As active seasonal ­cruisers seeking winter warmth, usually in the Bahamas, my husband, Radd, and I have spent many winter holidays aboard our Island Packet 40, Sasha, far away from family and friends back home. We do miss the gatherings and traditions, but no matter where we are, we try to embrace new ways of celebrating—joining local celebrations or attending local services—while preserving a few tried-and-true traditions from our land life. 

Nassau, on New Providence Island in the Bahamas, was the backdrop for one of our most memorable holidays. We arrived a few days before Christmas, got settled, and then set out to explore. That day’s mission was to visit the Bacardi distillery.

In all our cruising ­destinations, when venturing beyond walking distance of our harbor, we always use whatever public transportation is available (if any). Yes, we’re frugal cruisers, but public transport is a great way to interact with local people and absorb the culture. It’s always far more interesting than taking a taxi.

In Nassau, we were lucky: There’s an extensive bus system. New Providence is a fairly large island; if you want to head away from Nassau harbor and the downtown area to the island’s south side (“over the hill,” as the locals say), you must hail a taxi, get a ride or take the bus. 

After ensuring that we were going in the right direction, we asked our friendly bus driver if the Bacardi distillery was on the route. 

“No,” he replied, with a ­sorrowful head shake. Then, his face lit up with a wide smile. “But I’ll take you there.”

And away we went, the only two riders on the bus.

Once we got “over the hill,” we discovered a whole different world: homes with yards, small shopping centers, and no tourists. Eventually, we were out in the country. The driver took us right to the distillery’s entrance. We expressed our heartfelt thanks, and then he asked, “What time do you want me to pick you up?” 

The friendliness and ­courtesy of the Bahamian people are astounding.

After a pleasant tour and, of course, a rum tasting, we emerged with several bottles of Bacardi to restock our near-empty liquor locker on board. Sure enough, our new friend retrieved us at the ­appointed hour, and back “over the hill” we went.

Back on the boat, feeling festive, I formulated a plan. For as long as I can remember, my mom made special cookies for Christmas Eve. They were moist and creamy, with a hint of peanut butter perfectly ­complemented by chocolate centers. She always used packaged Brach’s Chocolate Stars, so we called them Star Cookies.

Of course, she passed down the recipe, one she’d modified through trial and error. I began to gather ingredients on the boat and realized that I had everything but the chocolate stars. It didn’t matter: The cookies are delicious with any small, solid-chocolate candy pieces for the centers. You can use dark chocolate, milk chocolate, even white chocolate.

When Christmas Eve arrived, we rode the city bus again, this time to attend a holiday service at the magnificent 300-year-old Christ Church Cathedral, a Nassau landmark. In yet another demonstration of Bahamian courtesy, a different driver apologized profusely for not being able to take us directly there but promised he’d get us within a short walk. We both wore wide smiles as easy-­listening Christmas carols blared out of the bus speakers. 

Late that night, back aboard Sasha, we feasted on the cookies, along with eggnog spiced with fresh nutmeg and a healthy shot of our recently acquired rum. Turns out it’s possible to be home for the holidays after all.

Star Cookies (yields 30 cookies)

Ingredients:

• 1¾ cups flour
• 1 tsp. baking soda
• ½ tsp. salt
• ¾ cup butter
• ¾ cup creamy peanut butter
• ½ cup sugar plus ½ cup more for rolling 
• ½ cup brown sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp. vanilla
• About 30 small chocolate pieces
• Powdered sugar, for dusting (optional)

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. Sift together flour, baking soda and salt. Set aside. 

Cream together butter, peanut butter, ½ cup sugar and ½ cup brown sugar. Add egg and vanilla. Beat well, then mix until consistency is like dough. (It will be slightly wet.) 

Line a cookie sheet with baking paper. With your hands, form the dough into 1½-inch balls (about the size of a ping pong ball), and roll each ball in the remaining ½ cup sugar. Place about 2 inches apart on cookie sheet. 

Bake for 8 minutes. Remove from the oven, place a chocolate piece on each cookie, and press firmly. Return the cookies to the oven and bake for 2 to 5 more minutes, or until the cookies are golden-brown and set. 

Let the cookies cool, and then sprinkle them with powdered sugar, especially if you miss snow. 

Prep time: 1 hour
Difficulty: Medium
Can be made: at anchor

Cook’s Note: 

Use a 1-tablespoon measuring spoon to scoop out raw cookie dough, then roll to shape into balls. A heaping tablespoon makes a perfect-size dough ball.

Do you have a favorite boat recipe? Send it to us for possible inclusion in Sailor & Galley. Tell us why it’s a favorite, and add a short description of your boat and where you cruise. Send it, along with high-resolution digital photos of you aboard your boat, to sailorandgalley@cruisingworld.com.

The post Sailor & Galley: Home for the Holidays appeared first on Cruising World.

I’m no Ernest Shackleton. I live in Hawaii, and I love the warm weather and clear blue waters of the tropics. Having done a little high-latitude sailing, I have to admit that freezing weather is not my favorite. My boat doesn’t even have a heater.

Yet here I was with Tracy, a surfing friend from Hawaii, ripping down Puget Sound at 12 knots under spinnaker, in the dead of winter. I had on about 10 layers, two puffy jackets, gloves, boots and a hat. I also had a huge smile on my face.

This was shaping up to be an ideal adventure, filled with solitude and unexpected experiences. It was also some of the best sailing I’d done on my Jeanneau 509, Kāholo. And it had all started with simple necessity: I had to move the boat to get new canvas.

In 2021, I had sailed ­new-to-me Kāholo 5,000 miles, across the Atlantic and the length of the Caribbean, from Portugal to Panama. While soaking under the torrential rains of Panama, I realized I definitely needed new canvas. Once we got to the Pacific Northwest, I learned that Iverson’s Canvas in Olympia, Washington, had a yearslong waiting list. And its team would not travel to your boat. Like the Soup Nazi in Seinfeld said, “No soup for you!” Unless you were ­prepared to travel.

Olympia is on the South Sound near Tacoma, 80 miles south of my winter berth in La Conner, near the San Juan Islands. Although I managed to secure a spot on Iverson’s busy schedule, the only date its team could do the work was in mid-February, the coldest month of the year.

Well aware of the shifting weather systems in Puget Sound, I stacked things in my favor by leaving plenty of time to choose a weather window. As luck would have it, a high-­pressure system was set to fill in, bringing a favorable, but very cold, northerly wind. To get ready for the next day’s northerlies, Tracy and I made a short sail out to the historic town of Coupeville on Whidbey Island, where we spent time in a warm pub with the colorful local crowd that had replaced the summer tourists. Well-fortified against the cold, we paddled back out to lonesome Kāholo, the only anchor light in the anchorage.

Leaving Coupeville early, we had a serene reach south in calm water, all alone, jibing back and forth across Possession Sound under an asymmetrical spinnaker. It was challenging sailing in shifting winds, amid evergreen-­covered islands down Whidbey, the second-longest island in the United States, after New York’s Long Island.

The wind began to build as we neared the bottom of Whidbey. The helm felt lively. Somewhere around freezing, the wind sent a chill right through me. Adding another puffy jacket at the helm, I was quite comfortable but looked like the Michelin Man.

