Cruising World

Southbound ON MEMORY LANE As the summer season tacks to fall projects and cooler-weather cruising up North, I’m sorely reminded, living here in the sweltering tropical clime of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, about just how much I miss those changing seasons. I grew up carving through the bewitching waters of coastal New England, and my fond recollections of those early sailing experiences have only grown stronger with time. The fall was always my favorite season, spawning a kaleidoscope of memories I still treasure, particularly at times when I’m breaking a South Florida sweat while stuck in neutral waiting for the next bridge opening. I remember the crisp Connecticut River sunrises, sitting cozily in the cockpit in some snug anchorage, inhaling the cool morning mist while warming my hands with a fresh cup of…

cruisingworld.com/thenoobfiles Bonus Features The New Charter Hotspot Planning your next adventure at sea? Our charter hub is your go-to guide for all things charter. This month, it gets a whole new look and feel, making the ultimate sailing vacation easier to plan than ever before. cruisingworld.com/charter Sailing Totem: Swimming With Sharks Sharing the water with sharks is a fact of life for any cruiser. Here’s how to enjoy it safely. cruisingworld.com/sailing-totem Newsletter Cruising World Weekly Don’t miss the latest from Cruising World. Sign up for our weekly email newsletter, and stay in the loop on our top headlines and current events. cruisingworld.com/newsletter Social Media Digital Voyage: Featuring Tor Johnson Join us on Facebook and Instagram (starting September 1) as we sail the globe on an exclusive digital journey through the lens of award-winning photographer Tor Johnson. facebook.com/cruisingworld; @cruisingworldmag cruisingworld.com Follow us on Instagram @cruisingworldmag Watch us on…

Lesley and I weren’t ready for launch season. The projects we’d started in March to upgrade Billy Pilgrim, our 1988 Passport 40, still weren’t finished on June 1. New plumbing for the head. New electric winch in the cockpit. New navigation instruments. New 12-volt charging system. We weren’t ready when shakedown season came. We’d aimed to spend August sailing Maine’s Casco and Penobscot bays, learning our new gear and breaking what we could break before we left New England waters. But the mid-July discovery of a hand-me-down roller furler inspired an entirely unforeseen boatyard project at Portland’s Maine Yacht Center: adapting our hank-on staysail to one we could set and douse from the cockpit. Sundry other one-last-things stretched our launch all the way out to Labor Day. The first cold northeasterlies…

The DIRTY LITTLE TRUTH About Bilges While I’ve almost never lived ashore, I have visited my wife’s mother’s house in Chicago, where she would send me scurrying to the basement to hastily retrieve odd, nearly forgotten household objects. Bilges are like that—we know they’re there, we stow stuff in them, and we seldom think about them. When we do think of them, it’s usually in a negative way: because they stink, are oily or have water leaking into them. Let’s start off with one central, indisputable fact: The bilges of a daysailer and a liveaboard vessel have little in common. Example: It is possible to keep a daysailer’s bilges sweet, but this is almost impossible aboard a vessel inhabited by Homo sapiens, a notoriously messy species. The problem starts with the largest organ…

A Superior FISH We’d just hit the jackpot. We were docked in Tobin Harbor on Lake Superior’s Isle Royale aboard Sasha, our Island Packet 40, when the bounty appeared. It came along with a park ranger, who’d just happened by to check on things. As we chatted amiably, he blurted, “Would you like some fresh fish?” He’d caught far more than he could eat that day. “Call me Rick,” he said with a grin. My husband, Radd, is a sailor, not a fisherman; he was thrilled to have any fish out of the lake. Of course, we gratefully accepted—and counted our blessings for having discovered this wonderful place. Our journey had been a long one. Florida is our home port, and we’d spent our cruising lives on various boats exploring the Bahamas and…

Bright and roomy down below and ready for business up on deck, the scrappy new Beneteau Oceanis 34.1 is a thoughtful model in a size range that often gets overlooked as builders and buyers go big (and bigger). Designed by Marc Lombard, with an interior by Nauta, the 34.1 is the latest addition to the seventh generation of Beneteau’s Oceanis line of cruisers. The 34.1 replaces the 35.1 in the French builder’s lineup, and offers a bit more volume forward in the owner’s stateroom than its predecessor did, thanks to a flared bow and hard chines that run stem to stern. The 34.1 that made its North American debut at the Miami International Boat Show in February was the two-stateroom, one-head version, which should appeal to sailors who don’t necessarily want a…