured out where Peter was, and why he wasn’t answering e-mail, when I got word from Paul Gelder, ex-editor of Yachting Monthly in the UK, that Ppalu was in trouble.

I gather from the blurb on that YouTube video that Ppalu somehow dragged on to a reef and was holed while Randy was out racing.

Old partners in crime. Peter Johnstone (left) and D. Randy (right) on Tribe this past weekend

Tribe under sail last week. She was the Gunboat that started it all

Ppalu, when first launched in 1978 (Randy was actually on hand to help carry her into the water!) was purportedly, at 75 feet, the world’s largest catamaran at the time. Like many of Spronk’s boats, she was designed for the Caribbean charter trade, but was also unusually fast.

Magazine charter ad for Ppalu circa 1980

Ppalu about the time Randy bought her last year

Randy at work renovating her on St. Kitts

As mentioned up top, D. Randy has waited a long, long time to lay hands on this boat. I’m sure he’ll move heaven and earth to get her floating again.

You remember Jeff Bolster, right? He lives down the street from me here in Portsmouth, and I’ve crewed on his boat, and he’s crewed on my boat, and he doesn’t mind eating fish raw for breakfast. He teaches history at the University of New Hampshire and in a past life was a pro schooner jockey. I’ve heard from him the story of how his first scholarly tome, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Harvard University Press, 1997), proved to be a major inspiration to a black prison inmate, Greg White, who consequently went on to forge a career as a merchant mariner after serving out a 22-year sentence for armed robbery. As a result, Jeff and Greg formed a bond that continues to this day.

Now their relationship has been featured in a recent mini-movie produced by the National Endowment for the Humanities, which you can watch right here:

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Good stuff. I’ve never met Greg, but I can assure you Jeff really does talk like that in real life.

Jeff’s most recent tome, The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail (Harvard University Press, 2012), has so far failed to inspire any prison inmates, but did win the Bancroft Prize last year.

Remembering the good old days

Jeff tells me someday he’s going to write a hot memoir of his schooner days. Tentative title: Chicks and Ships. The NEH has already optioned the movie rights.

The Gemini, the first production cruising catamaran ever built in the United States, was born from the ashes of a terrible fire that in 1981 destroyed the molds for the successful Telstar 26 folding trimaran that multihull enthusiast Tony Smith had just brought over from Great Britain. Eager to save his new Maryland-based business, Performance Cruising, Smith immediately started building catamarans instead, using molds for an old British cruiser, the Aristocat, designed by Ken Shaw back in 1970.

The original Gemini 31, appropriately named the Phoenix, was rebranded with minor changes as the Gemini 3000 after the first 28 hulls were launched. In all, 153 of these boats (including the first 28) were built from 1981 to 1990, when the 3000 was discontinued and replaced by the Gemini 3200. All subsequent Gemini models built by Performance Cruising, including the 3200, the 3400, and two 105 models, though they grew slightly, have the same basic hull and deck form and interior layout as the first. A total of nearly 1,000 Geminis have been launched over the past quarter century, making them the most popular American-built cruising cats to date.

Though the Gemini design concept is archaic by today’s standards, it still works well for contemporary cruisers who want a great deal of living space in a small inexpensive sailboat. As catamarans go, all Geminis are quite narrow, just 14 feet across, which means they can fit into most standard marina berths. In spite of the narrow beam, there is still enough room inside for a queen-size double berth forward in the master stateroom between the hulls, plus two small doubles in separate guest staterooms at the back of each hull, as well as a small but serviceable raised saloon with two settees and a table that can collapse to form yet another double berth.

A modest but useful main saloon

The galley is down in the starboard hull

One of two aft double berths

What this adds up to, in the case of the Gemini 3000, is a 30-foot boat with standing headroom that can honestly sleep four couples in a pinch, or three couples quite comfortably in private cabins, or a couple with several small children (or two older children who demand some space of their own). Throw in a good-sized galley, a roomy head with a shower, a nice long nav desk, plus a large comfortable cockpit, and you have a veritable poor man’s cruising palace.