We blew right past the mooring I’d had in mind for the end of the short winter day, not to mention the alternate destinations I’d marked off in case the weather or the gear failed to cooperate. This was no ordinary sail, and we were having too much fun. We continued south toward Seattle.

Passing the southern tip of Whidbey Island, we sailed into the comparatively open water of Admiralty Inlet. Both the seas and the wind began to build. Now we were reaching at 12 knots with more than 20 knots of apparent wind. This was the upper limit for the spinnaker. The boat was ­handling well, but I could feel the rudder loading up as the boat leapt through the following seas. Rounding up in this wind with the spinnaker would mean taking it down in pieces. Breaking seas to windward alerted me that the wind was still building in the exposed waters of Admiralty Inlet. As the saying goes, any fool can put up a sail, but it takes a sailor to know when to take one down—and I’d ­apparently left it a bit late.

“Tracy!” I called out. “We need to get that spinnaker down. Now!” 

As Tracy hustled forward, I brought the boat downwind to hide the spinnaker behind the main. Tracy tried to douse the sail, but the sock refused to come down. The spinnaker sock lines had become tangled after so many jibes. I managed to balance the boat on a deep reach, with the seas slewing her around and the spinnaker flailing behind the main. I set the autopilot, praying we wouldn’t wrap the sail around the forestay, and jumped forward to help. We managed to untangle the lines while the autopilot miraculously kept us safely off the wind. The sock ­finally slid over the unruly beast and we dropped the sail to the deck with a sigh of relief. After that battle, we were no longer cold. The wind increased to the point to where the working jib was now plenty of sail, and we surfed south to Port Blakely, just across Puget Sound from Seattle on Bainbridge Island.

We arrived as the sun set and the lights of Seattle came alive in a purple sky. We could see the huge marinas of Elliott and Shilshole bays, housing thousands of boats. Yet we were alone, swinging at anchor in a quiet cove at the end of a perfect weekend sailing day. Finally, one other sailboat joined us: a singlehander on his 30-foot Wauquiez. 

With the setting sun, temperatures dipped well below freezing. Luckily, we had thick down comforters on the bunks to keep us warm. In the morning, I found water pooling on the floorboards, something no captain wants to see. Assuming we had a freshwater leak in one of the pressurized lines, I pulled off panels to reveal the hullsides. They were running with water. In freezing temperatures, comparatively warm moist air inside the cabin condenses on the cold hull of the boat “like a cold can of soda on a hot day,” as one sailor described it. I immediately invested in a dehumidifier for use at the dock. The proper solution while underway would, of course, be a diesel heating system. 

The northerlies were still blowing the next day, and we raised the spinnaker again, doing an outside jibe back and forth down serpentine Colvos Passage to Gig Harbor. For an outside jibe, I bring the boat directly downwind, jibe the main to put the boat wing on wing, and then completely release the working spinnaker sheet, letting the spinnaker flag in front of the boat. I then turn the boat through the wind, onto the new tack, and haul in the leeward spinnaker sheet, which is led around the bow on the outside. I can do this singlehanded, and it works like a charm as long as the sheets don’t get snagged on anything. Sadly, they often do, which requires a trip to the foredeck to unsnag them.

Gig Harbor was where we’d planned to meet the team from Iverson’s Canvas. A lively harbor town shadowed by Mount Rainier—with several marinas, a fishing fleet, a strong paddling scene, and lots of maritime history—Gig Harbor was named in the 1800s for Capt. Wilson’s gig, or rowboat, brought into the narrow entrance for shelter. The town is home to Gig Harbor Boat Works, which builds traditional gigs from modern materials.

It was amazing to watch Kyle and Mike, two guys from Iverson’s. They installed custom, large-diameter stainless, and patterned the entire dodger and Bimini top with plastic sheeting, all in a day. They said it would be two weeks for me to receive the dodger and Bimini top, but they were back a day early. The new dodger transformed the cockpit, with better visibility and clear windows. It felt as though I’d been upgraded to an ocean-view home after cowering under an old tent for years. It wasn’t cheap, but it was money well spent.

As luck would have it, sailing north back up Puget Sound was also a downwind run. Southeasterlies are quite common in winter, often associated with the approach of a low-pressure system. This was exactly the case I encountered: An approaching low was sending me 15-knot southeasterlies. I jibed back and forth up the sound, this time singlehanding because Tracy had flown back to Hawaii. Often, I would tangle the sheets on some obstacle on deck or on the anchor, and I’d need to hustle forward to free it. On my last jibe across Admiralty Inlet, on a layline for Port Townsend, I noticed the unmistakable T-shaped mast of a submarine steaming at me en route to the naval yard at Bremerton. Two oceangoing tugs and two US Coast Guard vessels were in escort. Soon, the Coast Guard politely hailed me: “Sailing vessel Kāholo, I see that you are making tracks for Marrowstone Point. We request that you keep as close as you feel safe to the shore. We will be turning right, into your path.” Good thing I was on a layline, with good speed, and didn’t plan another jibe. The consequences of something going wrong were too great.

An old friend, veteran bluewater sailing instructor John Neal with Mahina Expeditions, met me at the dock at Port Townsend. He showed me around the bustling boatyards and introduced me to his favorite sailmaker, Port Townsend Sails, and riggers, Port Townsend Rigging. These are family operations where attention to detail and craftsmanship are the rule. John says that he can get 50,000 to 55,000 miles (two circumnavigations) on a single main and jib built by the craftspeople at Port Townsend Sails, who, by the way, are all women. 

I set out on foot to see the boatyards at Port Townsend, the premier wooden-boat building and repair region on the West Coast. It’s a dynamic place where the next generation of shipwrights learns traditional skills at places such as the Northwest School of Wooden BoatBuilding. I wandered around the yards, amazed at vessels like the 133-foot San Francisco bar pilot cutter Adventuress, built in 1913 and still sailing here. 

Port Townsend is famous for its annual wooden-boat show, but what seems to have escaped worldwide notice is that Kirsten Neuschäfer, the South African sailor who recently became the first woman to win the Golden Globe round-the-world race, sailed a Port Townsend boat: a 36-foot, 1988 fiberglass-hulled version of a traditional 1930s design built by Cape George Marine Works. Her boat was among only three boats to finish the grueling race without pause for repairs, and it survived 235 days at sea around the tempestuous Great Capes—and with Neuschäfer managing to rescue a skipper whose boat had sunk.

Continuing my stroll through Port Townsend on this cold, blustery afternoon, and seeing a small sign advertising “sails and canvas built and repaired” on an old wooden building in the harbor, I ducked into a shop called The Artful Sailor. Engulfed by the smell of tar, hemp and linseed oil, I found Emiliano Marino and Pami-Sue “Salty Sue” Alvarado practicing the ancient art of marlinspike seamanship. The late-afternoon light streaming in through the windows made it look like a scene from an old Dutch painting.

Only in Port Townsend could a sailor encounter a nuclear submarine, see a 1913 schooner and meet a couple practicing traditional marlinspike splicing, all in the same day.

