Armor belt

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Would you take a wooden sailboat into the ice-filled waters of the Arctic? Circumnavigators Ellen and Seth Leonard will be doing just that. They are taking their cold-molded cutter Celeste to the Northwest Passage next year. But first Celeste spent some time at Platypus Marine in Port Angeles, Wash., where the Leonards had a fiberglass skin laid down over Celeste's wood strips and then added a waterline belt of armor like a dreadnought battleship. Except this armor wasn't plate steel to stop torpedoes but Kevlar cloth to prevent sharp surface ice from slashing Celeste's hull. Read more about Celeste's ice defenses and a sea trial in Alaska in the upcoming January issue of ON

By Ocean Navigator