When it comes to performance Geminis are a mixed bag. They have a solid bridgedeck stretching the entire length of the boat from the stern to the bow, plus the bridgedeck is fairly close to the water, and this inevitably hampers a catamaran’s performance to some degree. The boats will pound and hobbyhorse a bit sailing into a chop, especially when overloaded. On the other hand, Geminis do have relatively deep pivoting centerboards to provide directional stability and lift underwater, rather than the inefficient shoal keels found on most dedicated cruising cats. In flat water a Gemini with its lee centerboard down could be rather closewinded for a boat of its type. On the Gemini 3000s, unfortunately, the genoa track is outboard and the wide sheeting angle makes it hard to take advantage of this potential. On later models the track was moved inboard to the coachroof.

Example of a Gemini 105Mc, the last Gemini built by Performance Cruising

Because their centerboards can be raised and wetted surface area thus reduced when desired, all Geminis are reasonably fast off the wind compared to others of their ilk, particularly if you hoist a spinnaker. Unlike most modern cats, however, they have conventional rigs with backstays, and cannot fly a large main with a fat roach. Still, as long as they are not overloaded (an important proviso aboard any multihull), Geminis do surprisingly well in light air and can generally outsail most monohulls in their size range. They also have retractable rudders housed in stainless-steel cassettes, which allows them to take full advantage of their boards-up shoal draft when venturing into thin water.

Construction quality is mediocre at best, and though a few bold souls have taken Geminis offshore, the boats are best suited to coastal cruising. The entire hull (that is, both hulls plus the underside of the full-length bridgedeck) is formed in a single mold and is laid up as a solid fiberglass laminate of mat and woven roving. In the Gemini 3000 hulls polyester resin was used, and according to one consumer survey conducted back in the 1980s about 20 percent of owners reported some blistering. All subsequent models were built with an exterior layer of vinylester to prevent this.

The deck, also formed in a single mold, is cored with balsa in all horizontal areas and is through-bolted to the hull on a flange. To save weight neither the deck nor hull laminate are terribly thick and this, combined with the free-floating bulkheads inside the hull, makes for a somewhat flexible structure. Flexing in older Gemini 3000s often leads to some crazing and spider cracking in the exterior gelcoat. This problem is usually only cosmetic, but more severe stress cracking may indicate delamination in some areas and should be carefully checked. Older Gemini 3000s may also have problems with leaky Plexiglas windows. These were later changed to Lexan, which works better in windows of this size. Other problems to look for include corroding steering cables and undersized deck hardware.

Outboard installation on an older Gemini

Though optional inboard diesel engines were available, almost all Gemini 3000s are powered instead by a single long-shaft outboard engine mounted in the middle of the transom. The outboard turns with the rudder cassettes, which greatly improves close-quarters handling under power, and can be raised when sailing to reduce drag. When the boat was in production outboard-powered 3000s were delivered with either 35 or 40 hp motors, but many boats currently are driven by 25 hp motors. Reportedly even a 10 hp motor can drive the hull along at 5 knots or better.

Because alternators on outboard engines cannot generate much electricity, most Gemini 3000s have propane-fueled water heaters and refrigerators. The refrigerators can also run on 110-volt AC power when plugged in at a dock. All other DC electrical loads for lights, pumps, electronics, etc., must be kept at a minimum, or generation capacity must be augmented with solar panels and/or a wind generator. In most cases owners prefer to cope with the undersized DC system by keeping other systems as simple as possible.