Unfortunately, my luck ran out with the weather, and I sailed the 30 miles up to Deception Pass and to Kāholo’s La Conner slip in full foul-weather gear, in cold, drizzling rain and variable winds. The ending was a bit of a letdown, but overall, this had been an unforgettable voyage, precisely because it had happened in the dead of winter.

Not that I am planning any Shackleton-esque small-boat crossings in the Antarctic, but at least now I understand the beauty of a winter’s sail. Next on the my shopping list? A diesel heater.

Tor Johnson is an award-­winning photographer and writer who has shot 16 covers of CW, so far. He grew up sailing the world with his family.

The post A Winter’s Sail appeared first on Cruising World.

It was early afternoon on Day One of a weeklong course to prepare for the US Coast Guard’s captain’s exam, and besides my head feeling like a balloon about to pop, already several pages of my notebook were filled with hastily scribbled notes, including this gem: 1.169 x square root of light height = geographical range. Who knew I’d have to know that?

During the course of the morning, we’d slogged our way through license requirements, calculating days underway inshore and seaward of the boundary line that wraps like a string around the offshore points along America’s coasts. We’d touched on license endorsements, required publications when carrying ­passengers, and a list of additional things we’d need to procure before applying for any license. Things such as a Department of Transportation physical, CPR and first-aid cards, and a Transportation Worker Identification Credential.

We discussed in detail aids to navigation, buoy functions, beacons, light characteristics, Intracoastal Waterway navigation, light ranges, weather patterns and cloud identification.

And in between it all, Capt. Greg Metcalf, owner of the Atlantic Captain’s Academy, and instructor Capt. Chris Davis, an ex-Coastie-turned-towboat-skipper, spun entertaining sea tales and bantered back and forth with the 12 students—nine would-be tuna charter captains, a mate with a family tour boat that runs on the New Jersey coast, and a couple of sailors—who had committed to this immersive experience, held in a hotel conference room on the banks of the Annisquam River in Gloucester, Massachusetts. 

That first day, a Sunday, as Metcalf outlined what we’d cover before taking four individual exams the following Sunday, he assured us of one thing: We’d make it through. ”Anyone know a charter captain?” he quipped. “Do they seem like rocket scientists?”

And then there were Davis’ two fundamental rules of ­navigation that we’d be reminded of again and again: “No. 1: Never hit bottom. No. 2: Never hit anyone else.”

Different Routes, Same Waypoint

There are all sorts of good ­reasons for mariners to ­consider becoming licensed captains. In the class that I took, several of the students were fishermen who had spent years on boats of all sizes, either chasing sport fish or fishing commercially. A license would allow them to take paying passengers out on charters, or it would let them command boats on which they’d been deckhands. A Maine lobsterman wanted to take tourists out on Sundays and charge them to haul traps on days when commercial lobstering isn’t permitted in that state. One woman, a school nurse, had summer jobs lined up driving launches out to islands off the Merrimac River. 

Me? I do some teaching at a sailing center in Boston, and a ticket would let me spend more time on the bigger boats and run an occasional charter. 

The basic license, Operator of Uninspected Passenger Vessels, is where it all starts. Sometimes called a “six-pack license,” it allows a holder to carry up to six passengers for hire in coastal waters. To qualify, besides passing the US Coast Guard exams, you need 360 documented days underway, 90 of which must have been in the past three years. The next step is to pursue Master credentials. At the Atlantic Captain’s Academy, this involves a two-day course on top of the OUPV curriculum. A Master allows you to captain a Coast Guard-inspected vessel with more than six passengers. The size of the boat and where it can be operated depends on your prior experience.

With various study options from which to choose, an eight-day in-classroom course worked the best for me. Setting aside a single solid chunk of time was easier to plan for than committing to a longer time frame, and the course in Gloucester was relatively close to where I live. Metcalf offers courses in several other New England locations, as well as online instruction.

Alternatively, Steve Wilson, the lead instructor at the Boston Sailing Center, who along with a friend had plans to be in Florida for the winter, opted to take one of Metcalf’s online programs that met in a Zoom classroom for three hours every Monday and Wednesday night for nine weeks, starting in January. When they returned to the Boston area in late spring, they and most of their Zoom-mates met in Maine for a day to take the proctored exams for OUPV credentials.

“Anyone who embraces Zoom technology and can learn that way, it’s awesome,” Wilson says. Before each class, he spent time becoming familiar with the material in Metcalf’s textbook, and after each class, he and his partner spent additional hours studying, working through exercises, and taking practice tests. He estimates that involved another 12 or so hours a week, sometimes a bit more. Near the end of the course, Metcalf held two optional weekend study days, and he was available throughout to answer questions over the phone or by email, Wilson says. 

During the online course, students had ample time to get to know one another, Wilson says, and his classmates came from a variety of backgrounds, as was the case with my class. A few of the students in his class were auditing the course with no intention of taking the exam at the end. They just wanted to learn the material to become better boat operators.

Cruising Solo

While the Atlantic Captain’s Academy and many other schools across the country offer a variety of schedules that employ Coast Guard-approved curricula to help mariners earn their credentials, they aren’t required. 

Tim Murphy, a CW editor-at-large and a New England-based marine journalist, first earned his OUPV credential when he was 18 and living in New Orleans. In high school, he’d signed up as a trainee on the brigantine Young America and was invited back as a volunteer. That, in turn, led to a six-month job crewing, so he was at sea every day and able to rack up 180 days of sea time. Meanwhile, his family was living aboard, and with them, he sailed all throughout the Bahamas, so in a period of three years, he had all the sea days needed.

Murphy says that a car ­accident during the summer after his senior year left him idle for a few months, so he spent the time studying and memorizing Chapman Piloting & Seamanship. He also used flash cards his father had employed while earning his own license to memorize all the mnemonics sailors rely on to remember navigation rules. Then he walked into Coast Guard headquarters and passed the tests. A year later, when he turned 19, the minimum age for Master credentials, he qualified for a license allowing him to captain vessels up to 100 tons, 200 miles offshore.

Murphy let his ticket expire in the 1990s, but in 2018, after buying hisPassport 40, Billy Pilgrim, with the intention of going off cruising with his partner, he decided to renew his credentials and used a few texts the boat’s previous owner had left to prepare on his own again.

“It was so hard,” he says with a laugh. “It was really hard.” But ultimately successful. Murphy again now holds those same Master’s credentials and will be able to use them if the opportunity arises in his travels.

By the Book

Back in the hotel in Gloucester for Day Two, we spent more time going over currents and tides, and then many hours poring over navigation rules. That night, we went home to review navigation general material—buoys, lights, weather—and took a practice test that we corrected in class the next day.

Day Three was all about mnemonics. “Red over red, captain is dead,” meaning the lights displayed on a vessel not under command. “Red over white, a fishing boat at night,” meaning a commercial fishing boat not trawling. “Red over green, sailing machine,” meaning a sailboat displaying its masthead tricolor. They were endless. “Turn to port, go to court,” meaning what action to take as a give-way power vessel in a crossing situation.

There were horn signals to memorize, whistles, gongs and bells. All followed by practice quizzes and more practice quizzes. Ditto on Day Four.

