Residents of Greenport, N.Y., a small maritime village on the northeast end of Long Island, have been watching all sorts of sailing ships come and go over the past couple hundred years. There must be some sort of genetic memory of the commonplace in the locals because the presence of sailing craft, barques, yawls and sloops tying up at the village marina hardly elicits a buzz. On occasion though, when some vessel of rare beauty sails down the bay, the quotidian memory is erased and all eyes turn seaward. Adix is one of these rare sailing vessels: a three-masted schooner of such grace and elegance that even the most jaded are charmed.
Designed by South African Arthur Holgate and built of steel in Spain at the Astilleros de Mallorca shipyard in 1984, Adix was inspired by William Gardner’s three-masted schooner Atlantic, which in 1905 established the trans-Atlantic sailing record from Sandy Hook, N.J., to the Lizard Light. Atlantic’s time was 12 days, four hours, one minute and 19 seconds, with a fastest 24-hour run of 341 nautical miles at a speed of 14 knots. That record held until 1998.
Since its launching, Adix has had five refits costing millions of dollars. The vessel has been stretched, fitted with carbon-fiber spars, coddled, mollycoddled and fashioned with a new interior, decks and more.
Adix is gaff-rigged, measuring 183 feet on deck with a beam of 28 feet and a draft of 15 feet, and weighs in at 370 tonnes. The sail area is 13,800 square feet, increasing to 28,000 square feet for sailing downwind. It sails with 14 crew, and in a trans-Atlantic race with the schooner Windrose, it beat Atlantic’s record, taking 11 days and 10 hours to cover the distance.
Christened Jessica, Adix was bought in the mid-1980s by Alan Bond who named the yacht after his Australian beer company. Bond, an Australian businessman who later in his career served four years in jail for corporate fraud, might be better remembered for bankrolling Australia II in 1983 and winning the Americas Cup — the first time the New York Yacht Club had lost the trophy in more than 130 years. In 1989, he sold the vessel.
The latest owner of Adix, Jaime Botin, an heir to the Santander Banking Company of Spain, was arrested in 2015 for attempting to smuggle a Picasso painting out of the country aboard the schooner. The painting, “Head of a Young Woman” (1906), was seized by French authorities in Corsica in 2015. It was acquired by Botin in 1977 and is valued at $28 million. Cataloged as a national treasure, it cannot leave Spain under any circumstances. Botin’s trial began in November 2019.
We will have our captain do a morning sun line. We’ll use the 2020 Nautical Almanac and a height of eye of 15 feet, for a morning sun line on Feb. 3. We need to find the local mean time (LMT) of the observation and the Ho. Then, using HO 249, find the intercept and plot to find the estimated position. The GMT time of the lower limb observation of the sun is 02:25:15. The DR of Adix at the time is 22° 25’ S by 158° 53’ W. The Hs is 38° 40.9’.
A. What is LMT?
B. What is Ho?
C. What is the EP?
Answers
A. LMT is 12:57:15
B. Ho is 38° 52.2’
C. EP: 22° 25’ S, 158° 53’ W
