Antifreeze is a critical component in any liquid-cooled internal combustion engine that relies on a closed cooling system. It should be referred to as “coolant” because it does much more than prevent freezing.

In a closed cooling system, excess heat created by the engine is absorbed by the coolant and transferred, via a heat exchanger, to seawater and pumped overboard with the exhaust gases. From the 1930s through the 1990s, nearly all coolant used in applications like this was the familiar green ethylene glycol (referred to as IAT, or inorganic acid technology), which provided corrosion protection and circulator-pump lubrication, offered freeze prevention down to about minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit when mixed at a 50-50 ratio with water, and elevated the boiling point about 15 degrees Fahrenheit above that of ordinary water. Pressurized cooling systems, such as those on all modern diesel engines, also raise the boiling point; at 15 psi, the boiling point of ordinary water is 250 degrees Fahrenheit.

Today things are different, mostly in the realm of choice; there is a range of coolants from which to choose, ­including organic acid ­technology (OAT), hybrid ­organic acid technology (HOAT) and ­nitrided organic acid technology (NOAT), along with some proprietary coolants designed for specific engines. These formulations afford engines greater corrosion protection and longer coolant life. Then there’s color: In addition to green, there is blue, pink, orange and red, and while those colors might be indicative of a particular chemistry, it’s no guarantee.

Always follow the coolant instructions provided by your engine’s manufacturer, and never add coolant without knowing what’s there already. In an emergency, you are better off adding water (preferably distilled, but anything will do in a crisis) than the incorrect coolant. The primary mission of coolant is to prevent freezing, but if that’s not an issue, water will work just fine short-term.

When changing ­coolant, whether to a similar or different chemistry, plan on flushing the system to remove sediment and all traces of old coolant. Remember, conventional ethylene glycol is poisonous, so don’t leave uncovered containers out where they can be accessed by pets or children, and always clean up spills (it evaporates very slowly), and dispose of old coolant properly.

If you’ve decided to replace your coolant, you should once again do so in accordance with engine-manufacturer guidelines, and in the absence of those, about every 1,000 hours or three years. Unless the manufacturer specifies one of the above-mentioned more-modern varieties, most sail auxiliaries and gensets can use conventional IAT; however, it should be formulated for diesel-engine use.

Diesel engines, particularly those that rely on a “wet” cylinder—wherein the outside wall of each engine-cylinder liner is in direct contact with the coolant—can experience a phenomenon known as cavitation erosion, sometimes called ringing. At each power stroke, the cylinder bulges slightly and then rapidly contracts, creating a void or cavitation bubble that implodes violently, and in doing so, removes some metal from the liner. This all occurs on a microscopic basis and takes time for damage to occur, but after enough time passes, it can lead to cylinder-­liner leakage and failure. This is rare on sailboat auxiliaries, but why risk it? By using a high-quality diesel-rated coolant (these include anti-cavitation additives), and changing it regularly, you will all but eliminate this possibility. Supplemental anti-cavitation additives are also available, and these can be added on an annual or hours-based model.

If you are using a concentrate (that is, a coolant that requires the addition of water as opposed to one preformulated), be sure to mix with distilled water only. Do not use tap or bottled water. Water that contains minerals can leave scale deposits within the cooling system, thereby impeding heat transfer. Unless otherwise instructed by the manufacturer, the mix ratio should be 50-50 for the best balance of corrosion, freeze and boil protection, as well as heat transfer (pure distilled water can transfer more heat than coolant, which is why it’s undesirable to increase the coolant-to-water ratio beyond 50 percent). Anything under a 30 percent ratio of coolant can allow biological growth to form within the cooling system, especially on engines that are used infrequently. So stick with the 50-50 ratio for the best results.

RELATED: Sailboat Diesel Engine Analysis

Finally, if you’ve never checked the coolant concentration in your engine, you should do so, especially before winter layup. If the coolant concentration is too low, it will freeze, which could cause significant and possibly irreparable damage to the engine. While the “floating balls” test tool works for ethylene glycol, a refractometer is more accurate, and it’s applicable to all coolant types.

Steve D’Antonio offers services for boat owners and buyers through Steve D’Antonio Marine Consulting.

The post Monthly Maintenance: Diesel Engine Coolant appeared first on Cruising World.

Superyachts aren’t ­typically the first things that come to mind when terms such as “sustainable” or “environmentally responsible” get bandied about. But, as with many things related to building custom-designed boats, much hinges on the ­design brief.

Take, for example, ­Spirit Yachts’ magnificent-looking Spirit 111, which was commissioned with a brief that ­challenged the UK-based builder to create “a Tesla of the seas” while also ­embracing sustainability and stealthy eco-friendly features as its reasons to be. Much like ­upscale terrestrial Teslas, the ­Spirit 111, which was launched in 2019, achieved this lofty goal ­without compromising ­aesthetics, luxury appointments or sailing performance.

The Spirit 111′s sustainability efforts start with a hull that’s built using wood and epoxy on a stainless-steel space-age frame. “The research into materials and technologies was Spirit’s efforts,” explains Nigel Stuart, Spirit Yachts’ managing director. This began with timber selection. “The majority of the hull is made from ­Douglas fir from ­Canada, where the forests are ­tightly ­managed and heavily ­regulated.” These timbers were Forest ­Stewardship Council-­certified, and Spirit Yachts took the ­additional step of ­conducting ­one-on-one conversations with foresters and timber-mill operators to thoroughly vet the supply chain.

While “green” epoxies weren’t readily available during the Spirit 111′s build, Spirit Yachts found other important ways to channel Elon Musk-like thinking. These include four BMW-built 40-kilowatt-­hour lithium-ion batteries and a 100 kW Torqeedo-built electric motor that—while the yacht is sailing—harnesses the Spirit 111′s spinning prop and drive shaft to repower the ­batteries using regeneration.

“At the time of the build, the drive system was a new product for Torqeedo, and it was designed for Spirit but with other yachts also in mind,” Stuart says. Since then, Torqeedo added this drive to its standard menu, ­meaning that the Spirit 111 project helped spur a next-generation product for other similarly minded owners and builders.

Lighting and air ­conditioning represent greedy power draws aboard most ­superyachts, but Spirit Yachts employed LED ­lighting, ­motion detectors, a variable-­speed air-conditioning ­system, and a smart control system (think Nest thermostats) to trim electrical consumption where possible. “The system is smart by turning off ­unwanted lights automatically,” says ­Stuart, adding that the yacht’s sensors detect where sailors are and provide appropriate lighting.

The combination of a smart system and ­variable-speed air-conditioning ­equipment means that the Spirit 111 can comfortably operate at ­anchor for up to four days ­without having to power up its twin 25 kW generators. Cooler still, the Spirit 111 can cross the Atlantic Ocean ­without ­consuming any fossil fuels, provided, of course, that there’s wind to ­power the yacht’s 4,843-­square-foot sail plan, which is comprised of OneSails’ 4T Forte sails that are built using ­recycled sailcloth and handled by ­energy-efficient Lewmar ­hydraulic hardware. If there’s wind and the yacht’s underway, the crew just has to activate its regeneration system.

Given that the Spirit 111′s owner plans to ­extensively cruise and race the yacht, ­sailing performance was ­another important key to the project’s success. “The ­percentage of drag is around 5 percent,” Stuart says, ­explaining details about the regeneration system.

“As well as sustainability, central to the brief was the creation of a beautiful yacht with clean lines and hidden eco-features—hence no ­solar panels or wind turbines,” ­Stuart continues, drawing ­further comparisons between the sleek look of a Tesla and the Spirit 111. “The prop can generate far more kilowatts of power than wind or solar, so solar panels and wind turbines weren’t used.”

Finally, the Spirit 111 was fitted with an energy-efficient Webasto on-demand hot-­water system, and Penguin Refrigeration’s ­UK-designed fridges and ­freezers that use highly efficient ­Cryogel ­insulation to keep the ­Chardonnay chilled and the gelato frozen, without having to overly tax the yacht’s lithium-­ion batteries or fire up the generators.

Mix elegant design with innovative gear, and you can still live large while sailing green.

David Schmidt is CW’s electronics editor and occasionally reports on other topics from his home base in the Pacific Northwest.

The post Sail Green: Spirit 111 appeared first on Cruising World.

I have been messing about on boats for more years than I care to remember, but it still never ceases to amaze me how many new things you learn when you restore an old boat. One example: Who knew that the ceiling on a boat is not the ceiling at all? “Ceilings” are those wooden slats often fitted by manufacturers on cabin sides, most frequently in a fo’c’sle. The correct nautical term for the actual roof (i.e., ceiling) of the cabin is “overhead.”

I learned these archaic snippets (whose only value are in impressing fellow mariners) when I decided to renovate the forward cabin of my 1977 Down East 45 schooner, Britannia. The cabin was still covered with 40-year-old ­faded foam-backed vinyl, much of it in rotten, smelly condition, and all the woodwork needed revarnishing, if not a complete replacement.