The latest iteration, the Gemini Legacy 35, under sail

The cockpit on a Legacy 35. With no backstay and the main traveler on the targa roof, the cockpit is considerably more open

If you are attracted to Geminis but are keen on buying a new boat, you’ll be glad to hear that Marlow Hunter (formerly Hunter Marine) has taken over production and has significantly modernized the design. The Gemini Legacy 35, as it is called, is more of a mainstream cruising cat, with twin diesel engines, a diamond-stayed rig with a square-top mainsail, and fixed keels instead of centerboards. Build quality and the cockpit layout have also been improved. With a base price of $175K, the Legacy is considerably more expensive than a used Gemini, but is still significantly less expensive than most other new cruising cats.

Specifications

LOA: 30’6″

LWL: 27’7″

Beam: 14’0″

Draft

-Boards down: 4’9″

-Boards up: 1’9″

Displacement: 7,000 lbs.

Sail area

-100% foretriangle: 425 sq.ft.

-With spinnaker: 675 sq.ft.

Fuel: 20-40 gal.

Water: 60 gal.

D/L ratio: 149

SA/D ratio

-100% foretriangle: 18.55

-With spinnaker: 29.46

Nominal hull speed: 9.1 knots

Typical asking prices: $35-65K

IT’S HERE! Spring, I mean. Though there is still snow in the forecast up here in New England, and even in Annapolis, from which I returned last night after holding forth at the World Cruising Club Ocean Sailing Seminar over the weekend. I have an awful feeling I will actually succeed (for once!) in getting Lunacy launched in early to mid-May this year… and there will then be a HUGE BLIZZARD the day after she splashes.

We are forging ahead regardless, so I stopped by Maine Yacht Center last week to see how the old girl’s rudder-skeg repair is coming along.

The welder was on site and stuff was happening! I love it when that happens. You’ll recall this is actually the second time we’ve made this repair. Last time, over four years ago, there was a small crack at the back of the skeg and we just focussed on fixing that. This time we’re taking a more global approach.

In addition to repairing the crack that has reappeared at the back of the skeg, I also asked the welder to lay on extra metal all the way around the base of the skeg.

And then I asked that fillet plates be welded on to either side of the skeg. Here you see the welder holding one of them in place. The idea, of course, is to spread the load imposed on the root of the skeg.

The skeg doesn’t fully support the rudder. Most of that job is done by two big bearings on the transom. But there is a rudder heel at the bottom of the skeg that connects it to the rudder, and the rudder is quite deep. The skeg is also a very high-aspect structure, with a short root, and is simply welded on to the bottom of the hull. Side loads from the rudder are evidently transmitted to the right-angle joint at the base of the skeg, and that I reckon is what keeps cracking the weld at the back of the joint.

Jean-Claude, owner one of Lunacy‘s sisterships (there are in fact five of them), advised me that he solved this problem (you can read his comment to my last post on this subject) by building a new skeg that comes up eight inches into the hull of his boat and is tied into the interior framing. Which sounds very strong, indeed, but also quite expensive. I’m hoping by adding structural support outside the hull I can save some trouble and money.

Note: there will also be end-plates welded on to the back of the fillets to keep wildlife from inhabiting the voids.

Here’s another mini-project involving metal. Two surveyors and various service managers have complained over the years about the simple wood plug I use to secure the drain hole in Lunacy‘s keel. The plug has always worked well enough, but at last I let the guys at MYC fabricate an aluminum plug to take its place. There are two, actually–one on the inside and this one on the outside–so now I can stop worrying about teredo worms chewing up the soft pine plug that used to live down there.

After fussing around with my boat, I took a quick tour of the MYC shed and found a few other interesting projects going on:

This is the canting keel from Rich Wilson’s Open 60 Great American IV, which is currently being refit at MYC to run in the next Vendee Globe.

In the foreground here you see part of the bridgedeck and the house of a home-built high-performance cruising catamaran that MYC’s service manager, Jeff Stack, has been creating in his spare time. In the background that’s Mike Hennessey’s Owen Clarke Class 40 Dragon, which will soon get splashed so it can compete in this year’s edition of the Atlantic Cup.

