Cruising World May 2021

What’s not to like about a good birthday bash? The more festivities, the better, I say, which is just what the Herreshoff Marine Museum has planned for the remainder of 2021, its golden jubilee year. Located on the waterfront in Bristol, Rhode Island, on the site of the storied boatbuilding company that bears the family’s name, the museum has a number of events planned, including a Classic Yacht Rendezvous to run in conjunction with the annual Herreshoff Classic Yacht Regatta the last weekend in August, and a Jubilee Gala in late September. Several educational events are also planned, both in person and virtually, as COVID-19 restrictions allow, executive director Bill Lynn says. And up and down the New England coast, the museum plans to host a dozen or so celebrations in…

Idon’t remember much about our sail down the Baja coast in February 2009. This seems strange because it was five days and nights at sea, our first real passage aboard Kate, our Newport 41. The ship’s log says that we had a fresh 25- to 30-knot breeze for most of the trip. Thankfully, it was a downhill run, and the motion of the boat was comfortable but lively. My husband, Steve, who had much more experience than me, called it a sleigh ride. I thought it felt more like a rickety roller coaster. The days passed uneventfully, but my solo midnight watches were haunted by stories from my childhood. I saw sea monsters in the green phosphorescence of the large waves that periodically broke close enough to where I sat that…

Oyster World Rally With high demand resulting in a sold-out 2022-23 event, Oyster Yachts has announced that its fourth Oyster World Rally will depart Antigua on a 16-month circumnavigation on January 14, 2024. The rally provides a fully supported experience for any Oyster owner. For more information, visit oysteryachts.com/oyster-world-rally. Keep the Dink Safe When cruising, your dinghy is your car—and so much more! Here are some tips from the Sailing Totem crew to keep your dinghy from going on walkabout. “Hoisting a dinghy out of the water is probably the biggest deterrent to theft,” said Behan Gifford. “Davits make this easy. If you don’t have davits, lift it with a spinnaker halyard and secure amidships against the hull flush with deck level.” Also, lock up your tender at the boat or dock. “Whether the…

If you harbor dreams of Patagonian sailing, backcountry skiing, or Antarctic peak bagging, you’re likely familiar with Skip Novak’s Pelagic Expeditions (pelagic.co.uk), which offers highlatitude sailing adventures to charter guests. Novak is a veteran of four Whitbread Round the World Races and has spent the past several decades sailing high latitudes and taking charter guests to some of Earth’s wildest places aboard his Pelagic (54 feet, built in 1987) and Pelagic Australis (74 feet, built in 2003). He was recently involved with the build of Vinson of Antarctica, a Tony Castro-designed Pelagic 77 that was built out of bare aluminum by KM Yachtbuilders, in Makkum, the Netherlands, for owner Nicolás Ibáñez Scott, a Chilean entrepreneur and adventurer. The high-latitude adventure-sailing yacht was launched in February and is named after Mount…

James Baldwin’s voyaging-lifestyle philosophy—travel frugally, and take the time to reflect on and learn from every experience along the way—continues in this third book in his retrospective Distant Seas trilogy. This volume continues the saga begun in Bound for Distant Seas (2015) and The Next Distant Sea (2018). Readers rejoin James and Atom, his 28-foot Pearson Triton, in South Africa, and are swept along as he voyages across the South Atlantic to Brazil and the Caribbean, then homeward (with mixed feelings) to the United States. Baldwin is a calm, keen observer of places, people and events. His mini profiles of the sailing characters he meets along the way make the reader feel the cruising life, as do his descriptions of places explored and situations encountered. His acquired profession—boat repair and…

Nostalgia is welcome now when the pandemic makes most of us long to go cruising—coastal, ocean crossing, even an afternoon sail to join friends inside a cruiser bar in a nearby harbor. Into this longing for the recent past drops a new book by Mike Jacker, Taken by the Wind: Memoir of a Sailor’s Voyage in a Bygone Era. In 1976, after college graduation, he and a couple of friends set out to cruise the South Pacific. Their story is both a timeless one of young people seeking adventure before taking up careers and a look back at a kind of cruising that has all but disappeared. By today’s standards, the Cal 30 they could afford is undersize for three people and not a suitable design (single lifelines!) even for the…