On Thursday, Capt. Davis had us roll out the paper charts and grab our Weems & Plath plotting tools and dividers for a three-day deep dive into current set and drift, plotting, dead reckoning, speed, fuel—you name it. I’m not sure I’d ever used up an entire eraser before.

Then finally, on Sunday, it was the day of reckoning, with exams in Navigation General, Chart Plotting, Rules of the Road, and Deck General. Navigation and Deck required minimum scores of 70 percent. The other two, 90 percent.

It was intense. It was challenging. But in the end, Metcalf was right: It was doable. 

That afternoon, a few of us stuck around to study and take an add-on exam for a towing endorsement. And a couple of weeks later, most of us turned up for the two-day Master’s course. Two of us also opted for sailing endorsements.

So what’s the plan? Well, that’s still in the works. But already my Inland Waters Master credentials have earned me a few bucks and provided some new opportunities. And one thing I know for certain after a full summer on the water is that I’m definitely a better and more knowledgeable sailor. For that alone, it was well worth the effort. 

Mark Pillsbury is a CW editor-at-large.

The post Plot a Course for Captain Credentials appeared first on Cruising World.

In 1974, Australian journalist Murray Davis assembled a ragtag crew of sailors and scribblers in Newport, Rhode Island, and put out the first issue of Cruising World. The bet Murray made that summer was a big one: 65,000 big ones, if bets are measured in printed magazine copies. Ten years later, he sold the brand to The New York Times Company. Paid circulation had grown to 120,000 copies addressed to high-net-worth individuals (in the parlance of Madison Avenue). Davis retired to a life of ease on Newport’s tony Ocean Drive.

In some ways, the joke was on Madison Avenue. Davis’ genius was to tap into a countercultural zeitgeist impelled by skyrocketing oil prices, back-to-the-garden dreams of self-reliance evinced by the Whole Earth Catalog, and a particularly prominent June 1973 Time magazine story called “The Good Life Afloat,” which placed, of all boats, a Westsail 32 front and center. 

“Beached though he may be by responsibilities ashore,” the Time story went, “the cruising sailor can still feel a certain smugness about his boat. She can take him across an ocean whenever he is ready to go. Just a few years ago, the men who owned boats like these were usually looked upon as oddballs, dropouts, or dreamers ready to up-anchor and take off for the islands. They were incurable eccentrics, antiquarians putting in their time refurbishing relics of another age. But suddenly those old-fashioned boats and their gear seem strangely up-to-date. The cruising sailor seems less eccentric. The boats they have preserved have now become objects of envy.”

Playboy magazine took the idolatry a step further in a 1976 feature: “Your ultimate destination in a Cigarette boat may be no farther than the forward berth, but there is no navigable place in the world beyond the range of the Westsail 32.”

Davis came to the subject honestly. For the first half of the 1960s, he’d written a column about the Western Australian waterfront scene for The Age, a Melbourne daily. That lasted till his wanderlust overtook him. In 1967, he and his wife, Barbara, and their two small children boarded a 21-ton, yawl-rigged Falmouth Quay punt called Klang II and sailed themselves to America.

“Every escapade needs a hook to lend it legitimacy,” Nim Marsh wrote in a 2004 profile. Davis’ hook was, in his own words, “to watch Australia’s challenge for the great symbol of sailing, the America’s Cup.” He would cover the races in Newport, in which Australian hero Dame Pattie was to compete, reporting back to his readers in Melbourne. As the Davis family sailed halfway around the world, they befriended some of that era’s giants of the cruising community—Eric and Susan Hiscock, Miles and Beryl Smeeton, Blondie Hasler—as well as young up-and-comers such as Lin and Larry Pardey and Bruce Bingham. The first issue of CW included dispatches from all of them.

Though Davis tapped into a deep vein, he didn’t invent the worldwide cruising community; instead, he discovered one that by the 1970s was already thriving. To locate the father of this community, he’d have to look back still another 50 years to a man named William Washburn Nutting—arguably the most influential cruising sailor that today’s cruisers have never heard of.

We All Sail in the Track of Typhoon

 “I think it is reasonable to say that a country is only as big as its sports. In this day when life is so very easy and safe-and-sane and highly specialized and steam-heated, we need sports that are big and raw and, yes, dangerous. Not that we recommend taking chances in the roaring forties in the middle of November or crossing the Atlantic on the fiftieth parallel at any time of the year. This sort of yachting, I suppose, will never be popular. But I do hope that if there is any result from my book on the Typhoon, it will be to inspire a confidence in the possibilities of the small yacht and instill an interest in the sea and a desire to explore.”

Thus wrote W.W. Nutting. His 1921 book, The Track Of The “typhoon,” lit a fire whose flame still spreads more than a century later. “I feel that what American yachting needs is less ­common sense, less restrictions, less slide rules, and more sailing,” Nutting wrote.

A line he borrowed from a US Navy sub-chaser commander distilled Nutting’s ultimate disdain for his own safe-and-sane era: “Is ‘Safety First’ going to be our national motto?”

Like Davis, Nutting started his career scribbling on the waterfront scene—in Nutting’s case, from the Manhattan offices of The Motor Boating Magazine in the years just before World War I. Nutting was a gregarious man who gathered around him a Parisian-style salon of other men who were interested in something entirely new under the sun: sailing on the ocean “for the fun of the thing.”

In the 1910s, there was no seagoing cruising community. Yacht clubs had begun to proliferate after the Civil War, but with a focus that seldom extended beyond inshore racing. A handful of America’s wealthiest Brahmins very occasionally raced to Bermuda or across the Atlantic, but with large crews of paid professional sailors. Amateur sailors had made well-publicized ocean voyages: Joshua Slocum, who published his enduring bestseller about the first recorded solo circumnavigation from 1895 to 1898; Howard Blackburn, who in 1901 crossed to Portugal in 39 days aboard a 25-foot Friendship sloop. Still, before World War I, there was neither a cohort of long-distance cruising sailors nor a fleet of seaworthy yachts to take them sailing.

Nutting changed that. In summer 1913, with scant experience of sailing, piloting or navigation, he sailed the 28-foot cutter Nereis, mostly singlehanded, from New York to Newfoundland. Along the way, he survived several near calamities. Off Nantucket, Massachusetts, he was knocked overboard by the boom. Only dumb bloody luck and a loose lazy jack saved him from drowning. But that summer’s experience inflamed his adventuring spirit, and the stories he published inflamed others. With friends he met during those travels, Nutting began to dream of a shorthanded trans-Atlantic voyage—and of the boat that could accomplish such a trip.

One of those friends was Canadian engineer Frederick W. “Casey” Baldwin, the first British subject to take flight in March 1908, shortly after the Wright Brothers’ first Kitty Hawk flights, and the man who would go on in 1919 to set the world speed record of more than 70 mph across the water in a hydroplane that he designed and built with Alexander Graham Bell.

Though World War I interrupted the conversation they had started in 1913, Nutting and Baldwin reconvened in fall 1919 to work out their plans—for the boat and for the voyage. Nutting wrote: “Finally we got down to the inevitable subject of boats and more particularly of cruising boats.” 

