Innholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2025 i Cruising World

My husband, Harry, and I spent 25 months cruising the Pacific Ocean. We returned to land at Bainbridge Island, Washington. Friends and family gathered on the dock to greet us. They rang cowbells, boomed a cannon and cheered when I expertly slalomed our 44-foot Mason, Oh Joy II, to the dock. It was an over-whelming experience, and that feeling didn’t fade for months. Before we departed on our adventure, we’d watched videos, movies and in-person presentations about cruising. We’d read books, magazine articles and other stories. We’d talked incessantly about our cruising plans with each other and with other cruisers. The preparation phase was rich and well-supported. But upon return, there was no guidance whatsoever. No videos with recommendations on how to transition back to land life. No sage advice…

When I bought my Down East 45, the shower in the aft state-room’s head drained directly into the bilge, where the boat’s regular bilge pump removed it. This is not a good setup, because even with the boat’s powerful automatic bilge pump that discharged the soapy water out of the side of the boat into the sea, there was always a small amount of residue left over. It soon began to smell. I considered fitting an automatic self-draining shower system at a cost of $200 or more. Then I thought about making one myself. These types of automatic shower drains are pretty simple. A small bilge pump is mounted inside a watertight container, along with a float switch. As the shower water runs into the container, the switch activates the…

The Hallberg-Rassy 57 is packed with redundant systems. It has a 24-volt lithium battery bank and a generator to feed it. There’s a high-output watermaker, practical and elegant accommodations and crew’s quarters, and tankage for more than a 1,000-mile cruising range. And on top of all that, the Hallberg-Rassy 57 was by far the most striking long-range voyager among 2024’s Boat of the Year entries. It’s a beauty of a sailboat. Designed by longtime Hallberg-Rassy collaborator Germán Frers, it’s the second largest in the builder’s seven-model range that spans 34 to 69 feet. Like Frers’ other recent Hallberg-Rassy designs, the 57 has a plumb bow, twin rudders, a modern sail rig and a beam carried aft to allow for more living space below. With a decked-out price tag approaching $2.8…

12 BOAT PEOPLE From the Bering Sea grind to Mexico boatyard dreams 14 SEAWORTHY Why the most difficult passage may be stepping back on land 18 ON WATCH Off-grid, no crowds: finding joy in remote anchorages A lone yacht carves its way through the cool, slate-blue waters off Scotland’s Shetland archipelago. Here, the North Atlantic rolls in unimpeded, and the landscape of steep green headlands, cliff-top sheep, and typically low clouds clinging to stone is as raw and cinematic as it gets. This is high-latitude cruising at its most elemental: no sunscreen required, but every sense rewarded. On page 42, Cruising World Editor-at-Large Herb McCormick takes readers aboard the Swan 68 Aphrodite for an unforgettable passage up Scotland’s Western Isles, from Kerrera to Skye and beyond. Through fogbanks, fortresslike cliffs…

I nurtured dreams of the Amazon as a kid growing up in rural Maine in the 1980s. What I saw on PBS documentaries and read in National Geographic at the library made Brazil feel as distant as the moon. Then I went to Bowdoin College, where I fell in love with the work of Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado. Later came beautiful films like City of God and Lower City, and images by photographer David Alan Harvey. These glimpses into different aspects of Brazil’s culture suggested layers of complexity I longed to explore. Motherhood forced me to set aside, albeit temporarily, my visions of remote river adventures, wild carnival nights and wandering Brazil’s streets with a camera. Brazil wasn’t on our immediate sailing route early in our family sailing adventures, either.…

There are three types of boats. The first includes every possible spare and piece of gear that might be used. The second has hardly anything at all. The third has essential spares and gear, but is not overstocked. I like to sail on the third kind of boat, with the essentials. I recently completed a safety-at-sea course whose list of gear was so exhaustive that its cost was depressing, and the equipment would overwhelm the stowage areas on any yacht. I thought about that list and the three long-distance ocean races that I competed in over the summer. I was amazed by how many pieces of equipment we used to solve small and large problems. All of this got me to thinking about which equipment is considered essential, and why.…

Having a few soft spots in the balsa-cored deck of your 50-plus-year-old sailboat is neither uncommon nor all that concerning. However, last season I noticed a not-to-subtle flex in the fore-deck of our Newport 41 when I was retrieving the anchor from particularly sticky mud. We’d had the foredeck reinforced from below in 2008, when we’d upgraded our anchor windlass after buying Kate, but now there were spongy areas underfoot. We decided to tackle the project ourselves. We bought an oscillating saw, a circular saw and a wet-dry vacuum. Then we booked a haul out at Penuwasa Shipyard in Kudat, Borneo, Malaysia. We took a deep breath, and we opened a proverbial can of worms. DEMO DAY Balsa wood has been the preferred material for cored deck construction for decades.…

Emerging from the mist like a craggy apparition, the sheer cliffs fronting the Scottish isle of Skye dramatically revealed themselves. We were motor-sailing aboard the Swan 68 Aphrodite from the nearby island of Rum, one of the so-called Small Isles of the country’s Inner Hebrides chain, and we’d already been forewarned that the coast of Skye would be scenic and remarkable. Now, here it was, in all its noble glory. And it was clear that the coming attractions had been spot-on. Tall granite peaks stood proudly against the sea. Rivulets of water spilled over the lofty plateaus until the spray coalesced into riveting waterfalls, one after the next. At sea level, along the weathered shore, relentless storms with accompanying seas had battered the coastline, as evidenced by the deep caves.…

It was one of those times when our world shrank to a dot, a little speck of green, impossible to find in the endless blue of the Pacific Ocean. You should know, there are moments we question our life choices. That’s when we go back and think of such times. This one, in particular, found us on a remote Fijian beach with a lone inhabitant: a man who belonged to the land and sea. The beach was pure—perfect, almost—like something that occasionally appears in dreams. Waves slapped against the sand in their usual rhythm, timeless and familiar, yet extraordinary in the context of today’s memories. The only footprints were our own. The only sounds, save for the sea, were the lowing of cows hidden in the hills and Yoda’s frantic chase…