Nautical expressions can get somewhat confusing when referring to ceilings, which are really slats, and roofs, which are overheads. So for this article I decided to use common terms. “Roof” means the underside of the fiberglass deck that forms the actual roof of the cabin, and also includes the underside of the lower deck, forward of the bunks. “Slats” are the teak strips on the sides of the hull. “Side” means the sides of the cabin, both the lower sloping sides with the slats, and also the upper sides with the port lights in them.

Teak slats might look nice, but they are extremely difficult to clean behind and can trap dust and mildew. I therefore decided to remove all 22 of these 2-by-½-inch-thick strips from the sides, and replace them with easy-to-clean hygienic plastic sheeting. With six plugged screws securing each slat to the hull ribs, that was a lot of unscrewing—132 screws, to be precise! After the sides had been washed, an immediate improvement was that the cabin appeared larger, even though it had actually been widened by only a little over an inch.

I then cut out all the dirty vinyl covering on the sides and roof, which was glued and stapled to the fiberglass deck. I removed three port lights—two on the starboard side and one to port—then temporarily sealed the outside with duct tape to try to keep any rain out until I could reinstall them after I had fitted the new plastic side coverings.

Anyone who works on boats knows it is usually much easier to strip things out than to rebuild them, and this project was no exception. After cutting out all the dirty vinyl, I then made templates by taping sheets of foam art board together, then cutting and adding bits to form the exact shape of each side. Then I traced the template on a plastic sheet on the marina dock. Plas-Tex plastic sheet comes in 4-by-8-foot panels about 1/16-inch thick. It is very pliable, waterproof and washable, yet easily trimmed with scissors and a box cutter. It is sold by Lowe’s hardware store at $20 per sheet. I used a total of five sheets.

I glued the panels to each side of the hull using contact adhesive on the side ribs and battens that run along the top of the cabin. I used gel-type ­adhesive because it is not stringy and doesn’t drip like the regular sort. This is particularly important when applying glue upside down. I screwed a teak batten along the bottom of the sheet, which stopped it from sagging between the ribs.

With the lower panels in place, I then made templates for the upper sides, which curve around the shape of the deck. These were larger than the lower sides and more difficult to glue underneath. Reinstalling the port lights helped to keep the large side panels in place.

The largest and final piece of Plas-Tex had to be glued to the forward underside of the roof. I made the template by taping the art boards to the roof with masking tape to hold them in place while I trimmed and added pieces where required.

RELATED: Restoring Your Gelcoat

After cutting a plastic sheet to shape, I pre-glued the fiberglass roof and the plastic. Sticking it up after about 10 minutes was a delicate once-off operation because contact adhesive sticks—as its name suggests—on contact. I lay on my back while my wife slid the large sticky sheet over me, and I carefully placed it where I had made marks from the template. It was became a question of “push it up and hope,” and then pressing it in place with arms and legs while the glue made contact. I then made props to hold the sheet in place while the glue hardened.

I had originally trimmed the sheets to overlap each other by about half an inch. This enabled me to score through both overlapping layers at the same time, using a box cutter with a sharp new blade. I then stripped off the top layer and peeled away the inside layer, leaving a perfect butt joint between the two pieces. It was just a matter of cleaning excess glue with solvent.

I cut other teak trim pieces from the slats I had removed, varnished them, then glued them to cover the joints ­between the sides and roof.

There were also two ­sections that needed covering in the roof of the cabin, between the deck beams and around the hatch. For this I used the same tongue-and-groove plastic boards I had used throughout the rest of the boat. It is called plank paneling and is PVC planking used as wainscot panels on house walls. Each board is 7 inches wide and ¼-inch thick and comes in a pack of three boards, each 8 feet long, for $20 from Lowe’s. It’s reversible; one is molded with two strips and the other with three thinner strips. I decided to use the two-strip side. An important benefit, particularly on a boat, is the rot- and mildew-free lifetime guarantee, along with the ability to wash it with soap and water. I had also found that the thickness gave better thermal insulation from the hot deck compared with thin vinyl. I measured and trimmed these panels individually to accommodate any unevenness between the deck beams, then slotted them into the previous panel, and discreetly nailed them to the wooden beads that had supported the original vinyl. I needed only one pack to ­complete this small area.

These improvements made the cabin appear much larger than before because the dark wood slats tended to bring the sides inward. It is also brighter and much easier to clean.

I added a second 12-volt dome light to provide better light into this cabin. I also wired two 120-volt sconce lights and connected both systems to a double switch mounted near the door. This is a much more practical method than groping in the dark for the tiny overhead dome-light switches.

There are two hanging lockers, one to each side, that had been varnished with multiple layers over the years. I removed both locker doors, along with the pin rails around the shelf tops. I also removed the cabin door and the chain locker door and framework, along with four sliding drawers. I took them home to restore in my garage. The locker sides and tops had to be stripped in situ with varnish remover, then scraped down to the original teak. This was then cleaned with teak cleaner and given two coats of satin varnish, which brought out the beautiful golden tones of the wood. The inside of the lockers was then painted white.

As part of the renovation, I wondered what to do about the imitation-teak laminate shelf covering on top of the lockers. These were not scratched or damaged because Formica laminate is very resilient, but they had lost their luster over time. After experimenting with a small section, I decided to varnish them with clear gloss varnish. I cleaned the laminate with soap and water, then slapped on a liberal coat of clear gloss with a 2-inch brush. I then left the tops untouched for a week so the varnish could thoroughly dry to a hard finish. It set to a fine, smooth, shiny finish with the advantage that when it gets scratched—which it undoubtedly will—it will be easy to retouch with a dab of new varnish.

I then reinstalled the freshly varnished pin rails around the edges of the shelves. But instead of the square corners, which the original pin rail had, I made rounded corners out of spare wood. These look much nicer, but more important, they are not as painful when you bump your arm against them as the boat rolls.

We had taken the foam bunks to our home to wash the covers. When everything was replaced, we found ourselves with a pristine new double cabin. It had not cost a lot of money, if you don’t count the effort—but it was all worth it.

Costs

Serial DIYer Roger Hughes is a frequent contributor to Cruising World. See more of Britannia’s renovation projects at schooner-britannia.com.

The post Forward Cabin Makeover appeared first on Cruising World.

Any sailor with even the mildest case of wanderlust has gazed longingly at the gentle curve of a tabletop globe, tracing imaginary routes from their hometowns to faraway ports with the tips of their fingers. For West Coast sailors, these lines are likely to lead south; perhaps meandering along Baja’s rugged Pacific coast and turning the corner at Cabo San Lucas, headed for a place where the water is said to be bluer, the air warmer, the fish just a bit more colorful.

This magical place, of course, is the Sea of Cortez. And if that narrow strip of water tucked between mainland Mexico’s Sonoran Desert and the Baja’s beckoning finger is, in fact, the setting of your cruising daydreams, then you are in luck, because exploring the sea has never been easier. After all, we live in a time when every bit of information necessary for an extended sailing ­journey—from downloadable charts and safety guides to ­anecdotal what-to-expect articles—is just a quick Google search away.

This wealth of easily accessible information has made traveling around the Sea of Cortez, by sailboat or otherwise, not only easier, but far more popular. Tourism has been steadily rising for years. While this growing popularity has boosted local economies and allowed for more people to experience the beauty of Mexico’s most ecologically diverse body of water, increasing international traffic has also put a strain on the natural environment, potentially putting the very things that have drawn so many of us to the sea at risk.

My impression of the Sea of Cortez, ­after my family’s first cruising season there nearly three years ago, was that it was a body of water absolutely brimming with life. It did not take long for me to realize how skewed my perception was by my unfamiliarity with the environment and its history. Seasoned cruisers were quick to inform me that while the sea is still home to an exceptional quantity of wildlife, the decline just over their lifetimes has been evident and indisputable.

I spent many hours of that first winter lying in the sun on the foredeck, fantasizing about the wonders these sailors were fortunate enough to witness in the earlier years of traveling. As a 19-year-old on the first leg of what hopefully will be a lifetime of voyaging, I was saddened by the thought that I may have already missed out on the golden years of cruising, when our oceans were still healthy and flourishing. Sadder still was the thought of what the sea could look like in the next five to 10 years, when I hope to return on my own sailboat.

Will it still be legal—or possible—to fish in the Sea of Cortez? I would wonder, as the Mexican sun beat down on my skin. Will this place that I have come to know and love so much even be recognizable in 10 years? And what could I possibly do to make sure that it is? While these doubts might be discounted as the overdramatic musings of a teenage girl, there are many people in Mexico—and the world over—asking the very same questions.

Cruisers and the Sea

I was lucky enough to meet a few of these like-minded people this past spring, when a small group from the organization Grupo de Ecología y Conservación de Islas, A.C. came to San Carlos, Mexico, to speak to cruisers about how we can help keep the Sea of Cortez the pristine place we all know and love. They showed up in San Carlos with a presentation but no plan for where or when it would take place. With the help of the local cruising community, in less than a week the group was able to find a suitable venue and get the word out about the impromptu event.

