Power & Motoryacht

One of the things I thought I would miss most as a result of keeping our boat in the driveway was interacting with fellow boaters—the small talk about future boating plans, projects we’re working on and grousing about fuel prices. I needn’t worry for long; I quickly found out that my neighbors would swarm like ants to a fallen ice pop in summer whenever I was working aboard. I live on a quiet road and thought I knew most of my neighbors by name. Start bottom painting or waxing, however, and at least a few neighbors would stroll up, inspect my work and share their experiences on the water—sometimes on their own boats or friend’s boats. I was especially excited when one neighbor I didn’t know walked by and shouted, “Hey,…

On a train from Vancouver to Montreal are 60 tons of empty drinking bottles, laundry detergent containers, plastic bags, nettings and other abandoned vessels and tools that now presume the role of discards. To the naked eye, it merely looks like a bunch of washed-up trash, but without exaggeration, it’s probably the most important trash the world has ever seen. This heavy load of plastics is just one of many that nonprofit organization The Ocean Cleanup has planned to fish out of the North Pacific Ocean and ship across the world for recycling in an ongoing effort to clear what is known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Also called the Pacific Trash Vortex, it’s exactly as the name implies—a giant patch of garbage in the sea. Only it’s not some…

In our beautiful, small coastal city we have a downtown marina popular with visiting cruisers and fishermen, a restaurant and bar overlooking said marina which serves as the de facto town square, and the Sparkling Waters Yacht Club two blocks up the coastline. Standing between the yacht club and the marina restaurant is an eight-story condo building the locals refer to as the “high-rise.” This neighborhood is a wonderful place to be in the summer. You can imagine in this four-block portion of the downtown waterfront area that plenty of people who live in the high-rise also own boats in the marina, eat at the restaurant and socialize at the yacht club. The ingredients for a good time are all assembled in tidy order. We keep our convertible By Design in the…

Thanks to a new Starlink satellite system geared toward recreational vehicles, boaters are inching ever closer to affordable at-sea internet service with unlimited data. Starlink sits under the SpaceX umbrella and provides high-speed, low latency internet access via a growing web of low-Earth orbiting (LEO) satellites. When the system first debuted in 2020, the company targeted residential use, and coverage was limited as SpaceX expanded the network by sending up more satellites. Each user needed to set a fixed address, and the service only worked within a few miles of that address. Well, SpaceX has been launching 100 to 150 satellites into orbit each month, and the Starlink constellation is now 2,000 satellites strong. SpaceX ultimately plans to launch more than 30,000 satellites in total to provide high-speed internet around the…

Our first visit to Portland, Maine, was a one-night stop while traveling south from Nova Scotia. The next time we were cruising the Maine coast we stopped in Portland for four days. On our most recent New England adventure, we booked a stay at DiMillo’s marina in downtown Portland for two weeks. Are you sensing a theme here? It’s hard to get too much of Portland. In Old English, Portlanda meant “land surrounding a harbor.” It’s a minor distinction, you might say, but I see Portland as a “harbor surrounding land,” for the harbor met us first and introduced us to the city. Few harbors are as welcoming as Portland’s, which you access by threading your way through the outer islands. It is a pharologist’s dream, with lighthouses appearing on each…

Twenty-five feet is the size of your average garden hose or extension cord, or five park benches lined up side by side. Those 300 inches made a world of difference when I took in the view of the 85 resting beside its 60-foot sistership at the show. Everything about the 85 feels bigger and more substantial. Saying that a boat feels like a small superyacht is an oft-used cliché, but in the case of the 85, that sentiment rings true from the moment you step into the massive cockpit. “One of the key goals with the Grand Banks 85 was not just building one of the best performing 85-footers in the marketplace, but also one of the most spacious boats in the marketplace,” says Richards as we walk from the aft…