Their choices were limited to one of two categories: fishermen or racers. There simply were no other choices. Fishermen—­adaptations of Friendship sloops, oyster dredgers or Gloucester schooners—accounted for all the boats sailed in shorthanded transoceanic voyages. These tended to be rough-hewn, solid, seaworthy and slow. Casey, by contrast, had collected silver by racing lightly built boats with long overhangs designed under Nathanael Herreshoff’s Universal Rule. Casey, Nutting wrote, was “all for a big boat—as big a one as possible without going beyond the strength of one man in the matter of the mainsail and the ground tackle, which are really the limiting factors.”

Nutting’s tastes were shaped by his summer on Nereis. “I think a singlehander should be as small as possible without ­sacrificing full headroom—say, 28 to 30 feet on deck,” he wrote. But, conceding that singlehanding wasn’t the most desirable way to cruise, he consented to a compromise: “a 40-footer, fisherman style, ketch rigged with an auxiliary motor.”

Ocean Sailing “For the Fun of the Thing”

Back in New York, Nutting delivered his commission to yacht ­designer William Atkin, a pal and stablemate at Motor Boating, who pushed the length to 45 feet before the boat was done. Baldwin oversaw the boatbuilding at Bell’s laboratory in Baddeck, Nova Scotia, and on July 3, 1920, Typhoon launched.

As Davis legitimized his escapade with the hook of an America’s Cup summer, so Nutting latched onto the Harmsworth Trophy Races, set for August 10 in Cowes, England, to ­legitimize his. “Not that there was any serious motive behind the cruise of the Typhoon,” Nutting hedged. “We were not trying to ­demonstrate anything; we were not conducting an advertising campaign; we hadn’t lost a bet. I had the little vessel built according to Atkin’s and my own ideas of what a seagoing yacht should be, and we sailed her across the Atlantic and back again for the fun of the thing. We feel that the sport of picking your way across great stretches of water, by your own (newly acquired) skill with a sextant, pitting your wits against the big, more or less honest forces of nature, feeling your way with leadline through fog and darkness into strange places which the travelers of trodden paths never experience, chumming with the people of the sea—these things, we believe, are worth the time, the cost, the energy—yes, and even the risk and hardship that are bound to be a part of such an undertaking. We did it for the fun of the thing, and we believe that no further explanation is necessary.”

They did it, all right, crossing from Baddeck to Cowes, 2,777 miles in just over 22 days. Along the way, they encountered several gales, which Nutting illuminated for his steam-heated readers in full, breathless detail: “It was a roaring, wild, wonderful night, the sky pitch black, the sea a driving stampede of weird, unearthly lights. The countless crests of breaking waves made luminous patches in the blackness as though lit by some ghostly light from beneath the sea, and the tops, whipped off by the wind, cut the sky with horizontal streaks of a more brilliant light, like the sparks from a prairie fire.”

For a shipmate, Nutting could have picked no one better than Baldwin. “Casey, drenched and grinning, was in his element,” he wrote. “The wind was still increasing, but there was no trace of concern in his voice as he shouted back a ‘cheerio’ through the racket. He was enjoying himself as only the man at the wheel can at such a time.”

At Cowes, word of Typhoon’sexploits quickly spread through the harbor. General John Seely, the Lord Lieutenant of Hampshire, brought regards from King George V, a sailor himself. The Earl of Dunraven, who’d challenged the America’s Cup with three Valkyrie iterationsbetween 1887 and 1895, came aboard Typhoon. But the most consequential acquaintance Nutting made was Claud Worth, vice commodore of the Royal Cruising Club, established in 1880.

Birth of a Cruising Community

“Before leaving England,” Nutting wrote, “there is one institution we must mention because I hope that some time there will be such a one in our country. This is the Royal Cruising Club whose membership included many of the real cruising yachtsmen of England. Why can’t some such club be started on this side of the Atlantic?”

One of the first things Nutting did when Typhoon returned to New York that November was to propose what would become the Cruising Club of America—established in 1922, with Nutting elected as its first commodore. The club’s purpose? “To encourage the designing, building, and sailing of small seaworthy yachts, to make popular cruising upon deep water, and to develop in the amateur sailor a love of true seamanship, and to give opportunity to become proficient in the art of navigation.” You can walk down the dock of any seaside marina today and judge for yourself what kind of success Nutting had. Or, you can simply flip through these pages.

It’s not for his seamanship that we remember Nutting today. “He was a charming character and good company, a good sailor in some ways, but foolhardy and had too much courage,” recalled George Bonnell, an early CCA member.

Neither is it for his yacht-design eye, the musical equivalent of a tin ear when you compare it with others of his CCA cohort: John Alden or Olin Stephens or Philip Rhodes.

But for infectious enthusiasm, no one ever beat Nutting. Shortly after founding the CCA and publishing Track Of The “typhoon,” he became infatuated with a boat type he’d seen on a Copenhagen canal during the war: the redningskoite, or Norwegian rescue boat, as developed by the Scottish-Norwegian designer Colin Archer (1832-1921). 

Virtually no one west of the Atlantic in 1924 had ever seen such a craft. He wrote: “Although strange to an eye accustomed to the racing type yacht, or to the fisherman type as we know it today in America, these boats held a fascination for me and I resolved that one day I should own one and try it out.”

On one winter’s evening, Nutting found a book that contained the drawings for a Colin Archer-designed redningskoite: “The lines scale to about 47 feet overall. After a few rough measurements we decided that if the boat were reduced to 32 feet overall, we could get the headroom under a trunk of reasonable height and sitting headroom under the side decks, and so, for convenience, we had the design photostated 16 inches overall, or to a scale of one-half inch to the foot. With these lines to work from, I spent a couple of evenings making a skeleton model.”

Nutting’s old pal Atkin helped him clean up the lines. Together, they named the design Eric for the Viking explorer Erik the Red, and Atkin published them.

It was aboard someone else’s version of a redningskoite that Nutting, with three shipmates, crossed the North Atlantic from Norway by way of Iceland in summer 1924, then set off from Greenland on September 8—after which, none of them were ever seen again.

“It is more than too bad that Mr. Nutting should not have lived to see the popularity of his child,” Atkin wrote many years later about the Ericdesign, “for some 175 sets of blueprints of the 32-footer were sold by the designer within three years after the plans appeared in Motor Boating, and many more have been sold since.” Argentine solo sailor Vito Dumas famously circumnavigated in anEric during the 1940s. And the fact that Robin Knox-Johnston’s Suhaili, the boat that won the 1968 Golden Globe solo round-the-world race, was built to an Ericdesign inspired a California entrepreneur to commission an adaptation for fiberglass-series production.

The result was the Westsail 32. Yes, the Westsail—object of so much love, and of so much derision. (“Wet Snail,” anyone?) The Westsail, with Nutting’s hand in its creation all but erased after the decades, was the very image that launched so many 1970s cruising dreams. 

“This wonderfully sturdy sailboat,” ran the 1976 Playboy ­feature, “embodies within its wide stubby hull all of the ­wanderlust fantasies harbored by each of us: that marvelous dream of shucking the niggling demands of daily life and simply taking off, boosted by the wind and sea, to probe the corners of the earth. A Westsail skipper turns each cruise into a long reach to Pago Pago.”