And this is Mike Dreese’s Akilaria RC3 Open 40 Toothface 2, which is also being prepped for the Atlantic Cup.

Lunacy may be a funky boat, but you can see she does keep good company.

In our last episode in this series, we described the genesis of the Cruising Everyman in the mid- to late 19th century. These were sailors who were not aristocratic bluebloods looking to flaunt their wealth, but a simpler breed of more middle-class sailors who enjoyed cruising under sail for its own sake. These are cruisers we can easily relate to today, and what most interests us, of course, is the sort of boat they most often went cruising in.

For many sailors of more modest means who wanted vessels that were both substantial enough to survive a bit of weather and large enough to live aboard for limited periods of time in some comfort, the easiest and cheapest thing to do was simply to buy an old working boat and refurnish it. Some paint, some furniture tacked in down below, and perhaps some rig alterations could quickly transform many such boats into perfectly serviceable cruisers. It helped, of course, that working sailboats everywhere were steadily being replaced by power vessels, and thus were available at reasonable prices in ever-growing numbers.

Fishing boats were probably the most popular candidates for conversion. Indeed, some types established secondary reputations as cruising boats that ultimately eclipsed their previous identities. We tend to forget, for example, that two popular American craft now considered classic coastal cruising vessels–the Cape Cod catboat and the Friendship sloop–were both originally designed and used as inshore fishing boats.

Sailplan of a typical Friendship sloop. These were working fishing boats that morphed into coastal cruisers as cruising under sail became more popular

In Britain, lifeboats were also seen as ideal vessels to make over into cruising boats. This practice, which continues to this day, started at least as early as 1886, when E.F. Knight made a name for himself cruising from England to the Baltic and back aboard Falcon, a converted ship’s lifeboat he purchased for just 20 pounds.

Pilot boats were another logical choice, as they were usually designed to be both fast (so they could compete with other pilot boats racing out of a harbor to do business with inbound vessels) and seaworthy enough to go out in any weather. Several types were pressed into service as yachts on both sides of the Atlantic. Bristol Channel pilot cutters became particularly popular as cruisers in Britain, but by far the most influential type was a beamy double-ended 47-foot pilot and offshore rescue boat designed by Colin Archer in 1893 for work along the coast of Norway. The simple symmetrical lines of these boats, known as Redningskoites (see photo up top), were explicitly copied by others seeking to create durable all-purpose cruising boats. The best-known example was Eric, a scaled-down 32-foot Redningskoite designed by William Atkin in 1925. Meanwhile, the design for another very influential double-ended cruising boat, the Tahiti ketch, conceived by John Hanna in 1923, was explicitly based on boats sailed by Greek sponge fishermen.

A British pilot cutter under sail

For a generation of cruisers John Hanna’s Tahiti ketch, based on old sponge fishing boats, was considered an ultimate “get-away boat”

By far the most famous converted working boat was Joshua Slocum‘s Spray. Slocum does not at all fit the template of the amateur cruising yachtsman described in our last installment, but his influence on the sport was extraordinary. Ironically, he did have something in common with George Crowninshield, the owner of Cleopatra’s Barge, which we discussed at the very beginning of this series. Like Crowninshield, Slocum gained his nautical expertise as a professional merchant mariner. Unlike Crowninshield, he lived in the latter part of the 19th century, when commercial sail was being driven into extinction.

Crowninshield took up cruising because it amused him, and he had been successful enough as a commercial mariner that he could indulge his fancy in a grandiose manner. Slocum, on the other hand, became a cruiser mostly in desperation. His professional life had been destroyed, and he was shorebound and down on his luck when, in 1892, a fellow ship captain, perhaps as a joke, gave him a decrepit 36-foot Delaware oyster smack that had been left in a field to rot. With characteristic tenacity Slocum rebuilt the boat and, after a brief attempt to earn a living fishing her, set out on a protracted singlehanded cruise around the world. This voyage and Slocum’s book describing it, Sailing Alone Around the World, not only helped to legitimize “alternative” cruising, it also spread the seed of the cruising dream much farther than before. Indeed, Slocum’s book is still in print today and still works its magic in the minds of most cruising sailors.

