Índex per November/December 2023 a PassageMaker

Recently, a friend complained that a deal went sideways to sell his 19-year-old, outboard-powered cruiser. A survey revealed internal corrosion in the exhaust leg of the motor. It was a low-hour boat that showed well, but this problem would need repairing, or the boat would have to stay tied to the dock. The deal was saved with the needed engine work, but my friend’s inflated sense of his beloved boat’s value was destroyed. Boats are durable goods. A well-maintained boat will retain value, but its net worth hinges on the owner’s attention to detail. Two boats with similar accommodations, engine power and accessories may start out worth about the same, but their location, how they age, their hours of use and their maintenance schedules will be deciding factors during a…

Active survey days can run long on time. However, if you can plan to set aside 30 minutes to an hour at the end, it is an ideal time to review the priority issues that your surveyor discovered. Combing through any trawler from bow to stern to test, operate and inspect systems and equipment takes a full day or more. Surveyors and diesel mechanics can do a better job if they are not interrupted, and they simply can’t do their job if they stop and show you each time they notice a potential issue. Surveyors take photos, write notes and generally poke, probe and observe just about everything from the moment they step on board. In our experience, the best surveyors prefer to compile all of the details in their…

Still waters may run deep, but deep waters are definitely not always still. The rolling motion of the ocean can make life aboard a seagoing vessel less than comfortable. Hence the thriving industry for companies trying to calm a rolling boat. For the past 30 years, hydraulic active-fin stabilizers have been the choice of many builders of recreational trawlers and large motoryachts, and justifiably so, as they successfully work on most boats. In the late aughts, the recreational-yacht industry welcomed new players—including Seakeeper and Mitsubishi—into the market with advancement in gyrostabilizers. The gyros offered small- to medium-size boats effective stability, and came with the benefit of zero-speed stability, something active fins didn’t do particularly well. Boatbuilders and owners are now welcoming another bilizer technology, already successful in Europe and…

When debating future concepts with our team, we always start with an open discussion. It may kick off with a story that a junior designer has heard or read, a series of iPhone photos of a striking boat design, or an architectural detail that caught someone’s eye. Often, modern materials and technical developments are threads that run throughout our debates. These vibrant discussions keep us sharp before we render into a design spiral. In this first phase, we start by sketching various items based on our conversations. The sketches then become a subject of debate again, with some destined for the refuse heap and others deemed well worthy of sharing. A recent one that rose to the top is based on the classic Chesapeake deadrise. The vessel has earned its…

The lockmaster was getting a little impatient with the motoryacht in front of us, as its sole occupant was trying to handle the bow and stern lines by himself. My wife, Dori, and I were tied behind him in our vessel, and we were also a little surprised to see a nearly 50-foot boat being single-handed. The rest of the day, we discussed whether we thought it was safe to handle a boat of this size by yourself. I can speak from personal experience that regardless of how well you’ve prepared, or how capable you are, when you’re out on the water, you have to expect the unexpected. It could start with a mechanical issue—say, a blocked thru-hull causing an engine to overheat, or an engine belt breaking, or a…

It was the sort of darkness where it’s hard to discern the boundary between ocean and sky. The fog didn’t help. It condensed on everything, requiring the intermittent hum of the wipers, a metronome for monotony. Daylight was coming, but so was the ice. We had seen a few larger icebergs on the radar. Just a day earlier, the area we were now traversing appeared to be impassable on the Danish ice charts. Sea ice from farther north up the Greenland coast was breaking apart and being sucked south in nearsolid floes by the East Greenland Current. We had departed Iceland two days back, making use of a narrow weather window in July between Greenland and Iceland. The weeklong stretch of fog and cloud cover had made all the recent…

The city of Trieste has existed in some form or another for millennia. Perched atop forested limestone outcroppings in northeastern Italy, it is the centerpiece of the Gulf of Trieste on the Adriatic Sea. Just a few miles from the Slovenian border, 15 miles from Croatia and 50 miles from southern Austria, it’s a true cultural crossroads. The Romans built a wondrous walled city here, and an amphitheater for more than 3,000 spectators. The Austro-Hungarian Hapsburgs built a magnificent, canal-served marketplace and port city with a classic seafront promenade. The city became part of Italy in 1954, and, just a few months ago, served as the back-drop for Prestige Yachts to unveil the latest powercat in its M Series line, the M8. Prestige’s parent company, Groupe Beneteau, had Hull No.…

Fans of long-distance passagemaking know the brand name Doggersbank well. Ever since Dick Boon, founder of the Dutch design firm Vripack, drew the first 35-foot version back in 1968, Doggersbank boats have been seen cruising pretty much every corner of the planet, from the Arctic Circle to Antarctica and lots of remote destinations in between. Now, Altena Shipyard in the Netherlands has started construction on what will be the biggest owner-operated Doggersbank, and the first one with a single-engine PTO/PTI hybrid propulsion system. It’s a 77-foot Offshore that was commissioned by an experienced yachtsman from the Pacific North “It’s one of life’s great experiences if you have the means to do that,” says John Clayman of Seaton Yachts, which is Vripack’s Doggersbank partner for the Americas. “This boat has been…

Wouldn’t it be great if you could look at a battery and tell how many amps it was holding at any point in time? Unlike a fuel or water tank, a battery has no mechanical sender that can float up and down, and then convert the current volume to a readable number. With so much riding on the state of charge of our batteries, how are we supposed to guess how full they are? Let’s look at our options. TANKS OF AMPS Batteries are tanks, of a sort. Inside the plastic box are cathodes and anodes immersed in an electrolyte that facilitates the transfer of electrons. But we can’t see electrons or stored energy. That’s where meters come in. In the most rudimentary sense, a voltage meter can tell the…

An acquaintance was raving recently about her summer holiday in Finland’s Turku archipelago. She relished the swims in cold, gin-clear waters, quirky food, long days of sunshine, and star-filled, ink-black nights. Days were spent lounging at mökkis, which are summer cottages as vital to Finnish culture as saunas, in which she partook daily. The reason she was telling me all this was her newfound love of the rugged Scandinavian boats that are the primary means of transport for vacationers. I’m a fan as well, especially after the time I spent aboard flagship models by Sargo and Targa, two brands that are becoming better known to stateside boaters. These builders have similar origin stories and share decades of success in Finland, each with continued ownership through generations of the same family.…

My wife reminds me regularly that I have too many bad habits. Mea culpa. They are, in order: boats, cars and planes. All of them have devotees who discuss endlessly what they’ve had and, perhaps more important, what they wish they’d had. Or may still get. Pilots have hangars. Car junkies have garages (or cars-and-coffee gatherings). But boating people? We have “wishful marinas.” After a day on the water, skippers and crews gather in someone’s cockpit to quaff a beer and talk about their dream boats. I will share with you some of the boats that fill my mental marina, with several caveats. First, I must never have owned them. Second, they must be in perfect repair; we’re not talking fixer-uppers here, but turnkey. Third, they must be cool for…