Índex per September 2018 a SAIL

The Swan 48 Isbjörn lies at anchor in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago as a female polar bear and her cub forage for food. Isbjörn—which means “polar bear” in Swedish—was on an expedition sail into Arctic waters, skippered by photographer Schell and his wife, Mia Karlsson. They managed to get close enough to the two bears in their dinghy to watch them feast on an old whale carcass for more than an hour. Schell was moved by the experience: “To say it was an emotional experience would be an understatement… To be that close to nature, to the symbol of thr Arctic itself… there’s no words.” As for the bears, they paid the crew no attention whatsoever, says Schell.…

If you were in Gotland, a popular island vacation destination off the coast of Sweden, on the morning of July 3, your holiday might have been interrupted by a startling sight: a tiny island of trash approaching shore with people aboard. It was, in fact, a sailboat made from plastic waste, ghost nets and drift wood collected from the Baltic Sea. The boat, aptly named Trash-Tiki, had made a 90-mile open water crossing from Trosa on the mainland of Sweden to the island. The crew of three, Sören Kjellqvist, Glenn Mattsing and Joakim Odelberg, set out with the aim of raising awareness about the harmful impact of trash in our oceans. “Last summer me and Sören rowed across the Barents Sea and landed on Björnön, one of the world’s most…

The most recent edition of the Volvo Ocean Race ended with one of the most exciting finishes in the race’s long history. It all came down to the last few hours of the final leg of the race from Gothenburg, Sweden, to The Hague when the three leading teams—Spain’s Mapfre, China’s Dongfeng and Team Brunel of the Netherlands—all stood an equal chance of taking home the big prize. The drama played out in slow motion as a global audience sat glued to the online race tracker watching and waiting to see who would blink. In the end, leg leader Mapfre found itself in an impossible position when the two other boats split to go to either side of a large traffic separation zone just off the Dutch coast. Mapfre had…

Like many, I often spend my sailing holidays far away from home, assuming that real adventure requires some kind of international flight. More and more, though, I’m learning that some of the best sailing vacations can be found right in my own back yard. In this spirit, I skipped my usual Caribbean cruising grounds, and a friend and I chartered a beautiful 2016 Jeanneau 349 from the Great Lakes Sailing Company in Traverse City, Michigan. The GLSC is exactly what I like in a charter company, an owner-operated outfit with good boats and great personal service. (The owner even let me borrow an old pickup to provision, though I wouldn’t always count on that!) Traverse City is a great place to base your adventure. There’s a convenient regional airport with…

In-mast furling systems have come a long way. Forget the hollow-leeched, baggy triangles we first saw decades ago; a well-specced modern in-mast system can offer more sail area than a traditional slabreefed mainsail, so the performance gap has narrowed significantly. Nevertheless, just about every sailor has heard a horror story about in-mast furling, and many are swift to condemn these furlers without ever having actually used one. Yes, in-mast furling can have its issues, but most of these are caused by operator error. We live in an age where we expect everything to just work. Let off one line, pull another and the mainsail should disappear like the money from your wallet when you take kids out for an ice cream. And when it binds or jams, it can’t possibly…

Some of the greatest sailing voyages are those that are undertaken quietly, without publicity and for no reason other than that they are there to be accomplished. One such ended in June when Jerome Rand sailed his Westsail 32, Mighty Sparrow, into the New England port of Gloucester to a rousing welcome from a small band of friends and family. Sporting an impressive set of whiskers grown en route, the Petosky, Michigan native made no secret of his happiness to be ashore once again. Rand’s wobbly steps onto the Gloucester dock were his first on a stable surface in 271 days. Since leaving Gloucester on October 3 last year he had sailed 29,807 miles, nonstop and alone. His journey took him south of the five southernmost capes—Chile’s Cape Horn, South…

If you are cruising, you need at least two anchors on board for the simple reason that you must have a backup. Imagine having to slip your anchor on a stormy night with other boats dragging down on yours, or having your rope rode severed by some unseen underwater obstacle, setting you adrift. If not up the creek without a paddle, you’d be on the beach without an anchor. The backup anchor is usually called the kedge, after the verb meaning to move a ship in a desired direction by means of a small anchor. A kedge is not merely a backup to be held in reserve for emergencies, though; it can be used in a number of ways as part of your everyday cruising armory. Any kind of anchor…

For the past few years I have been part of a project experimenting with massively powerful alternator-type devices; the one I have now will generate up to 9 kilowatts (kW). To put this in perspective, that’s 750 amps at 12 volts! There’s not a lot of point in having this kind of generating capability if there is nowhere to dump and store the energy, so the corollary to the generating testing has been battery testing. The Holy Grail for which we have been searching is a system capable of generating and storing, during normal propulsion engine run times, sufficient energy to run the house systems for 24 or more hours. In our case, normal engine run times would be the time it takes me to set or pull up the…

Our first encounter with a big squall was sailing from San Diego to Ensenada, Mexico. We left at 0200 to ensure we’d get into Ensenada before our 1300 haulout time. The National Weather Service had forecast consistent 15-20 knot winds from the northwest, which was perfect for the 60-mile run down the coast. We hoisted sails as soon as we were out of the San Diego Harbor channel, keeping a reef in the mainsail as is our policy for night sailing. The wind was exactly as predicted, and we cruised across the border under a moonless sky. A short while later, as we were admiring the lights of Tijuana, we noticed the wind lessening, then backing to the west. “That’s weird,” I thought as I moved to trim the sails.…

So you graduated from navigation class where you practiced dead reckoning, doubling the angle on the bow and maybe even celestial nav, and you now feel well prepared for your first charter trip. Well, you won’t be doing any of that on vacation—not past the first day, anyway. Most charter boats today have chartplotters near the helm, and there’s a briefing before you cast off, so chartering isn’t as salty as it used to be. I’m not saying that navigating while on vacation should ever be haphazard, but there are some shortcuts that will get you through the vast majority of charter cruising grounds without calculators, calipers or even a roller plotter. 1 The Must-Dos: There are a few must-dos even on vacation. Do review the charts of the whole…

Just as all roads once led to Rome, many sailors now believe that all working lines should lead to the cockpit. The result, unfortunately, is often a pile of multi-colored spaghetti that is hard to manage and can actually make it harder to sail your boat. On many modern sailboats almost every line coming off the mast or deck forward of the cockpit is led aft through blocks and organizers to a battery of rope clutches arrayed around two winches on either side of the companionway under the cockpit dodger. On race boats this may not be too troublesome. The dodger is usually removed so the companionway winches are easy to access and grind, and the tails of all active lines are simply flung down the companionway into the main…