When my brother and I walked into the bar where the talk was taking place, the owner had to grab extra seats from the outdoor dining area and shuffle the audience around just so we could sit down. The room was packed. When the presentation began, people in the audience asked questions and scribbled down notes. Cruisers shared stories of their own experiences with fishing regulations, protected areas and invasive species.

The speakers, who were mostly unfamiliar with the cruising lifestyle, reacted with curiosity and gratitude for the insights and fresh perspectives. The audience expressed their equally abundant gratitude by staying after the talk to chat with the presenters. It seemed as though every boat owner within 100 miles was not only present at the event, but also engaged, concerned and eager to learn more about the state of their beloved sea.

I walked away feeling hopeful and inspired. I had learned a great deal about the surrounding ecosystem and my place in it. But more important, I had learned that other sailors genuinely care about the changes going on in the water beneath their hulls. Inspired by this realization, I decided to share Conservación de Islas’ message with the broader sailing ­community. The result is a cruising guide of sorts, written not for your benefit, fellow cruiser, but for the benefit of your future cruiser grandbabies.

Beware of Hitchhikers

Rats and other unwelcome stowaways are a danger to more than sailors’ sanity when cruising in the Sea of Cortez. Invasive rodents, as well as seeds from certain invasive plants, pose a tremendous threat to the biodiversity of the sea’s many islands. One well-known invasive rodent is the black rat. Also known as the “ship rat,” these pesky little hitchhikers have been the cause of many a gray hair for sailors for hundreds of years. If you happen to find and catch a rat aboard your vessel, however, think twice before tossing it overboard in triumphant glee. Black rats are incredibly resilient and can swim up to a mile in open water. If they make it to an island, they are likely to throw off the delicate balance of their new ecosystem by preying on native seabirds.

My initial assumption after learning about the ship rat’s diet of choice was that sea life would flourish in response to a decrease in these predatory birds. It turns out, the opposite is true. The nutrient-rich guano produced by seabirds makes up an essential part of the underwater food chain. When there is less guano making its way into the sea, small fish that rely on it lose a vital food source and begin to die off. When little fish disappear, bigger fish—the ones we like to eat—are always close behind.

Sadly, the best way to safely get rid of rats is to kill them. The thought of ending a rat’s life might be unpleasant, but far more animals are put at risk when invasive rodents take up residence in island habitats.

RELATED: Sailing Totem: Cruising Untethered in the Sea of Cortez

Not all invasive species make their presence known when hitching a ride on your vessel. Invasive plant seeds can find their way from the mainland to islands by silently clinging to the bottom of an unwitting sailor’s shoes. Once their roots are set in island soil, invasive plants compete with native flora for resources, often crowding them out completely and limiting the food supply of native herbivores. The invasive buffel grass, commonly found throughout the Sonoran Desert, spreads quickly, ­creating grasslands that not only lack biodiversity, but also increase the risk of wildfires in areas where they would otherwise be rare. Conservación de Islas recommends keeping a mat on deck or in your dinghy so that it is easy to wipe seeds off your shoes before stepping onto islands or back onto your vessel.

Invasive marine invertebrates (think mussels and barnacles) often make their way to new environments by hitching rides on sailboat hulls and in ballast tanks. Make sure to give the entire underside of your vessel a good cleaning, and empty your ballast tank—if you have one—­before entering Mexican waters to avoid transporting invertebrates from your home port to foreign environments.

The eradication of invasive species is a tedious and resource-intensive process. It is up to those who frequent the islands in the Sea of Cortez—cruisers being at the top of this list—to take preventative measures that will eliminate the need for eradication in the long run. A simple rule that sailors can follow is to bring as little as possible onto the islands we visit and leave nothing behind. This includes food scraps, such as orange peels and apple cores, that might be a source of food for invasive rodents.

Think Before You Fish

Remember that fishing ­regulations are in place for a reason. Marine protected areas were created to give ecosystems a chance to recover from the effects of overfishing and coastal development. While it’s true that sailors have played a relatively small part in the overfishing that has wreaked havoc on the Sea of Cortez, we can be respectful visitors by adhering to the regulations put in place to reverse its effects.

Over the six months I have spent island hopping in the Sea of Cortez, not once have I seen fishing regulations being enforced. Mexico’s environmental protection agency, Procuraduría Federal de Protección al Ambiente, is underfunded and spread incredibly thin when it comes to enforcing environmental law. As cruisers, we can help them out by making a conscious effort to remain aware of the laws as we make our way from anchorage to anchorage. One way to educate yourself is to talk to an official about the fishing regulations on the islands you plan to visit. Before visiting any of the sea’s protected islands, you’ll need to buy a permit at a Comisión Nacional de Áreas Naturales Protegidas office in either La Paz or Loreto, which provides the perfect opportunity to pick an environmental expert’s brain. They will have plenty of useful information and should be more than willing to share it.

If you enter the Sea of Cortez with so much as a single fish hook aboard your vessel, you will need to purchase a fishing license. This allows line fishermen to catch 10 fish per person per day. When fishing underwater with a spear gun or sling, this number goes down to five per person.

For most of us, this is a pretty generous limit. But it is important to note that stricter limits are placed on a few specific species: dorado, roosterfish, shad or tarpon, and gulf grouper. These have limits of two fish per person per day. And if you are lucky enough to catch any of these fish, it will count as five toward your daily 10-fish limit.

Visitors are also prohibited from catching mollusks and shellfish such as lobsters, mussels and clams. Unlike the catch limits on fin fish, some cruisers find this law harder to obey. Maybe the information is not known widely enough, or perhaps it’s hard for some to resist the urge to discreetly pick lobsters off the rocks when snorkeling. Regardless, it is an important rule to follow. Shellfish, as is much of the marine life in the Sea of Cortez, are in steep decline thanks to our hefty appetite for seafood.

There are no limits placed on catch-and-release fishing, as long as the fish are returned to the water in good shape. Even if you are not practicing catch-and-release, it is best to release fish that have not reached maturity. This gives them the opportunity to reproduce, helping to keep fish populations level over long periods of time. Become familiar with the average full-size length of the fish you catch most often, and stick to keeping only the fish that have clearly reached that length.

All the islands in the Sea of Cortez are protected and managed by CONANP, and have their own set of fishing restrictions. The use of spear guns and slings is prohibited in island waters. Line fishing is allowed in most areas on the islands, with a few exceptions. There are, though, no-take zones, where no fishing of any kind is allowed.

It is easy to get caught up in the ­excitement of reeling in a fish once the tug-of-war match has begun. Before you pull out the knife and start planning your fish taco dinner, stop and think about your catch. Have you reached your limit? Is the fish mature? Has it had a chance to reproduce? Are you in a no-take zone? If, after a moment of contemplation, you decide that the fish would do more for the sea than your dinner plate, consider releasing it.

When it comes to shrinking the collective cruising footprint, doing your part is relatively straightforward. In my eyes, it boils down to a simple combination of using common sense and staying informed. These tips are just a few examples of the countless ways we can work on treading lightly while voyaging. Do some Googling and get creative. Few stretches of coast on our blue planet are safe from the harmful effects of overfishing and invasive species, not to mention plastic pollution, coastal development and climate change. Researching location-specific environmental issues should be common practice when preparing for voyages anywhere in the world, not just in the Sea of Cortez.

One of the beautiful things about life at sea is the sense of accountability that comes along with being almost entirely off-grid. The illusory veil separating human life from the ocean is lifted by the cruising lifestyle. Being a steward of the sea can hardly be called activism by those of us drawn to a life afloat. Instead, we should recognize it as our job to protect the places we hold dear, in the hope that the coming generation may inherit the same sense of awe and wonder we feel every time we spin that tabletop globe.

Laura Belichak grew up sailing and surfing in Northern California, and after high school moved part time with her family aboard their Catalina 400, Circe, to spend the next four years cruising the Sea of Cortez. She is in the process of preparing her own boat, a Cal 2-27 named Wild, for her own extending sailing adventure. You can follow her at ­ livingthewildway.com.

The post A Green Guide for the Sea of Cortez appeared first on Cruising World.

The germ might not have sprouted on the Spanish Camino de Santiago in June 2013, but it found fertile ground there. By bicycle we were traversing the 1,000-year-old pilgrim’s route to the mythical crypt of St. James, and on crossing into Celtic Galicia, where the landscape starts feeling witchy, we both realized we wanted to travel more deeply along Europe’s outpost edges. We’d each lived in European capitals before, but now we wanted to dwell in places still older than those: not Madrid but Catalonia, not Paris but Brittany, not Dublin but Connemara.

Cycling was a great way to travel deeply in foreign countries, and we proved to ourselves that even in remote places, we could fix flat tires and adjust cables as simple mechanisms faltered. But our scope was ultimately limited by the twin 20-liter paniers each bike carried, and that revelation soon set us off to thinking about sailboats for some extended traveling. After many months exploring the yacht-brokerage market, in fall 2017 on Florida’s Atlantic coast, we found the right boat for our project: a 1988 Passport 40, designed by Robert Perry. She was Hull No. 141 of the 148 P-40s built in Taiwan between 1980 and 1991, and we named her Billy Pilgrim—a nod to our own peregrinations but also to the Kurt Vonnegut character who came unstuck in time. He or she; never they: Billy P abides gender fluidity but abhors sloppy grammar.