Or to Greenland.

Nutting started a fractious 100-year conversation that we, cruising sailors all, still gather round—whether we remember him for it or not.

CW Editor-at-Large Tim Murphy is the author of Adventurous Use of the Sea (Seapoint Books, 2022), which tells the full story of William Washburn Nutting and 16 other influential cruisers and yacht designers from the past century. Murphy develops marine-­trades curricula for the American Boat and Yacht Council.

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When Groupe Beneteau’s Excess Catamarans introduced its first model in 2019, a test sail in winds approaching 40 knots made it abundantly clear that the 38-foot-7-inch Excess 12 wasn’t just another pretty new face in the ever-growing cat crowd. That boat could sail.

A recent light-air outing aboard the company’s newest model, the Excess 14, was perhaps equally revealing. With a hull length right around 44 feet and a beam of 25 feet, 9 inches, this is a big, roomy and comfortable cruising cat. But in just 5 knots of breeze, sailing with the main and working jib set, the chart plotter’s speed over ground read 4.1 knots heading upwind with the sails sheeted hard. A little later, with the jib rolled up and the code zero unfurled and set on a sprit that brings the boat’s LOA to 52 feet, 5 inches, our boatspeed was 5.7 knots on a reach in wind gusting to maybe 6. 

Those were conditions that would have left a lot of similar-size multihulls parked, but the Excess 14 felt relatively lively underway and “tacked quickly,” I wrote in my notes. I also noted that line handling was easy, thanks to sheet winches within reach of the helms and an electric Harken FlatWinder winch that handles a traveler mounted outboard of a comfortable bench seat that spans most of the transom.

For the record, I’m a fan of the Excess brand DNA that calls for outdoor helm stations located far aft on either stern. Sitting at them underway, you can see and hear the water rush by and feel the breeze in your face. You know, like when you’re sailing. You can converse with people seated in the cockpit, and you have easy access to the salon should you care to set the autopilot and keep watch out of the elements, through windows that provide nearly 360 degrees of visibility.

Open to fresh ideas, the team at Excess started with a blank slate when they conceived the 14, and they gave naval architects at VPLP Design some liberty in terms of hull design in their quest for better performance. VPLP, drawing from their experience with a long line of racing machines, then tested and ultimately opted for asymmetrical hulls—think of a monohull sliced lengthwise down the middle and then separated—that tend to reduce the size of the waves produced between the hulls, thereby reducing drag that slows down the boat.

The design team also toyed with replacing the stub keels affixed to most cruising cats, including earlier Excess models, with the sort of lifting daggerboards found on high-performance cats. They dropped that idea, however, because daggerboards add complexity when sailing and take away from living space below. Instead, the 14 has more-efficient, deeper and thinner fixed foils that increase draft to 4 feet, 10 inches—a few inches deeper than what you would expect to find on cats of a similar size.

There are also interesting ­innovations found in the 14’s interior, where saving weight has a direct relationship to livelier sailing. Relatively lighter carbon-fiber cloth is employed in some structural areas for strength, and some bulkheads are infused using foam coring. And there’s less wood used in furniture, drawers and stowage areas. Overhead, the cabin top is injected-molded, eliminating the need for a liner. And in hulls with two staterooms and two head compartments located amidships, the toilets share a single holding tank to reduce plumbing, while the staterooms share one larger Webasto air-conditioning unit, saving the weight and wiring required for two. 

Excess is also involved with Groupe Beneteau’s overall efforts to adopt more-sustainable building practices. Laminates used for the performance mainsail and genoa are recycled material, and hemp fibers are used in place of fiberglass and injected with partly bio-sourced resin in some nonstructural parts such as locker lids. Even furniture knobs have been replaced by neat little loops of rope.

Buyers have a few decisions to make when ordering an Excess 14. There is a four-­stateroom version that would be well-suited for charter, and there are a couple of three-stateroom options. In one, the owner gets a large fore-and-aft bunk aft, a sitting area with a desk at the foot of the companionway, a head and shower forward, and a walk-in closet in place of a V-berth. A second plan, called the Transformer Version, has bunks far forward that can be folded down for sleeping or up for stowage. (One company photo shows a paddleboard stashed away there.) That’s the layout we saw in Miami and the one I’d choose if it were my boat. In all the layouts, the salon gets lots of sunlight and has a pleasant, airy feeling with the sliding door and window open aft. There’s an abundance of fridge and freezer space adjacent to the galley to port. Dining tables are indoors, at the front of the salon, and in the cockpit. 

The Miami boat included a pair of optional 57 hp Yanmar diesels with saildrives (45 hp engines come standard) that pushed us along at 7.8 knots in cruising speed and 8.4 knots in get-home-quick mode. Gear included an electric winch at the starboard helm to make raising the main easier, as well as engine controls at either wheel to make docking simpler. Davits are available, as are canvas Biminis over the wheels for shade.

The boat also had an optional seating area on the flybridge. It reminded me a bit of a stretch version of the footwell that you’d find on a Sunfish. I’m not sure if it’s an option I’d choose, and with the boom set relatively low on the mast, it wouldn’t be a place to lounge underway. Some might like to sit up there while at anchor to enjoy the view though.

The sail-away price for the boat we visited is right around $980,000, but that’s loaded with gear, including an Onan generator and a Pulse rig and sail package that includes a 70-foot-8-inch mast instead of the standard 64-foot-11-inch spar. The upwind Pulse rig sail area of 1,453 square feet will be appreciated by those who sail in variable conditions and like to go fast; in the trades, the standard 1,323 square feet might suffice, and the shorter rig would let you just squeeze under most Intracoastal Waterway bridges.

Me? I was happy to have the added horsepower provided by the bigger square-top main. Sailing a big cat in 5 knots of breeze isn’t always fun, but aboard the Excess 14, we had a jolly old time.

Excess 14 Specifications

Sea Trial

The post Sailboat Review: Light and Lively Excess 14 appeared first on Cruising World.

Steve Brown knows a thing or two about heavy weather. Throughout his sailing career, Brown and his wife, Trish, took on a four-year circumnavigation aboard their Oyster 56, Curious, sailed a 30,000-mile circumnavigation of the Americas—sailing north from Camden, Maine, and then an east-to-west transit of the Northwest Passage—and spent more than his fair share of time in the Southern Ocean. 

Brown is up for debating the superlatively inhospitable places on Earth. 

“Southern Georgia, in the South Atlantic, is the most unforgiving place I’ve ever sailed,” he says. “Although there was this one time, coming up the Le Mer Strait between Staten Island and Tierra Del Fuego.” 

The sailing was the fault of his ­mountaineering interests, he claims, and he originally took to the sea for adventure. He followed in the footsteps of mountaineer-sailor Bill Tilman, and decided he needed to learn how to sail in order to “fill in the blanks on the map.”

A starter dinghy was followed by a Furia 44, and then by the circumnavigation in the Oyster 56. When he bought the AeroRig Bestevaer 60C Novara, an aluminum-hull schooner designed as a research vessel, the expeditions stepped up a notch. 

Along the way, there’s been brash ice and icebergs, rogue waves and drogues, penguins and polar bears. He’s a sailor who’s had the real-life experience of switching from gale-force storm management to survival tactics after conditions transcend control. 