Joshua Slocum aboard Spray

Sailplan of Spray

Lines of Spray

What perhaps is most significant about Spray is how anachronistic she was. Even at the time of her circumnavigation, which Slocum completed in 1898, she was in many respects completely obsolete. She was, by Slocum’s account, approximately 100 years old when he acquired her, and her hull form reflected this. Her shape tended toward the old “cod’s head and mackerel’s tail” school of naval architecture, with a fat entry, maximum beam at or a little forward of amidships, and a finer run aft on her waterline. She was wide (over 14 feet) with a relatively shoal draft (about 4 feet) and short ends–her waterline length (about 32 feet) was just 4 feet shy of her length overall. She was also immensely heavy for her size, displacing 24,000 pounds, and carried all her ballast in her bilges, with none at all in her keel.

Spray had almost nothing in common with modern turn-of-the-century yachts (a fact in which Slocum seemed to take great pleasure), but she served well enough as a cruiser. Indeed, her performance, given her particulars and the fact that she was sailed singlehanded, was extraordinary. Slocum reported top speeds on the order of 8 knots, and he routinely averaged 150 miles a day on passage–numbers more typical of 36-foot yachts built in the mid-20th century that weigh half as much. He also boasted of the boat’s ability to steer herself, but credit for this, and for the speeds achieved, must in fact go to Slocum himself. He was a master mariner who had the skill and nerve to drive a vessel hard and was an intuitive expert when it came to sail trim.

What is also significant about Spray is that, in spite of her putative obsolescence, her design is still considered viable today. Contemporary cruising boats that mimic her lines, most particularly steel hulls built to plans drawn by designer Bruce Roberts, though not exactly common, are not hard to find. Some devotees, in fact, still insist that Spray represents the “ultimate” cruising boat.

Example of a Bruce Roberts ketch based on Spray

What this really demonstrates is that–unlike a racing yacht, which succeeds only if it wins races–the worth of a cruising boat can be measured in any number of ways. One good reason, for example, why some traditional designs based on old workboats like Spray are still viable is that they yield lots of interior accommodation space, which is, for many cruisers, a key consideration. Other reasons for favoring such boats may include, as mentioned above, their affordability and availability, plus they are often extremely seaworthy. But perhaps their most powerful (and most subjective) attraction is their strong romantic appeal. Traditional boats tap directly into the zeitgeist of the cruising dream, and this unquestionably influenced the development of cruising boat design as cruising became more popular.

Of course, not all early small-boat cruisers were inclined to go sailing in old work boats. Many had the resources to commission the building of modest yachts and this led to a proliferation of specialized designs. As was the case with R.T. McMullen’s 42-footer Orion, which we mentioned last time, these were often unremarkable adaptations of mainstream yacht designs. It became common, however, for experienced amateur cruisers to commission idiosyncratic designs that reflected personal prejudices and preferences. Here again McMullen provides a useful example, as both Procyon and Perseus, his smaller purpose-built singlehanders, were unique vessels that must have seemed odd to mainstream yachtsmen of the time.

Some amateur cruisers acquired enough knowledge and expertise to become amateur designers as well. One of the first and most influential of these was Albert Strange, a British headmaster and art teacher born in 1855 who first started cruising the Thames estuary as a teenager in a converted workboat. As a member of the Humber Yawl Club, which was directly descended from one of John MacGregor’s canoe clubs, Strange’s design work followed a fascinating trajectory from small sailing canoes similar to those sailed by MacGregor to much larger double-ended deep-keeled vessels known as “canoe yawls.”