Porthole Project

The Punch List

The Passport 40 was perfect for us in a hundred different ways. Still, there’s no getting around Billy Pilgrim’s 30 years of living. We knew that a shakedown would reveal items to update and refit. Sure enough, by the time we sailed from Florida to our home port in New England, we loved Billy P all the more, despite a pressing short list of shortcomings. One category earned its place at the top of the list: leaks. Fixing those became our priority when we hauled the boat for winter at Maine Yacht Center in Portland.

Tim has worked through boat problems before. As a teenager, he slept aboard his family’s liveaboard CT-41 ketch surrounded by Tupperware to catch the downpours from a leaky cabin top. Since then he’s partially refit a 1974 Vineyard Vixen 29 (see “A Jade Mist Dream Come True,” CW, October 1998). Lesley’s experience with boat ownership was limited to a fleet of kayaks and a 1985 Boston Whaler 15. She’s owned homes built more than a century ago and knows that when you address one problem, you inevitably uncover others, and that sometimes it seems best to just leave the damned dominoes alone rather than set off the whole series. Still, this particular home would also be oceangoing, so it was clear that some projects couldn’t be ignored forever. We went into the refit as enthusiastic amateur marine technicians, eager to learn. Yet the more we got into it, the more we realized there are some things the eight-hour-a-day guys know that we didn’t even know we didn’t yet know.

We determined that unwanted water was coming into the boat from three sources: portholes, chainplates and hatches. The process for stopping the leaks at each source suggested the same steps: Remove the items without damaging vital parts; keep track of what went where; and re-bed the parts snugly so that they don’t start leaking again.

One crucial choice stood over every part we removed: Repair it or replace it?

Re-bedding Portholes

On examination, the gaskets that seal the glass lens in the porthole frames weren’t compromised, nor were the frames themselves. Water was instead leaking in through the cabin house around the edges of the porthole assembly. We determined that five of our 10 portholes needed re-bedding: one on either side of the V-berth, two portside in the galley, and one above the starboard settee.

Each Hood porthole assembly comes in two parts. Installed from inside the cabin is the body of the porthole, which comprises the glass lens, stainless-steel frame, hinges, and a flange that protrudes from inside to the exterior. Outside the cabin, a flat trim ring fits over the protruding flange and provides surface area for sealant. Both the frame and trim ring are secured with wood screws into the plywood cabin side and are bedded in marine adhesive sealant.

Removing the wood screws was straightforward enough. But in order to remove the porthole, we had to break the seal of the 30-year-old sealant without damaging either the stainless fittings or the cabin sides. It may have been crusty and leaky, but it sure didn’t want to let go! We rank amateurs started by using a series of putty knives, screwdrivers and pry bars, working around the edges of the frame, slipping in the blades to loosen the sealant, and prying to get it to release from the cabin side, while at the same time trying not to scrape up the surface or bend the stainless trim ring. A slender putty knife with a certain amount of stiffness worked best to get under the edge and move around the trim ring’s circumference to break the seal. After our initial trials, one of the trained professionals at Maine Yacht Center came by to offer advice and provide us with a selection of small wooden wedges to replace our metal tools when we’d broken the seal. We were now able to move our tools and break the bond on another section.

Once the exterior trim ring came off, we had to break the seal on the porthole flange inside the boat. To do this, we started from the outside by bonking the flange toward the interior with a rubber mallet, trying to move it evenly so that the porthole would slide out at the same angle it had been inserted through the hull—challenging because we were still working against the ancient sealant. Our first porthole removal was not entirely elegant. Some of the melamine surface inside the cabin got a little chipped, but we hadn’t ruined anything vital. One down, four to go!

For the remaining portholes, our friends at Maine Yacht Center provided us with a simple custom-made porthole puller: a wooden contraption that looks kind of like an old-school vise with two feet. Using the puller, you still have to break the seal of the old goo under the trim ring. That done, you put the two feet of the puller against the interior cabin side and the other end against the outside edge of the flange; then you torque the nuts of the two bolts, thereby pushing it toward the inside of the boat. This was a revelation, a process far tidier than our bonking method.

With the portholes removed, now it was time to clean up the surfaces before reinstalling them. Both the porthole assemblies and the cabin-side holes through which they pass needed some work. The water that had seeped in had made a mess of things.

So we cleaned up all the nasty debris, using sandpaper and a stiff brush to get any loose chunks off, then we sealed all the plywood edges of the cutouts with thickened West System epoxy. In the worst spots we applied polyester filler with a putty knife, taking care not to alter the shape of the hole. On the stainless-­steel porthole assemblies we used a wire brush, sandpaper and even a Dremel tool in the spots that showed some pitting corrosion. All cleaned up, our parts were ready to be installed.

One charming moment came upon removing our second porthole, when a little note fell out of the cabin side. In Mandarin, we later learned, it read, “Good luck for selling your boat.” It was a sweet surprise to hear from one of the souls in Taiwan who had built our boat decades before.

We now needed to be very clear about two things. One was labeling. All the portholes we’d removed looked like they were the same size and shape. That wasn’t exactly true, but it was important that everything got labeled, to a kind of ridiculous extent. The second thing came before we started with the re-bedding: We vigilantly covered everything. We taped all edges religiously; we had tons of gloves and rags easily accessible; we covered any nearby surface with cardboard or plastic.

For our marine adhesive sealant, we used white UV-resistant Sikaflex Marine 295. Working with this stuff is ­basically like working with the insides of a well-toasted marshmallow. We tried hard not to get it on anything; once cured, it’s a nightmare to get off. So we taped around the work area, leaving about a quarter-inch gap to make a nice fillet around the edge of the frame or trim ring. We kept a trash bag ready to receive all of the nasty we were about to produce. We squeezed generous gobs of Sikaflex on all the parts (not just the backs of the trim rings, but also inside the tubular part of the porthole flange that protrudes through the cabin side) so that when we fastened them back into place, an ample amount oozed out the entire perimeter. This was our proof that the sealant filled all the voids where water might be tempted to leak in. Then we secured the trim rings and frames with new stainless-steel wood screws. With a clean gloved finger we made a nice fillet around each edge. Before it cured, we carefully pulled our tape, leaving an elegant arc of sealant between cabin side and stainless plate. This is really a four-handed job so that one person can remain goo-free and can clean the stainless with water-soaked rags. Our final step was to clean up all the unintended Sikaflex before it set and then gaze with pride. The fine white line of that fillet was the only visible sign of all our work.

Chainplate Project

Re-bedding the Chainplates

Chainplates are hidden workhorses. Before this project, Lesley hadn’t really been conscious of their existence. Ours are flat strips of stainless steel that pass through the deck. Below deck, they’re through-bolted to structural members massively laminated to the hull. Above deck is a hole in the chainplate through which the shroud terminals are pinned. These unsexy but crucial pieces of steel carry all the dynamic sailing loads, holding up the mast against all the forces from the sails and the waves.

On each side, the Passport 40 has four shrouds and therefore four chainplates. Capping the hole in the deck through which each chainplate passes is a flat, thin, rectangular steel cover; the receiving end of the chainplate sticks up through a slit in this cover. It looks kind of like a light-switch cover about 1/16-inch thick and mounts flat on the deck. Because the Passport has 4-inch bulwarks around the deck perimeter, seawater or rainwater sometimes stands deeper than these chainplate covers. It’s a recipe for leaks and crevice corrosion. Once we determined that we’d need to pull and re-bed all eight chainplates, we decided it might be a good time to add an upgrade: a step or a riser, which would raise the deck cover above the level of soaking saltwater pools. This presented us with a design project.

Inside the cabin, we removed the teak cladding that conceals the chainplates. Next, we carefully removed and labeled all of the grounding wires that were attached for galvanic bonding. Because these showed 30 years of corrosion, Tim replaced all the ring terminals and sealed them with heat-shrink tubing. Then we removed the nuts, washers and bolts from the chainplates. On deck, we removed the cover plates, which were attached with sealant and wood screws into the deck. Finally, we had to wiggle the chainplates out of their slot through the deck. Of course, inside the boat the chainplates are located in one awkward place or another: inside cabinetry in the head, behind other cabinetry in a hanging locker, or in the saloon. Each set of bolts required a different set of yogic contortions to access, but we are fortunate in that Lesley is right-handed and Tim’s a lefty, giving us options for any configuration. In several places we could read a nasty tale of leaked water. We had to release the grip of the old sealant and slide the chainplates up through the deck without distorting them. Our rubber mallet and some more bonking from above helped to free them. We again labeled everything compulsively, cleaned up any water damage, and gave white surfaces some fresh coats of paint.