His current role is as mentor and ice ­pilot as Novara pursues a multiyear mission in the Caribbean working with coastal communities to educate and ­combat climate change, followed by a planned 2025 Northwest Passage.

Know Your Boat

Brown’s first piece of advice on heavy-weather management, offered during the Cruising Club of America’s 2022 seminar in Newport, Rhode Island, was: “Don’t go out in it,” but there were a few more lessons shared.

“Take your boat apart from stem to stern and know every inch of it,” Brown told me during a recent call. “If you’re going to be far from marinas and chandleries, ask yourself: If it breaks, can I live without it? Can I fix it? If you can’t live without or fix it, then you need a spare.

“When I prepared the boat in Camden for the 2014 Northwest Passage, I spent two and a half months for 15 hours a day on Novara getting to understand it and stripping it from stem to stern,” he says.

If you look at what Randal Reeves did, Brown said, in Reeves’ preparation for the Figure 8 Voyage of the Americas, he took that boat to pieces. “If you’re going to do something that demanding,” Brown says, “then you really have got to have gone through everything. If something goes wrong, then you’re not thinking, Oh, what can it be? You know, because you’ve taken the boat to pieces.”

Kirsten Neuschäfer, during her preparations for the 2022 Golden Globe Race, took apart her Cape George, Minnehaha, starting forward and finishing aft. 

“You’ve got to strip down everything and know it’s in good condition,” Brown said. “When you know every inch of your boat, you know the strengths and weaknesses of your rig, hull, and systems. You’re able to assess problems quickly and are prepared to come up with solutions. The one thing that I didn’t strip down on Novara was the steering system. It’s an incredibly complex system, and when we sought advice, we decided that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Unfortunately, moisture had built up on top of an exposed bearing. We got up as far as Newfoundland when the bearing broke.”

Be Prepared

Weather forecasts, man-overboard drills, storm sail management, a hot meal ready to go—each step you take in preparation gives you a greater chance of weathering a storm. Practice until you know what works for you, your boat and your crew. Make sure everyone knows the MOB drill and can perform each role.

Get regular weather forecasts that extend five to seven days out, of wind and seas. Remember, GRIB files have winds but not gusts or waves. Study the areas you plan to sail to familiarize yourself with the depths, sea bottom, landmasses and winds. All of these can play a role in wave size, windspeeds and wind directions.

If a low-pressure system is forecast in your area, study the wind directions and speeds. Try to avoid a blow by charting a safe course that minimizes your time in the path. If you can’t avoid the system, check equipment and chafe points, and remove solar panels before conditions deteriorate. As much as possible, attend to self-care: Get some sleep. Shower and clean up. Prepare meals and coffee. 

“Get the main down, and get it out of the way,” says Randall Reeves, one of Brown’s fellow CCA heavy-weather panelists. Reeves completed his record-breaking 2019 Figure 8 sail of the Americas aboard Moli, his 45-foot aluminum sloop, becoming the first person to sail solo and nonstop around the Americas. “I have two drogues on board, which I flake out and lash down on deck if a gale is in the forecast. I run what-if scenarios in my head and ask myself, What will I do?” 

Stormy Weather

What’s your plan if you are overwhelmed by wind or seas? 

As the wind builds, reef down, Brown says. Know beforehand what your sail plan is, and have your canvas ready. Know how to heave-to, and practice. And know how to manage your boat under hove-to conditions. 

Heaving-to is a fantastic survival tactic, and it’s the go-to method for high-latitude experts such as Skip Novak, Brown says, but it’s absolutely essential to test it out. His boat, Novara, is an AeroRig and can’t heave-to. “I experimented with possible methods, but with little success,” he says, “so we researched other ways to ride out a storm.” 

If the boat can no longer handle even the smallest of storm sails, take it down to bare poles. “We’ve had to do this only once, in 65 knots of wind off South Georgia,” Brown says. 

Heavy Weather Sailing, Eighth Edition, by Martin Thomas and Peter Bruce, has an excellent section on storm tactics, ­including shortening sail, heaving-to, ­running before the wind, and drogue devices. Brown’s advice is included in the book, and he has written several reports on the Jordan series drogue based on his experience and the experiences of other sailors who have deployed the JSD.

“If there’s one piece of kit you need to put on your boat, it’s a Jordan series drogue,” Brown says. During Novara’s 2017 passage from South Georgia to the Falklands, while the boat was running under bare poles, wind and seas built to unmanageable levels. The boat carried too much speed running down the waves and was susceptible to a knockdown if it turned up into the face of a wave, or a pitchpole. 

The drogue was ready on deck, lashed down, with the bridle in place, as wind and seas built. “We put it out off the stern, into 35 knots of wind,” Brown says. “Conditions worsened to 65 knots, with higher gusts and monstrous seas. The drogue slowed our speed, and we went below, and slept, ate and played cards for 48 hours. You need sea room to do this.”

His exchange with Neuschäfer before the 2022 Golden Globe Race focused on sizing her Jordan series drogue for her Cape George. Neuschäfer deployed the drogue during storm conditions off Cape Horn and held on for 12 hours.

While competing in the 2008 edition of the GGR, Susie Goodall deployed a Jordan series drogue off her Rustler 36 during a storm 2,000 nautical miles west of Cape Horn. The drogue’s rope gave way at the bridle as she battled 60 knots of wind and massive seas. Goodall pitchpoled, was dismasted, and was knocked unconscious. 

Although she survived and was ­rescued, her boat was a total loss. The JSD ­manufacturers, along with heavy-weather-­sailing experts, used her experience to update recommendations for drogue sizing, based on boat tonnage. The key is to research and know which drag devices are appropriate for your boat, and know how to use them.

There’s a fantastic database on drag devices that offers an exhaustive list of options, Brown says. “If you look closely at the list, you can see my favorite, the ‘Milk Churn.’ Who among us doesn’t have one milk churn you could lob?

The great thing about this is that there are firsthand narratives of sailors using all of these techniques. You can actually read about some guy who chucked a milk churn. It’s worth taking the time to read. People who have been through this have shared their experiences, or at least those who survived did.”

A Curry on the Shore of Antarctica

During a January 2018 passage from the Falkland Islands to the South Shetlands, after making 685 miles south in five days, Steve Brown and Novara’s crew studied the GRIB files showing winds building above 30 knots and the sea state worsening. 

“We changed course with the intention of running before the wind to Deception Island,” Brown says. Novara made a fast passage, but conditions rapidly deteriorated, with 45-knot winds, driving snow, and poor visibility. Ice and snow built on the rig, sails and deck. 

Using radar and charts, Novara was able to enter Neptune’s Bellows, the pass into Deception Island’s caldera, but AIS showed multiple boats already in the intended ­anchorage of Telefon Bay. In Brown’s words:

We went into sort of a second choice: Pendulum Cove. We needed to get into the lee and out of the wind. We came around a bend and, as we prepared to lower the anchor, we were hit by a 100-knot gust.

