Table of contents for July 2018 in Soundings

Fred Karash says that, right from the start, the whole thing felt like a shakedown. He and four friends were cruising aboard his 23-foot boat on Lake Erie in May 2016 when he saw lights swirling and a Pennsylvania Fish & Boat Commission patrol vessel approaching. “They said, ‘Disengage your boat. We’re going to come aboard and do a safety check,’” the 38-year-old Karash recalls. “I said, ‘I don’t need one,’ and they said, ‘Get ready for us to tie off and come aboard.’ So I complied. I didn’t feel that I had much of a choice.” Karash says he remembers at least three waterways conservation officers being there. He says one straddled the two boats while another came aboard and asked him to turn on his blowers and open…

SEALINE C430 Today’s sport coupes, express cruisers and crossovers dish up luxury, comfort and performance for boaters with a wide range of on-the-water interests. The boats have become more stylish, too. During the past decade, thanks to design influences from Europe, we no longer see coupes or express cruisers with multi-tier decks or high-sided, cramped designs. Replacing them are eye-catching models with loads of interior space, intelligent deck designs and inspiring performance. Crossovers, which are also called sportsboats, day-boats or sport-utility boats, have also evolved. These designs offer a platform for cruising, fishing, scuba diving, hopping around to waterfront bars and restaurants, entertaining guests, or all of the above. Their utilitarian nature allows boaters to use them and then simply hose them off at the end of the day. Here…

Anyone who’s driven down into the town of Watch Hill, Rhode Island, and along the stretch of harborfront knows the scene. Beyond a portion of grass, the bulkhead gives way to Watch Hill harbor and its fleet, one of New England’s most picturesque boating scenes. That’s where Leif Nilsson set up his easel and went to work, creating Watch Hill Harbor from the Lawn, a 24-by-36-inch oil painting. “I commuted to Watch Hill in the summer of 2012 and passed this view every day,” he says. “The experience led to a series of paintings from the lawn.” Nilsson is a plein air artist, working outdoors, directly from life. When he comes upon a scene that inspires, he sets up his easel and puts the paint to the canvas, right from…

SPECIFICATIONS LOA: 50 feet • BEAM: 15 feet, 1 inch • WEIGHT: 42,000 pounds • DRAFT: 3 feet, 10 inches • HULL TYPE: modified-vee • POWER: twin 600-hp Volvo Penta D8 diesels with IPS800 pod drives • SPEED: 34.5 knots top, 28.2 knots cruise • TANKAGE: 555 gallons fuel, 106 gallons water, 40 gallons waste • PRICE: $1.3 million • CONTACT: Riviera, Coomera, Australia, +61 5502 5555. riviera.com.au The Riviera 4800 Sport Yacht made its North American debut in April at the Newport Boat Show in Newport Beach, California, following its mid-2016 world debut in the builder’s home waters of Australia. The boat has a two-stateroom layout — the owner’s stateroom with a queen bed in the bow and an amidships guest stateroom with three single berths, two of which…

In mid-April, President Trump said he was planning to remove summertime Environmental Protection Agency regulations and allow the sale of E15 gasoline — made with 15 percent ethanol — year-round. The move drew immediate concern from BoatUS, which has long said that ethanol can harm marine engines, decrease fuel efficiency and increase fuel costs for boaters. Allowing E15 to be sold year-round, the group says, would only add to existing fuel-supply problems that boaters face. “We think it increases the likelihood that we’re going to have misfueling in boats,” David Kennedy, BoatUS government affairs manager, told Soundings. “For a lot of people, you’re going to the lake. You’ve got the boat, the kids, the dog, all the things going on, and you’re pulling in to fuel up your boat. We’re…

Some people feel born and bred to do a job, but for Cindy Purcell hers is also a labor of love. At age two she began accompanying her father, Kenneth Archibald, to the Huckins family boat yard, which her grandfather, Frank Pembroke Huckins, had founded in 1928. She was encouraged to play in the yard, and by age 10 she had her own boat, joined her father on sea trials and learned everything she could about boats, boat building, yard operations and management. Then along came Buddy Purcell. They married and moved to Fairbanks, Alaska. But in 1970 they returned to Jacksonville, Florida, where Cindy would earn her stripes in the Huckins stock room. A year later, Buddy, who was working for a metallurgical engineering firm, joined Huckins in the…

At any given time, researchers at Allied Whale — a marine mammal laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine — are likely to be away from their small offices and instead somewhere in the Southern Ocean. Or perhaps on a small, rocky island 20 miles out in the Gulf of Maine. Or zipping offshore in a RIB to tie a line on a dead whale in preparation for towing it to shore. They may be rescuing a seal pup abandoned on a rocky ledge. They might also be photographing and cataloging humpback whales and right whales and all sorts of other whales, teaching citizen scientists how to recognize whales by their markings, or flying off to international marine mammal conferences. It’s possible they are facilitating esoteric student research projects, like setting passive-acoustic…