Lesley made paper templates to create new risers from 3/8-inch fiberglass sheet—higher than standing water but not so high as to introduce toe-stubbers. In this new configuration, the screws that hold the deck covers in place would no longer penetrate the deck or sit in standing water, diminishing the likelihood of new leaks. Lesley cut out the risers on a band saw, then rounded the corners with a sander and sprayed each with Awlgrip. The new risers are a thing of beauty, and now the plates and their fasteners sit well above any standing water on deck.

When it came time to reinstall, we had to make a decision about how removable the new risers would be. Should we bed them to the deck with epoxy (­permanent) or Sikaflex (removable with a bit of ­effort)? What kind of legacy were we leaving for the imaginary future owners of Billy Pilgrim if they were ever going to re-bed or replace their chainplates? The Trained Professionals we consulted strongly advocated for Sikaflex, not epoxy, and we followed their advice. After ­examining the chainplates to ensure that they were still sound (they were), we refastened them with all new stainless-­steel bolts, washers and nuts. This step presented some puzzles to detangle. Some bolts originally ran from fore to aft and others from aft to fore in order to fit inside the teak cladding. In some places it seemed like the interior furniture was built around the chainplates when the boat was built in Taiwan, and it took some fiddling around before we got everything snugly in its original place, bolts tightened and grounding wires reattached. Now we were ready to reseal from above.

We made a dam underneath each hole that the chainplates traveled through on the deck using 3M Strip-Calk butyl tape—the Trained Professionals call it dum-dum tape—which comes on a roll and is basically the consistency of chewed gum. This way enough Sikaflex can be injected to fill in the gaps, but the Sikaflex won’t drip into the whole cavity under the deck. From above we taped around the risers, as we’d done with the portholes. Next we squeezed Sikaflex to fill the hole around the chainplates, covered the ­bottom of the new risers so that it oozed out all sides to seal that bond, then covered the bottom of the steel deck plates to seal them onto the risers. Finally, we fastened the deck plates with stainless-­steel wood screws, which no longer penetrated the deck. One less opportunity for water to come in!

Replacing and Installing New Hatches

The last of our three leak-eradicating jobs was perhaps the most straightforward: hatches. Billy Pilgrim has four—two big, two small—all made by Atkins & Hoyle in the mid-1980s. The aluminum struts had collapsed on themselves, and we sometimes found little chunks of powdered aluminum in the V-berth sheets. Previous owners kept these hatches open with wooden blocks, a proposition that always bespoke smashed fingers. More ­consequentially, the aluminum frames of two of the hatches were cracked—not a case for re-bedding or repair but rather full-on replacement.

Hatch Project

For the past 20 years, Tim has either directed or judged Cruising World’s Boat of the Year event, giving him the chance to see and sail more than 500 new sailboats, as well as the gear that’s installed on them. That experience led him to prefer Lewmar Ocean series hatches, both for their security and user-friendliness. And no more wooden blocks to hold open the hatches.

Removing the old hatches was very much like removing the portholes and employed many of the same tools. Same goes for cleaning up the surfaces on which the hatches sit.

The main puzzle this job posed was that the frames of the Ocean hatches are slightly smaller than the composite bosses that are molded into the boat’s deck. We fashioned a solution from a ½-inch-thick flat marine plywood, finished off in the same way Lesley finished the chainplate risers. For each hatch, we cut out a piece whose outside perimeter matched the outside edge of the boss, and whose inside cutout matched the inside of the hatch frame. We used wood screws and Sikaflex to fasten them—no more aluminum powder in the bed!

Better still, no more unwanted water in the boat.

Billy Pilgrim has a permanent mooring in Gloucester, Massachusetts, but spent the COVID-19 summer of 2020 hauled out at Maine Yacht Center in Portland, Maine, where Lesley Davison and Tim Murphy visited on self-quarantined day trips so that work could progress.

The post Sailboat Refit for a Transatlantic appeared first on Cruising World.

Not so very long ago, in a South Pacific anchorage, I watched a neighboring boat of three young cruisers going about their daily routine. Their 28-foot classic-plastic yacht looked as though it had been in a head-on collision with the watersports department at REI. Dive gear hung off every available inch of lifeline, a menagerie of floaty toys bobbed happily alongside. One crewmate was unsuccessfully attempting to launch a kiteboard off the stern while another filmed his efforts with a drone. As I watched, I couldn’t help but feel a mixed sense of amusement and pride. These guys epitomized my generation; they were millennial cruisers.

My husband, Robin (age 35), and I (30) have been cruising together for five years. In that time, we’ve met and interviewed scores of millennials for Waterborne, our website for 20- to 40-year-old sailors. In collecting their stories, we’ve found several common themes that typify how millennials are going about cruising today.

Old Boats, Young Salts

Millennials have less disposable cash, making boat purchases and cruising a financial challenge. According to a 2017 analysis of Federal Reserve data, today’s young people earn 20 percent less than their parents did at the same age and have 50 percent the net worth. Fortunately, our generation has inherited a vast supply of old fiberglass hulls. Of the young cruisers I’ve met, 95 percent own pre-1980s boats. While not the most mechanically inclined generation, millennials learn to make repairs by watching YouTube videos and, over the course of a year or two, get their boats cruise-ready.

One such couple, Ruth and Garrett Jolly, both 24 years old, in the search for their dream cruising boat, bought, refitted, sailed and sold six old boats! “We’d find these old boats on the chopping block for free or a couple thousand bucks,” Garrett told me. “It wouldn’t necessarily be the boat that we wanted, but I couldn’t stand to see it destroyed. We’d just put in labor and reclaimed lumber, not really spend any money, and turn them around for a profit.”

In the search for their “perfect” boat, the Jollys ultimately decided to build one from scratch—a 35-foot George Buehler ketch—in the mountains along the Columbia River.

Their advice for young cruisers: “If you think you’re interested in the ocean, the best way to find out for sure is to get out on the ocean. It doesn’t need to be scary, because you start hanging out with people and you get pumped.” Follow along with their adventures at saltandtar.org.

Charter, Borrow, Hitch

Other young cruisers are doing away with owning a boat altogether. For a generation accustomed to Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms, Airbnb and Uber, owning an asset that can cost thousands of dollars a year is less appealing than renting, borrowing or riding along.

Ian Drogin, a 28-year-old California native, along with his brother and three friends, chartered Hellenic Sky, a Bavaria 44, for a two-and-a-half month sailing and rock-climbing expedition in the Greek Islands.

“I think a lot of people have this idea of sailing being a luxury sport for the rich, but the way we did it seemed very financially manageable. Adventures are not as hard as you think. They’re actually pretty accessible,” he says.

Drogin estimates that the total cost of his trip was $2,500 to $4,000 per person, a fraction of what it would cost to purchase and outfit a boat for a similar adventure. You can find out more at iandrogin.com.

Even more financially friendly is boat-hiking. We’ve met dozens of young cruisers who are seeing the world by jumping from boat to boat. Boat-hiking opportunities seem to range from paying your way to all expenses paid.

Two hitchhiking experts, Mariusz Honka and Maciek Badziak, both 27, began their trip in Poland—with almost no sailing experience. They have since boat-hiked across the Atlantic and Pacific without spending a dime on accommodations or transportation, proving that you don’t need a boat to sail the world; you can just thumb it!

Their advice to those looking to hitch a ride: “Skippers prioritize good people over good sailors. Because of that, the most important thing is to have a positive attitude and an open mind. Do your research, get a little knowledge about ­sailing, but don’t hesitate too long. Adventure is waiting for you!”

Hacking the Cruising Life

Steeped in tech and startup nomenclature, most millennials are familiar with the idea of life hacking: employing tricks, shortcuts or skills that increase productivity or efficiency. Millennial sailors apply this hacker’s mentality to many aspects of cruising. For example, they tend to opt for satellite communications over a single-sideband radio, choose multiple redundant/independent electronic charts over paper ones, and many prefer an iPad for navigation to a marine chart plotter. The majority have sailed for only a year or two before embarking on multiyear cruising trips. While young cruisers have a healthy respect for the ocean and their own limitations, they happily embrace hacks that get them cruising quicker and cheaper.

One good example is Mark Miele, 37, and Eden Yelland, 34, who, with little previous on-water experience, bought a trawler with their savings. As Miele put it, “We ended up with a trawler because we were looking to avoid the learning curve of sailing.” Six months later they left Victoria, Canada, bound for La Paz, Mexico, and became, they believe, the first people to make this journey in a 36-foot Universal Europa Sedan, proving the boat’s long-distance cruising ability.

They told me that they wouldn’t have been able to figure out the ins and outs of boats and cruising without the internet and YouTube. They said that they learned almost everything from one or the other.

Boaty Base Camp

Sailing for sailing’s sake is great, but young cruisers also think of their boats as a base camp, or a vehicle that serves as a platform for adventure sports. From rock climbing the rugged shores of Greenland to freediving in the Tuamotus, millennials aren’t content to sit and read a book on the boat all day.

Two Swiss brothers, Alexandre, 31, and David Giovannini, 29, recently navigated the Northwest Passage in Bonavalette, their 1979 Dufour 35. The trip was sponsored in part by Swiss cheese-maker Le Gruyère AOP—an excellent excuse for fondue on an iceberg!