Novara was knocked down literally as we were preparing to drop the anchor. The blow washed the aft mainsheet over the side, and it wrapped around the prop. The boat popped right back up, which is amazing since we had the centerboard up and the rig was heavy with ice. But once the mainsheet wrapped the prop, all I could do was steer straight up the beach.

Fortunately, with volcanic soil, there’s almost no rocks inside Deception Island, and we just plowed a big furrow. Novara is very round with a big keelson, and the ­centerboard is inside the keelson, so we plowed up the beach and sat there. The wind was raging, it was snowing like crazy, and we’d blown the jib. We tried to tame it—the aft jib—which had broken free and shredded itself, but we couldn’t. So I just said to the boys, “OK, everybody down below.” And they asked, “Well, what happens now?”

“I’ll put the kettle on and make a chicken curry for tea,” I replied. And that’s exactly what I did. We were inside. We were sort of safe. We weren’t going anywhere. 

I made a big curry with all the trimmings, Naan bread, and everything, and we waited until conditions eased. Then we went out and had a look. 

Novara has a big cable, three big anchors and a lot of chain. I told the crew that we would drag ourselves off on the high tide. We’d gone aground almost at high tide, but there was another 20 centimeters of tide over the next three days, and Novara’s got lots of ground tackle. We have two big bow anchors, with 200 meters (656 feet) of bow chain, a stern anchor with another 60 meters (196 feet), and four shorelines with 100 meters (328 feet) each. The plan was to put out three anchors, connect them to our winches and, at the highest tide, pull ourselves off.

We had a plan. Everyone has a role. We know what we’re going to do. Everybody’s fine, and there’s confidence and optimism in the event. 

When you sail with a crew, you have to be aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the team you put together. When you’ve got a diverse team, you have to understand how best to keep them happy, how best to keep them fit, make sure they look after themselves. This starts before you leave the dock. That’s the biggie for me—understanding the boat, and if you’re sailing with crew, understanding the team that you’re working with. 

You need to make sure you have the trust of your crew. You don’t want a skipper running around like a chicken with his head cut off. You tell them not to worry. I’ll start cooking dinner and it will be all right. Cool heads will prevail in these situations.

You have to put the pieces of the jigsaw together, when it comes to crew, and if you’ve got one piece that doesn’t fit, then it makes life difficult. The thing is, by and large, you look for people who have that third dimension, who can cope in that extreme situation. The Antarctica crew were, without exception, experienced sailors.

On Deception Island, we were up on the beach. When anything like that happens, within the terms of the permit you receive to explore these places, you have to notify the authorities. I notified the UK coast guard, and they picked up the phone to the Chilean n­avy, and it was out of my hands. We could have gotten ourselves off the beach, absolutely no question. But the next thing you know, there was a Chilean navy ship coming down to rescue us. They sent the RIB over, and I went to see the captain on the ship, and he said: “We’ve come to rescue you. We’ll take the crew off, and we’ll take you wherever you want to go.”

I told him that I was not leaving my boat. I needed to get Novara off the beach. And he said, “I don’t have permission to do that.” Following approval, he agreed to pull us off the beach.

They had a massive winch on the ship. I mean it was huge, with a big reel of 4-inch-wide polypropylene line. We made a bridle, and they connected it to the back of the boat. The weight of the line alone pulled the boat off the beach. It wasn’t even tight. Novara was once again safely afloat. —TN

More Info

For information on the Novara One Planet mission, led by Nigel Jollands and Veronica Lysaght, and the multiyear, worldwide climate awareness project,
visit novara.world.

The post Wicked Weather: High Latitude Sailing Strategies appeared first on Cruising World.

My old mate Ronnie Simpson was on the phone, having just pulled into Halifax, Nova Scotia, after a short hop from Portland, Maine. It was the first week of September, and he was en route to A Coruña, Spain, aboard his newly renamed Open 50, Shipyard Brewing. On October 28, he would start the Global Solo Challenge—a nonstop, singlehanded round-the-world race with a rolling, pursuit-style start for boats from 32 to 60 feet. 

“We were seeing a lot of cyclonic ­activity,” he told me, describing the suddenly bustling North Atlantic ­tropical-weather picture. “I think it was the right decision.”

Knowing Ronnie, he’d definitely given it a lot of considerable thought. Because as I’d come to learn, he basically has one speed: fast forward, with dispatch. 

I’d last sailed with Ronnie almost exactly a year earlier, when he rolled into Newport, Rhode Island, aboard his new ride, then called Sparrow, at the outset of his campaign. We enjoyed a wild, windy outing in what he openly described as a training trip: “We’re doing a lot of ­learning here today.” 

And he was clear that he was ­competing in the Global Solo Challenge with a broader goal in mind: to win it and then find sponsorship for an Open 60 for the next running of the Vendée Globe race, in 2024. “If doing [the Global Solo Challenge] on an Open 50 was the endgame, I probably wouldn’t be here,” he’d said. “I consider this my shot for the Vendée. I don’t know why I’m so driven to do that race, but I wake up every day and I want to do it, and I go to sleep every night and I want to do it.” Understood. And, I must say, Ronnie’s track record for getting stuff accomplished is pretty stellar. 

I first met Ronnie in a professional sense, as his former editor here at Cruising World, where he chronicled his incredible journey as a sailor in a series of articles starting with a piece called “From Fallujah to Fiji.” It was a detailed account of a decade-long odyssey that began with his enlistment in the US Marine Corps just days after graduation from high school, and it recounted the day in Iraq when his Humvee came under attack and he was nearly blown to smithereens. 

Quite by accident (or was it fate?), he found solace in sailing. He bought a 41-foot cruising boat that he abandoned in a hurricane, and he purchased a ­succession of small boats aboard which he raced alone to Hawaii and later rambled across the Pacific to Hawaii. With that background, he became a pro sailor and rigger, and notched more than 130,000 nautical miles leading up to his entry in the Global Solo Challenge. 

After his visit to Newport this past year, he ambled down the East Coast and then knocked off his solo 2,000-nautical-mile qualifying sail, which concluded in Portland, Maine. There, all sorts of magic unfolded. 

He met a local girl named Marissa and fell in love. She introduced him to Fred Forsley, the CEO of Portland’s Shipyard Brewing Company, which agreed to become his title sponsor. At the Maine Yacht Center, run by accomplished fellow solo sailor Brian Harris, he knocked off a long list of projects, including major structural repairs, to get his 50-footer race-ready. 

“Brian and the whole staff at MYC made me feel like family. They were a massive help,” he says. “Shipyard Brewing has a long history of supporting returning veterans, going back to World War II. I found this amazing girlfriend, a perfect sponsor, a bunch of new friends and an awesome boatyard, all in Portland, where I plan to return after the race.” Wow. Maine, man. 

With his close association with the nonprofit veteran-affairs ­organization US Patriot Sailing (which owns Shipyard Brewing), Ronnie remains true to his beginnings. He could still use ­support. Interested parties can follow his ­voyage and contribute to his cause by visiting ronniesimpsonracing.com or ­uspatriotsailing.org. They all have a long way to go on such a worthwhile mission.

With that, the day after we spoke, Ronnie was back underway across the North Atlantic. The plan was pretty straightforward. He had places to go. He had races to crush. 

Herb McCormick is a CW editor-at-large.

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