The world’s most common big batteries are called flooded or wet cell, as they have enough liquid acid to cover the battery plates. The electrolyte is a diluted sulphuric acid, and the plates are a form of lead suspended in a grid, with positive and negative plates close to each other. By using thinner plates, and adding more of them to the battery, the additional surface area allows the electrochemical reaction to occur at an increased rate. Frequently, thin-plate batteries are used for cranking an engine and more robust, thicker-plate batteries are used as a deep-cycling house bank (deep discharge can damage thinner plates). This older technology has charging limitations, makes it less desirable in certain applications and requires that batteries are stored and secured upright so electrolyte will not…

Westerbeke Genset Westerbeke’s 29.0 EGED marine diesel generator set (rated 29 kW at 60 Hz and 23 kW at 50 Hz) meets Environmental Protection Agency emissions requirements. Powered by a 3.3-liter, four-cylinder engine that runs at 1800 or 1500 rpm, the 29.0 EGED uses electronic voltage regulation to reduce deviation. Shutdowns protect the engine from low oil pressure and high exhaust and coolant temperatures. The 29.0 EGED also has an optional Sound Guard SST with a stainless steel base and frame. $29,850. Westerbeke Corp., Taunton, Massachusetts, (508) 823-7677. westerbeke.com Relief from Seasickness The Reliefband 2.0 is a drug-free way to control the nausea caused by motion sickness, virtual-reality activities, chemotherapy and morning sickness. It does so via Neurowave technology, which emits programmed pulses. These pulses have specific waveforms, frequency and…

Yo, Duuuude! Get Your Surfboard A new meteorological buoy in the Southern Ocean may have recorded the largest wave — 78 feet tall — ever measured in the Southern Hemisphere. It may also have failed to record an even bigger one. We’ll never know for sure because the buoy is not a full-time employee. It’s solar-powered, so it needs to conserve its energy. It works only 20 minutes per three hours, transmits its data via satellite, and then takes the next two-and-a-half hours off. Not a bad gig, if you don’t mind rough weather. Hinckley recently took the wraps off its Sou’wester 53, a carbon-epoxy pilothouse sailboat that Tripp Design Naval Architecture drew for cruising families. It is the first production sailboat from the builder since the Bermuda 50 in…

HISTORIC WINDJAMMING OPPORTUNITY Victory Chimes, the only known surviving example of a Chesapeake Ram schooner, holds a USCG Certificate of Inspection for 50 passengers and has been sailing the Maine coast for charter since 1990. The 132-foot, three-master has 21 passenger cabins and is offered for sale at $650,000. Honored by the National Park Service as a “National Historic Landmark” and featured on the State of Maine quarter, she was once owned by Domino’s Pizza, whose owner completely restored her and is credited with saving the vessel in the late 1980s. The ship has a beautiful full galley, but surprisingly, no dedicated pizza oven. northropandjohnson.com 4.5 Number of dollars, in trillions, in economic activity that occur annually on our nation’s waterways, according to a 2017 United States Coast Guard report.…

Back in the day, as yachtsmen in northern waters sat out the long winters, they thought about boats to race and cruise. Many a new design has come from such leather-chair-and-fireside musings. The Rhodes 27 was one of them. Inspired by members of the Fishers Island Yacht Club in New York, the sloop came off designer Phil Rhodes’ drawing board, onto the lofting floor at Henry Nevins’ yard on City Island, New York, and out into the waters of eastern Long Island Sound in 1939. A quarter-century later, the racer/cruiser was still in production in the United States while German builder Abeking and Rasmussen was turning Rhodes 27s out for an appreciative European audience. The original design was 27 feet on the waterline and almost 40 feet length overall. The…

SPECIFICATIONS LOA: 52 feet, 9 inches Beam: 17 feet, 5 inches Displacement: 68,000 pounds Tankage: 1,240 gallons fuel, 400 gallons water Power: single 231-bhp John Deere 6068AFM85 diesel, or twin 125-bhp John Deere 4045TF M85 diesels Speed: 9.4 knots top, 8 knots cruise Price: $1,549,000 (base; custom price on request) Contact: Kadey-Krogen Yachts, Stuart, Florida, (772) 286-0171. kadeykrogen.com The day was glorious by any standards but it was early February and anything short of a blizzard would have thrilled the winter-weary crew that had just cast off for Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Mother Nature did a lot better than that, taking pity on our frigid bones and pallid complexions by stirring hot sunshine with a soft onshore breeze. At 07:15 we threw off the lines and Larry steered us toward the…

Wrecks As Relics Packed with powerful photographs of shipwrecks from all over the world, Stefano Banazzo’s 144-page Wrecks: The Memory Of The Sea commemorates these ships’ histories and the sailors who ran them. Banazzo describes shipwrecks as “The evidence of men who have been cornerstones of economic, social and maritime history,” and connects their personal stories and tragedies through the relics he photographs. The photos bring the ships to life for Banazzo, who observes “The wrecks seem to be miraculously ready to sail again …” ($32, Skira) To Serve, Preserve And Conserve Ben Emory spent a lifetime exploring Maine’s extraordinary seascapes on a variety of watercraft. A conservationist, preservationist and boater, Emory’s book, Sailor For The Wild: On Maine, Conservation and Boats, shines a light on Maine’s gorgeous ocean environments…