Both avid kiteboarders, they were determined to ride in one of the world’s most extreme environments. After donning survival suits, one brother flew the kite in the frigid waters of a small cove while the other sat in the dinghy looking out for polar bears.

“One thing we learned along the way is that while it’s great to just sail, your boat can also give you access to remote places where you can hike, climb, kiteboard or dive,” David says. “Some of our best experiences have been in places where we were the only boat in the anchorage.”

After this adventuresome duo successfully transited the Northwest Passage, they went on to kiteboard the warmer (and polar-bear-free) waters of the South Pacific. You can follow their adventures (in French) at Bonavalette Autourdumonde (facebook.com/­bonavalette.autourdumonde).

Says Alexandre: “I think preparation is the most important thing. You don’t need an expensive boat, but it’s important to do lots of research. We were able to complete the Northwest Passage in a small fiberglass boat because we spent a lot of time preparing ourselves and the boat before we left.”

A Thousand Words

We have yet to meet a young cruiser who isn’t vlogging, blogging, photo journaling or writing a book about their cruise. At times, documenting a trip seems to absorb as much if not more time than actual sailing. Of course, it’s only natural that our generation’s fascination with media would extend to sharing stories about sailing and life aboard.

One top-notch example of sailing documentary is Canadian cinematographer Guillaume Beaudoin’s current project, Across the Salty Roads (facebook.com/acrossthesaltyroads/). The 34-year-old Beaudoin has just completed a boat-hiking trip across the Pacific, filming community-driven ocean-conservation projects. He told me that while he likes sailing, his real passion is storytelling. “Sailing to me is not about the number of miles I’ve covered; it’s about meeting new people, discovering new places, and sharing their stories.”

His advice for storytelling? “It’s important to understand the pros and cons of documenting your trip. The upside is, you’re going to get to go deeper into communities, go places you would never otherwise get to go. The downside is you have equipment to worry about and always have to work. So, you’re not as free as if you had gone on an adventure without filming it.”

From drone-flying digital nomads to cruiser/climber adventurers, it’s exciting to see my generation develop a unique take on seeing the world by sail, and adding to cruising’s rich heritage of adventure, community and appreciation of the ocean. Undoubtedly, it will all be different 10 years from now, but I’d like to think that millennials will leave some mark on cruising culture, making it even more attractive and accessible for the next generation of sailors.

Fiona McGlynn is a freelance writer who ­recently cruised from Vancouver to Australia on a Dufour 35. McGlynn also runs ­waterbornemag.com, a website devoted to millennial sailing culture.

The post Young and Restless: Cruising Millennial Style appeared first on Cruising World.

Zanzibar: the very name evokes exotic images of sultans, spices and 18th century explorers. I was traveling in Africa with my brother Dan, and it was time for him to head back to California—but I couldn’t go home without a quick visit to Zanzibar, an archipelago off the coast of Tanzania. I was so close, and I doubted that I would ever sail there aboard my own boat. My guidebook talked about beaches, ­restaurants, hotels and history, but the photos of the traditional sailing craft were what really hooked me—somehow, I was ­going to sail a dhow.

The plane landed in the dark, and I was whisked off to a hotel in the heart of Zanzibar City, a crumbling collection of Arab- and Indian-inspired old buildings that remind one of Old Havana. My driver insisted on escorting me all the way to the hotel office; I later learned that this wasn’t because of crime, but rather that there are no street signs. He assumed (correctly) that I would have gotten hopelessly lost in the night.

The many people I met over the next few days on this mostly Muslim island were poor but kind, and delighted to exchange a few words of simple Swahili or English with a clueless foreigner. Jambo, habari? (hello, how are you?) is a great icebreaker.

For close to a millennium, the dhow was the primary mode of transportation for Zanzibaris, providing vital trade and establishing Zanzibar City as the hub of commerce between mainland Africa and the Middle East. The stout craft are ­constructed of mahogany, teak and ­whatever else is available; are usually ­between 30 and 40 feet long, with a draft of around 3 feet; and have a ­wooden Bimini over a poop deck with a low waist. There is only one small ­marina on the islands, so visiting yachts are rare and usually anchor out. Most of the dhows anchor offshore and back their sterns to the beach to load cargo and passengers.

I arranged a ride through Eco+Culture Tours, a local company that donates a portion of their profits to community-­development initiatives. At the beach the next morning, I was introduced to Capt. Ahmed and his mate, Hafi, who welcomed me aboard Cima, and then they quickly prepared to get underway. Soon the Yamaha fired up, the grapnel was weighed, and we were off.

Once clear of the anchorage, the crew hung the rudder and tiller off the transom, released the ties on the long gaff of the lateen rig, and hit the engine kill switch. We were sailing now! I explained to Ahmed that I’m a sailor from the US, and his eyes lit up. “Would you like to steer the boat?” he asked.

“Yes, sir. I thought you’d never ask!” And he gladly handed over the tiller. It was the end of dry season, the winds were blowing gently from the south, and the boat tracked beautifully, cruising along at about 5 knots.

Most dhows carry only life jackets and an outboard engine. There were no modern navigational instruments, electronics or running lights. Sailing was by line of sight, and the bilge was emptied with a bucket. In short, the boat hasn’t changed much in 1,000 years.

We were bound for Changuu, aka Prison Island, once used as a detention center for rebellious slaves and then as a quarantine station for yellow fever. I enjoyed a sublime half-hour at the helm until it was time to bring her into the wind and drop the hook.

After a quick tour of the island, we were back on board for the return trip. The wind had veered, and I learned of the dhow’s primary shortcoming: the keelless boats don’t sail to weather. I asked Ahmed for a primer on tacking. “It’s much work,” he said, then went through an abstract explanation that I had difficulty grasping as he started up the outboard.

All too soon my time was up. Waiting for the airport taxi in Forodhani Gardens I took a last look out at the ­harbor and the timeless dhows drifting back and forth, grateful for my time here in this magical place.

The post Sailing a Dhow in Zanzibar appeared first on Cruising World.

The first lesson that I learned about ­Pacific Northwest sailing ­after moving here from New ­England in 2009 was that Puget Sound doesn’t get much breeze in the summer. The second was that it’s crucial to keep a constant vigil for logs and large branches. Worse still are deadheads. Having ­attended more than my share of Grateful Dead concerts, I thought I had a good pulse on the latter, but my third lesson was that—in Pacific Northwest vernacular—deadheads refer to logs or entire trees (and root balls) that have taken on so much water that they float vertically, often revealing only a few precious inches of freeboard. Unlike the tie-dyed variety, these deadheads can wreak havoc on hulls. ­Eleven years in, I’ve had ­numerous close calls, and I try not to think about the near misses that went unnoticed.

Fortunately, cutting-edge technology now exists that mitigates the danger of ­hitting myriad obstacles that are ­increasingly found at sea.

While mariners have ­fretted about collisions since ­humankind first took to the ­water, ­recent years have seen a ­massive uptick both in global shipping of containers, which can sometimes wash overboard, and all sorts of ­other debris. At the same time, a growing number of sailors are exploring the high latitudes, where they encounter icebergs and bergy bits. Then, there’s the jaw-dropping speeds that are being achieved by modern racing and foiling yachts, including IMOCA 60s and the massive 100-plus-foot ­Ultim trimarans, which regularly exceed 30 knots and 45 knots, respectively. Even “average” cruising boats sail faster ­today than years ago thanks to their ­progressively ­longer waterlines, ­modern sail plans, and improved weather-­routing ­capabilities. This ­bolstered performance—from record-­setters to family cruisers—is a good thing, but it reduces reaction time if a crewmember spots something in the water.

Tackling the problem head-on, BSB Marine has developed its Oscar collision-avoidance system, which uses daylight and thermal-imaging cameras, ­artificial intelligence, deep learning, and machine vision to make sailors aware of navigational hazards and give them enough time to make course corrections. Cooler still, some Oscar systems can autonomously control the boat’s autopilot to change course (see below).

In terms of hardware, all Oscar systems consist of a ­vision unit that has three masthead-mounted ­cameras, a belowdecks-mounted ­central processing unit, and a ­dedicated app to monitor and control the gear.

The vision unit weighs less than 2 pounds and houses two FLIR-built Boson thermal-­imaging camera cores, as well as one color (red, green, blue or RGB) daylight camera. The thermal-imaging cameras deliver a horizontal field of view of 50 to 123 degrees, and a ­vertical field of view of 32 to 71 degrees, depending on the model; higher-end systems use higher-resolution thermal imagers and can operate at ­longer ranges. The RGB camera offers a 120-degree horizontal view and a 96-degree vertical coverage. With these cameras, developers say Oscar can detect and identify objects in its video stream that are just 4-by-4 pixels.

Aboard a sailboat, the vision unit is mounted on an articulating bracket and can adjust for mast rotation. The unit also has an inertial measurement unit that electronically stabilizes the cameras’ real-time imagery, which is shared with the CPU via an Ethernet cable that is run inside the mast.