A Strange canoe-yawl under sail

Lines of a Strange canoe-yawl with overhanging stern

Strange did not invent the canoe yawl, but he is credited with inventing the elegant overhanging pointed canoe stern that initially distinguished his boats from others and was later widely copied. Among the many amateur cruiser/designers who followed in his wake were T. Harrison Butler, W. Maxwell Blake, Fred Fenger, and Maurice Griffiths. Although the work of such men is unique and identifiable, their boats on the whole tended to be conservative, featuring moderate proportions, full ballast keels, narrow to moderate beam, and relatively short ends.

Yet another intriguing wrinkle was the advent of cruisers who sought to build their own boats. For a certain sort of fellow the notion of constructing a boat was just as alluring as the prospect of sailing it. Also, of course, for those with the time and skills backyard building could be a more economical way to get afloat.

The most adventurous build-it-yourself cruisers worked without plans and made things up as they went along. Remarkably, this was yet another trail blazed by Joshua Slocum. Some years prior to his voyage in Spray, Slocum had owned and commanded a 138-foot trading bark, Aquidneck, that he lost on a sandbar in Brazil in 1887. To get his family home to the United States, he and his oldest son, Victor, built a bizarre 35-foot unballasted junk-rigged sampan (Slocum actually called it a canoe) that they christened Liberdade. Slocum and his wife and two children not only sailed this unlikely vessel more than 5,000 miles from Brazil to the U.S., they then lived aboard the boat and cruised it on the East Coast for nearly a year.

A vessel as eccentric as Liberdade did not immediately inspire imitations, but Slocum’s use of the Asian junk rig did anticipate such modern designers as Blondie Hasler, Tom Colvin, and Jay Benford, who installed junk rigs on both racing and cruising vessels. Liberdade also provided an important creative precedent, setting an example for future designers and sailors willing to think “outside the box.”

The backyard builders who had the biggest impact on the development of cruising boat design were those who wanted or needed plans to build to. To meet this demand, some designers started conceiving boats with simplified lines that were easy for amateurs to put together. Often such designs were published and marketed through the several boating magazines that sprouted up on both sides of the Atlantic.

One of the earliest and most significant was an American publication, The Rudder, founded in 1891 by a fiery small-boat evangelist named Thomas Fleming Day. Day believed strongly in the concept of backyard building–”No Boats, No Sport: All Hands Build Hulls” was a favorite slogan of his–and he published many build-it-yourself designs in his magazine. He also believed in practicing what he preached and in 1911 sailed one of these boats, a 26-foot yawl named Sea Bird, across the Atlantic from Rhode Island to Gibraltar with two companions as crew.

Sea Bird under sail

Drawing of Sea Bird

Sea Bird had a simple V-bottomed hull with a single hard chine on either side and was explicitly designed for ease of construction. Her plans specified two underwater configurations; she could be built either with a centerboard or with a deep keel supporting 700 pounds of ballast. She also reportedly carried about 1,000 pounds of internal ballast. With her low freeboard, Sea Bird may not have looked particularly seaworthy, but Day’s transatlantic voyage hushed many nay-sayers, while convincing others that Day himself most likely was a lunatic. Further support for the latter proposition came the following year when Day went transatlantic again, this time in a 36-foot powerboat carrying 1,200 gallons of gasoline.

Over the years, several hundred copies of Sea Bird were built by amateur cruisers. Among these was a larger sistership, a 34-foot boat named Islander built by Harry Pidgeon, a farm boy from Iowa, in a vacant lot in Los Angeles in 1917. Pidgeon, a self-taught sailor, completed a singlehanded circumnavigation in Islander in 1925, becoming only the second man (after Joshua Slocum) to perform this feat. He subsequently lived aboard for 16 years, made another circumnavigation, and was in the middle of a third (this time with his wife) when he finally lost Islander in a hurricane in the New Hebrides. Fortunately, both Pidgeon and his wife escaped with their lives.

NEXT: The Golden Age of the Cruiser-Racer