North to Nome
With the changes in the Arctic, the Northwest Passage (NWP) is becoming an increasingly attractive trip to adventurous voyagers. In April 2020, I got a chance at making this famous journey when Matt Thomas, the owner of the 60-foot…
ocean voyaging
A steel ketch built for sea
Our boat Havaiki was a 35-ton steel ketch. She was 48 feet on deck and 59 feet overall with the bowsprit and a six-foot…
Yes, you can still get Dacron
Our new Ocean Voyager 2021 annual issue has an informative article by Jayme Okma Lee for which she interviewed sailors on three voyaging boats about the decisions they made in replacing their cruising sails. One of the sailors interviewed was the cruising…
The Magic of Landfall
So many of our words and expressions come from the world of ships and sailing: taken aback, by and large, hand over fist, a wide berth, a loose cannon, chock-a-block, and landfall. Landfall, to a seafarer, is the moment…
Optimizing Alternative Energy
A successful ocean voyage depends largely on the way we manage energy on our vessels, be it from the wind, the sun, the ocean, the auxiliary engine or a separate generator. As offshore sailors, our goal is to gain…
CCA names Randall Reeves 2020 medal winner
Never count out creative thinking for devising new ways to explore the planet and establish a record. Sailor Randall Reeves conceived of a new way to sail around the world.…
Notable New Titles — Plunge
Former liveaboard voyager and self-professed “citizen of the world,” Liesbet Collaert’s memoir Plunge is, like many other voyagers’ memoirs, an account of passages made, life aboard, dealing with gear failure, experiencing tropical beauty and a freedom tempered only by wind…
Float plan: an excellent safety tool
Filing a float plan is a valuable safety tool and its usefulness is regularly borne out by real incidents. Take the case of SV Bonobo. The owner filed a float plan with a friend regarding a voyage from Cozumel to…
A digital sextant
Sextants are wonderfully analog optical devices. A sextant user from the 1850s would have little problem using a modern sextant. Now a company in South Korea has begun offering something it calls the Korea Digital Sextant (KDS) that digitalizes…
Reports of aggressive killer whales
Orcas have battered sailboats off Spain and Portugal and the behavior of these large marine mammals has baffled experts. Sailors along Spain and Portugal’s Atlantic coastlines…
Snagged anchors and empty gas bottles
Every corner of the world’s oceans has their own peculiarities. The roving squalls of the equatorial Pacific, the steep winter seas of the stormy northern Atlantic, the dreaded gales of the Gulf of Tehuantepec and the magically flat waters…
Light in a pinch
Routes from Florida to the Bahamas are as short as 50 miles, but they all involve crossing the Gulf Stream and hopefully arriving during daylight hours and early enough to clear Customs. For most sailors, this means an evening or…
It’s not easy being green
How can it be that something you love to do makes you sick? The ocean is a fickle host, at times benevolent and mild, then obstreperous and cruel — often within moments of each other. One minute you’re in…
Scopolamine patches: strong medicine
The scopolamine transdermal patch is a prescription medicine and very effective in the prevention of nausea associated with seasickness and postoperative nausea. By 2017, worldwide sales of the drug surpassed $370 million and have grown since. As with most medications,…
Solo rower breaks ocean record
Power voyagers have engines, sailors have the wind and ocean rowers have … muscles. In mid-September, British solo rower Lia Ditton finished a…
During a pandemic, flexibility is key
The wheelhouse was scattered with guidebooks extolling the virtues and sites to behold in and around the Baltic — fjords in Sweden and Norway, Danish in Denmark, history-laden Poland, and enough lager to sink a barge in Germany. The chartplotters…
Into the Denmark Strait
The crew of the Arctic expedition sloop Aurora from left, Corinne Prevot, Ilka Hadlock, Keree Smith, Mary McIntyre (author), Camilla Edwards, Florence Gross, Marie Charpentier, Not pictured: Julia Olsen. Photobomb: Voychek, one of Aurora’s deckhands.
Seamanship & Navigation, September 2020
Preparing a sailing rig for going offshore For the voyaging sailboat, your rig is your primary propulsion when offshore and should be given top priority when preparing to go offshore. The rig you have been using on weekends may have…