The CPU is a black-box computer that employs ­machine-vision algorithms and embedded AI to analyze and inspect the incoming video stream in search of dangerous objects. Oscar determines the target’s location and proximity to the vessel based on the camera’s known position and orientation in space, and—when available—it also uses the ­horizon as a reference point.

“Oscar takes pictures and synchronizes them with the [stabilizer] and CPU, and ­determines what’s ­water and what’s not,” explains ­Raphael Biancale, BSB Marine’s co-founder. “Oscar tries to identify objects based on their picture, and it locates objects around the boat over ­several frames to determine their speed and direction. Then it calculates the probability of collision.”

In addition to its hardware, Oscar includes an Android-, iOS- and Windows-friendly app, which can reside on a PC, smartphone, tablet or—thanks to the system’s NMEA-2000 compatibility—chart ­plotter. The app provides a visual ­reference depicting where a target or multiple targets are on a radar-range-like graphical screen, and it delivers AIS-like information, including the target’s speed, bearing and closest-point-of-approach data. Additionally, the app can ­trigger onboard alarms, ­warning of detected targets.

Each Oscar set leaves the factory with an AI ­system trained at using an image ­database of 50,000,000 (and counting) images. These ­images range from common ­objects such as ships, yachts and aids to navigation, to ­myriad ­marine species, to ­specific nonwater targets such as ­sargassum seaweed. The ­database also includes ­images of the ­water in all sea states, weather conditions and lighting (daytime and moonlight) ­scenarios. Oscar uses its onboard AI to compare ­detected targets with this database to determine what each object is and the threat level that it poses. ­Additionally, BSB ­Marine has partnered with ­several high-­profile ocean-­racing teams that record all of their Oscar-captured ­video ­imagery, which they share with the company once they’re back ashore. Once received, BSB Marine carefully labels, ­annotates, and compiles this information and updates all Oscar users’ image databases.

Then, each Oscar system’s ability to identify targets improves as it spends time at sea thanks to its AI and embedded deep-learning capability. ­Oscar, for instance, knows what ferries look like, and it “learns” to recognize them from ­different angles and distances, and in various sea states, ­temperatures and lighting conditions. ­Newfound “knowledge”—much like the data that’s gathered by racing teams—is shared with other Oscar users to help improve the systems’ abilities to recognize objects and minimize false alarms. ­According to Biancale, racing crews might see one false alarm per 24 hours, while cruisers might trigger an alarm every few days.

“Identification is valuable,” Biancale says, noting that sleeping whales behave differently than semisubmerged shipping containers or buoys and other aids to navigation. “You need to predict where the whale will go,” he says.

Once Oscar identifies a ­target in its video stream, its AI starts working. “It looks for any disturbance in the water,” Biancale says. “Oscar detects anything that’s different than the water background, which is known. It tries to detect things that aren’t in the database.” Regardless of ­whether a spotted target is in its ­database, Oscar is designed to ­either alert its crew to its presence so that they can ­manually confirm a course ­correction or, if interfaced with an ­autopilot, evade the object.

BSB Marine is ­marketing four versions of Oscar to ­sailors, starting with its top-of-the-line system that’s ­currently in use aboard high-­performance ocean-racing yachts, including IMOCA 60s and Ultims. Oscar Custom Sailing is a fully ­loaded system that employs dual high-resolution FLIR-built thermal-­imaging cameras with a ­target-detection range of up to 3,040 feet. Given the speeds that IMOCA 60s and Ultims regularly tick off and the fact that 3,040 feet buys only 40 to 60 seconds of warning ­before a collision, this high-end ­system autonomously controls the boat’s autopilot system. Once Oscar detects a target, the system performs its identification and filtration work in one second, and it takes an ­additional 2 seconds to ­adjust the autopilot’s heading to a safer course.

Biancale notes that grand-prix-level autopilots are always planning an escape route, say if the boat gets hit with an ­unexpected wind shift or off-kilter wave, and this same functionality helps the boat avoid a crash gybe if Oscar ­detects a target while the boat is broad reaching or running close to dead downwind.

The Oscar Advanced 640 also employs dual ­high-­resolution FLIR-built thermal-­imaging cameras, but they have a somewhat smaller field of view. They still deliver a target-detection range of up to 3,040 feet.

The Oscar Advanced 320 delivers the same autonomous autopilot controls and daylight camera as BSM Marine’s other Oscar systems, but it uses lower-resolution FLIR cameras. The result is a system that delivers a range of up to 1,970 feet, making it suitable for sailboats in the 50- to 80-foot range. At 10 knots, a boat will take 1 minute, 56 seconds to sail this distance.

The cruiser-friendly Oscar One 320 system is also available, and Biancale says it uses the same daylight RGB camera as the other Oscar systems and the FLIR thermal-­imaging cameras that are found on the Oscar Advanced 320, with a maximum range of 1,970 feet. The difference, however, involves what happens once the system detects a target. Instead of autonomously changing the autopilot’s course, this system will instead sound alarms and require the ­skipper or crew to confirm a target via the app before ordering the autopilot to change course. While this might sound like a smaller margin of error, it’s important to remember the speeds involved: At 7 knots, a sailboat takes 2 minutes, 46 seconds to travel 1,970 feet, which should be ample time for a crew that’s maintaining a proper watch to respond to the app’s alarm and course-­correction request on their phone, computer or plotter.

While Oscar’s advantages are easy to spot for anyone who has dodged Pacific Northwest deadheads or debris en route to Bermuda, its ­disadvantages are harder to spy. There’s cost, of course—systems start at about $15,000—but this becomes quite reasonable when compared with the price of a serious fiberglass repair job or an “opportunity” to test out the life raft (or worse). One could also argue that the masthead cameras and Ethernet cable in the spar add weight aloft, though not much: The ­cameras and bracket weigh less than 2 pounds, and the cable weighs roughly 1.1 pounds per 30 feet. If weight is indeed critical, lighter halyards could be ­purchased to compensate.

That said, it’s important to remember that Oscar is ­designed for offshore use, not for carrying a full press of ­canvas into San Francisco Bay or the Port of New York and New Jersey. “There’s no limit to the number of targets that Oscar can detect, but there’s a ­limit to the number that it can evade,” Biancale says, adding that the system can simultaneously dodge “several” targets.

One consideration, ­however, is that Oscar is an optical-based system, and its cameras are beholden to the laws of physics. For example, Oscar’s daylight RGB camera suffers from a blind spot created by direct sunlight. While this isn’t an issue for the system’s thermal-imaging ­cameras, these cameras don’t work well in thick fog or rain.

That said, if you’re outfitting a bluewater vessel for a transoceanic cruise, Oscar makes a lot of sense, especially when shorthanded watches, ­limited sleep and habitually tired eyes are involved. As for spotting deadheads, BSB Marine’s ­database includes this imagery, freeing sailors to instead use their binoculars to enjoy the panorama around them.

David Schmidt is CW’s electronics editor.

Collateral Losses

Given the sheer scale of international shipping and commerce, it should come as no surprise that some goods get lost in transit. The problem, of course, is that when ships lose cargo, they aren’t accidentally dropping a single shoebox of, say, Nike sneakers. Rather, they’re losing entire shipping containers of goods. While some lucky beachcombers occasionally find washed-up plunder, these wayward containers have the potential—if encountered at the wrong time and angle—to quickly sink boats. And while the world’s oceans contain a heck of a lot of real estate, experts estimate that between 1,400 and 15,000 shipping containers are lost annually. But, notes BSB Marine on a frequently asked questions page: “Containers are either floating or sinking but do not remain in shallow depth because the two stable positions are either floating, when the container mass-to-volume is less than 1 kilogram per liter, or sinking if it is above 1 kilogram per liter. You can experience it by putting objects in a glass of water; trying to have anything just below the surface is next to impossible.”

While this doesn’t ­absolve these navigational dangers—or their environmental impacts—it does mean that if there’s a container bow on, Oscar can detect it.

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It has been our pattern ever since we began cruising on Ganymede, a home-finished Cape George 31 cutter, to take the already simple systems we began with and simplify them further. And so, the motorcycle battery first used to start the outboard got chucked in favor of pulling the cord; the fuel now lives in a 5-gallon Mexican fabric-softener jug with a hole cut in it for a hose (it actually leaks and smells less than the OEM tank); the hand pump for lamp oil is in a junk heap in a Colombian boatyard. The list goes on: Suffice it to say that nearly everything is simpler and has fewer moving parts than when we began. Only one boat ­system, in fact, has become more complicated, and that was by necessity.

For the first several years of our cruise, when we were exploring Central and South America, in some of the places we explored, our sanitation strategy—the tried-and-true rubber bucket—was positively space-age. And in locales with more-modern conveniences, the strict injunction to use designated pump-out stations was made ironic by the complete absence of such facilities. I look forward to the day when every harbor has a pump-out facility, and coastal cities no longer dump sewage straight into the water. But these are the times we live in, and that was the situation in the spots where we cruised.

Returning to the United States, however, presented a new challenge. Here there are designated pump-out facilities, and the dutiful sailor will want to avail himself of them, for the good of everyone. And so, seeing we were going to cruise in home waters for some time, I installed a holding tank and a porcelain toilet. There being nowhere else to put it, the holding tank went in the tiny head cubicle, in the place where we used to hang foul-weather gear and stash the laundry basket. The biggest advantage of having it there is that there’s a very short run of hose from the head to the tank—the plumbing doesn’t pass under people’s bunks or through any bulkheads and is 100 percent accessible. Another advantage is that the 20-gallon tank takes up so much room that on really rough nights, there’s no chance of falling off the toilet because you’re wedged in pretty tight. It might not be comfortable, but who goes to sea for that anyway?

I have always wanted a Wilcox-Crittenden “Skipper” head, the one with a cast-bronze body and oh-so-elegant pump handle. Sadly, they’re no longer made, and if they were, there simply wouldn’t have been room on our boat. My No. 2 choice was the Lavac, largely because it seems the simplest, most trouble-free marine head out there. Also, being able to mount the pump separately from the toilet was necessary due to the space restrictions I’ve already mentioned. I mounted the pump on the bulkhead above, which was perfect for the children, who could stand on the closed lid of the head and pull on the handle to their hearts’ content.

Now, however much space a 20-gallon holding tank uses up, it’s not really all that big when five people are contributing, and we had to find a pump-out station pretty frequently. Also, since the system was closed—there were as yet no through-hulls at all in Ganymede—the only way we could self-empty the holding tank was to adapt a spare hand pump to the deck fitting, drop a hose over the side, and pump overboard that way. Definitely not for the faint of heart, and too ­acrobatic to do out at sea in any kind of weather. Clearly more plumbing was needed.

I had avoided putting any through-hulls at all in Ganymede when I built her, for the simple reason that I dislike and distrust them. However well-made and well-installed, there’s no denying that they make for a weak link ­below the waterline, and hose connections with clamps are a common point of failure and raise the potential for sinking. But there was no denying that some sort of outlet would be needed if we wanted to cruise offshore or in foreign lands again, and a water inlet would be nice as well: So far we had been pouring water into the bowl in order to flush.

Still, I couldn’t bring myself to use regular bronze through-hulls and seacocks. I mean, a sailor has to sleep at night! Instead, I ordered some lengths of thick-walled fiberglass pipe from ­McMaster-Carr. Then with the boat on the hard, I cut a hole for the larger-diameter pipe on one side of the bilge sump, and a smaller hole on the other side. Now the inlet and outlet sides would be separated by the entire full keel of the boat; there was no chance of sucking back in something that had just been pumped out.

Since fiberglass tube isn’t flexible, I took some careful measurements with T-bevels to ensure that the pipe joints would go where I wanted them, then cut the pipes and glued the joints back together with thickened epoxy glue. I was careful to make the outlet pipe have the straightest run, without unnecessary twists and turns. The inlet pipe crossed over from the opposite side of the bilge before turning up to parallel the other one.

It took some careful dry-fitting and fine-tuning before I was comfortable with the setup, but once it all looked good, I put the large pipe in place and held it there with some fiberglass pipe straps I’d made using the pipe itself as a mold. And just for good measure, I squeezed some glue onto the straps so they’d never come off the pipe. Then, making sure the pipe and the hole in Ganymede were thickly coated in thickened epoxy as well, I tabbed the pipe firmly to the inside of the hull with some scraps of biaxial carbon fiber.

It didn’t take long, and before the first phase was cured, I fit and tabbed the inlet pipe in a similar fashion. Because it spans a large distance inside the bilge sump, I glued a support strut halfway along, just in case someone were to drop something really heavy down there, though that would require some serious acrobatics.

On the outside, all I had to do once the glue dried was sand the protruding pipes flush with the hull and make sure I got antifouling up inside as far as the brush could reach.

Ganymede’s bilge sump, though easily accessible for cleaning and inspection, has never been pretty. It just wasn’t on my list of things to beautify during the construction. But now that there had been so much grinding in there anyway, it seemed a shame not to tidy it up a little. And so I sanded—with 80-grit by hand wherever a machine couldn’t reach—then primed and applied gray Bilgekote. It still isn’t pretty, I’ll admit, but it’s all a uniform color, and it’s got less dirt-trapping hollows. It’ll have to do.

At the upper end of the pipes I had installed Marelon ball valves—something I might not have been comfortable with if they were beneath the waterline. But as it is, they’re a couple of feet above it, which means I can take them off, with the boat in the water if necessary, to service or change them. I could probably have done without them entirely, but I wanted an easy means of sealing the pipes in case the siphon breaks failed. You never can be too careful with plumbing.

As with everything on a small boat, it took some careful arranging to get all the hoses, valves, siphon breaks and other fittings to fit peaceably together. Since Ganymede hadn’t been designed with all that plumbing in mind, there was nowhere to hide it out of sight—it’s all just out in the open, looking more as though it grew there, vine-like, than was placed on purpose. The advantage of that, though, is that the Y-valve can be operated and the filter changed without grubbing about in a dark cupboard, and all maintenance is easily done without the usual contortions.

Well, there it is: The one boat system on Ganymede that has become more complex rather than simpler. And while I grudge the expense and the space that it all takes up, I must admit that a porcelain toilet is far more classy and convenient than the old rubber bucket. So no, I don’t regret it—I just hope the rest of the world catches up and installs pump-out stations soon.

Boatbuilder and writer Ben Zartman is a frequent contributor to CW

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By now, of course, we’ve all come to realize that the COVID-19 pandemic has upended the world in ways previously unimaginable, and as we go into the first uncertain winter with the coronavirus, nobody knows what lies ahead. One of the ways in which our lives have changed is the way in which we consume sports—admittedly a small item in the grand scheme of things. But sports have always been important to me, going far back to my own athletic career, the highlight of which was captaining my college football team (back in those ancient times when the ball was a rock, but still….).

Despite COVID-19, the NBA and MLB somehow made it through successful (if abbreviated) seasons. In years past, I would’ve been on my seat devouring the NBA Finals and the World Series, but not this year. Watching sports played in empty stadiums and arenas, for me at least, holds little appeal; it makes for passable reality television but holds little emotion compared with epic games played before real, packed houses.

But this month—at least at press time—a competitive sporting contest was scheduled to get underway on November 9 that I am well and truly looking forward to: the ninth edition of the anything-goes, wild-and-woolly quadrennial Vendée Globe singlehanded around-the-world race. (One notable change for 2020: The pre-race “village” in Les Sables-d’Olonne, which in a normal year attracts tens of thousands of rabid fans, was basically scrapped.)

Think about it: Marathon, offshore solo yacht racing is pretty much the perfect game for a pandemic. You can’t get much more “socially distanced” than alone on a sailboat somewhere between Australia and Antarctica. And modern technology—using real-time tracking software, high-quality video and images from the far Southern Ocean, daily first-person blogs and reports from the skippers, and more—makes following the race not only possible, but also highly interactive and entertaining.

The race itself, now contested in skittish, outlandish IMOCA 60s, many with foils to add thrills, speed and sleepless nights—they are the undisputed answer to the question of what is the scariest, loudest, most uncomfortable sailboat on any ocean—provides plenty of drama in its own right. If past editions are any indication, there will be no shortage of casualties, crashes, rescues and retirements; it’s like a waterborne NASCAR race, with the added degree of difficulty of never stopping and lasting a few months. You need to check the “I’m nuts” box before even contemplating a Vendée campaign.

The sport of solo long-­distance racing was actually invented in the 1960s by a crew of what became household names in Merry Old England, where it originated: Chichester, Hasler, Knox-Johnston and the like. That all changed, basically, when a couple of Frenchmen from across the English Channel—the equally legendary Bernard Moitessier and Eric Tabarly—threw their watch caps into the ring and showed the fine tea-drinking chaps a thing or two.

Today, the sport is ­completely dominated by the French, where it’s every bit as big as football and basketball in this country: Every Vendée has been won by a Frenchman. Twice, however, an English sailor has almost barged in the door: In 1990, Michel “The Professor” Desjoyeaux was the winner, but a wee British lass named Ellen MacArthur was right behind him, and stole the show. And in the last race, charismatic Englishman Alex Thomson darn near pulled off an upset, also finishing second.

Thomson is a veteran campaigner who has sailed a string of boats called Hugo Boss, titled after his menswear sponsor. He’s well-known for YouTube stunts such as climbing his mast on a steep heel in a tailored suit and diving into the sea, but he’s also one helluva sailor. He’s back again this year, probably his last swing at a Vendée victory after multiple attempts, and is one of the prohibitive favorites. But there are plenty of great stories sprinkled through the fleet of 33 entrants, including a half-dozen skilled and ­dauntless women skippers.

Let’s face it, the pandemic has made many if not most of us landlocked to a high degree. And in almost every circumstance, I’d rather be on a bike or a stroll than parked behind a computer screen more than I already am. But this Vendée should provide a salty smack in the kisser or two, even if it’s a virtual one. Though from afar, I’m fully planning to hook in and hang on.

Herb McCormick is CW’s executive editor.

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