Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2015 i Soundings

Capt. Pat Mundus grew up in Montauk, New York, at the east end of Long Island. The daughter of legendary shark hunter Frank Mundus (said to be the inspiration for the character Quint in the movie Jaws), she spent much of her childhood afloat and, after high school, shipped off to the Caribbean for a few years to crew sailboats and yachts. In 1981 she graduated from SUNY Maritime College-Fort Schuyler. Mundus spent 17 years as an Exxon oil tanker deck officer, running ships in North America and the Middle East. She retired in 1997 and spent a decade restoring her ketch, Surprise, now part of a charter fleet she operates from Greenport, New York (eastendcharters.com). She sails south each winter to the Bahamas and was most recently honored as…

Standing behind one of the steering wheels of the world’s most outrageous monohull racing yacht, you have to squint to read the instrument displays on the mast. The most important number is the one on the top: boat speed. And it read 10.2 knots. A joke. On any other boat that’s cause for celebration, given that the wind speed on Block Island Sound was in the single digits. But aboard Comanche it felt like dragging the hook. For a speed machine that guzzles wind like an old Chevy guzzles gas, an anemic breeze is the mortal enemy. If winning is this yacht’s primary purpose, it also condemns her to rewriting the record books using the tried-and-true recipe: a long waterline and power, power, power. That’s Physics 101, really. And it’s…

It’s 2:30 a.m. when a ringing phone jolts a Maryland Natural Resources Police officer awake. A 25-foot cuddy with five adults aboard has run into a jetty off Deale, Maryland. He’s told to respond; there are critical injuries and fatalities. Outside in the dark, a south wind is howling on Chesapeake Bay at 25 to 30 knots, whipping up a long, angry fetch of 3- to 4-foot waves. With 25 miles of angriness between him and the scene, the last thing the officer wants to worry about is whether his patrol boat is up to the task. For life-and-death missions such as this, and for its more run-ofthe-mill operations, NRP maintains a fleet of 130 boats, from 14-foot jonboats to a 40-foot diesel-powered aluminum patrol boat. For 20 years the…

With deepwater frontage on Boston Harbor and southerly views across to Boston Islands National Park, Charles and Linda Gargill feel as if they are living in paradise. “This is a lovely location — a quiet residential neighborhood off the main street and a five-minute walk from [the shops, services and restaurants of] downtown Winthrop,” says Linda, a 65-year-old who owns a real estate asset management firm. She grew up there, and the couple bought the then 56-year-old home in 1994. “We stood on the crumbling seawall and fell in love with the house and the view of the harbor.” They spent 20 years expanding and remodeling the classic brick Federal-style home to fit their extended family. They rebuilt and raised the concrete seawall, dug a foundation to create a lower…

It looks as if the iconic Bahia Mar Yachting Center, home of the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show, will get a makeover, including better digs for the show. After 10 years of bickering over what shape that makeover might take, the investment group that bought out the 39-acre property’s long-term lease this summer has proposed a $1 billion hotel-residential-marina complex with a parklike public promenade along the waterfront and a parking garage convertible to indoor exhibit space during the show. “We specialize in redeveloping tired assets and distressed assets,” says Jimmy Tate, partner with brother Kenny in Tate Capital, one of the investors, at a Marine Industries Association of South Florida meeting in September at the Bahia Mar to present the plan. (MIASF owns the Lauderdale show.) The Bahia Mar…

“I had resolved on a voyage around the world, and as the wind on the morning of April 24, 1895, was fair, at noon I weighed anchor, set sail and filled away from Boston.” And so the 51-year-old mariner, Joshua Slocum, set off on a journey into history. Three years later, there he was, in Newport, Rhode Island, the first man to sail around the world alone. The Nova-Scotia-born sailor had covered 46,000 miles, navigating by dead reckoning using a tin clock and a sextant. Slocum’s book, Sailing Alone Around the World, became a sensation and made him a celebrity — and his boat a legend. Spray measured just over 36 feet, with a 14-foot beam and a 4-foot draft, and it was actually a derelict in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, when…

Comanche is a speed machine, but even smaller multihulls are faster. Why did her owner opt for a monohull? She’s the brainchild of Jim Clark and his Australian wife, Kristy, and they would go to Australia every year for Christmas and the Sydney Hobart Race, which is like the Super Bowl Down Under. They watch the start, hang out with their friends, who happen to own 100-foot raceboats. And especially a guy named Neville Creighton, who would nudge Jim from time to time: “When you gonna get a raceboat? When are you going to join the party down here?” But surely Mr. Clark is not hurting for impressive yachts. Hanuman is a 140-foot J Class replica of Endeavour II. She has more wood below deck than my house, so it’s…

Christopher Blossom grew up with a passion for the sea. He learned to sail at age 6 and later crewed aboard the brigantine Young America. “When I look at the ocean, I get the same feeling pilots must get when they look at the sky,” he says. Blossom was also raised in a family of renowned marine artists and took to the easel early, learning from his father’s critiques and through the family’s friendship with artist John Stobart. “I never really tried to think why [I took to art],” Blossom says. “At first it probably was not an intellectual idea that influenced me — the immensity of the sea with its beauties and menace — not consciously, anyway. I read and reread sea stories, especially C.S. Forester’s Hornblower series. I…

Mercury Marine and Volvo Penta have each introduced new gasoline sterndrive engines. Mercury unveiled a 6.2-liter V-8 engine in 300- and 350-hp models, and Volvo Penta countered with a 5.3-liter V-8 — also 300 and 350 hp — and a 280-hp V-6 4.3-liter engine (pictured below). Volvo Penta has opted to continue using General Motors blocks, touting the advanced automotive technology, durability and reliability of GM’s fifth-generation engines. Mercury also had used GM blocks but about 2 years ago decided to manufacture its own sterndrive engine, saying that by going it alone it can design and build its MerCruiser I/Os specifically for marine use. Mercury splashed its first home-grown engine about a year ago, a 4.5-liter 250-hp MerCruiser. Volvo Penta answered earlier this year with the first two of its…

In May 2013 Benjamin, a Wave Glider named after Benjamin Franklin, was awarded a Guinness World Record for the longest journey by an autonomous surface vessel. The 7-foot surfboardshaped “roboboat” traveled 7,939 nautical miles from California to Australia powered by waves alone and guided by an on-board command-and-control computer. No skipper. The Wave Glider, designed and built by Liquid Robotics of Sunnyvale, California, a Silicon Valley start-up founded in 2007, survived shark attacks, powerful currents and Tropical Cyclone Freda during the 15 months it was in transit, all the while collecting and transmitting wave, ocean and weather data. The Wave Gilder pokes along at a top speed of just 3 knots and averages about 1.8, but like the Energizer Bunny it keeps going. It needs no fuel; its information-gathering sensors,…

Sunseeker Predator 57 With its striking, swept-back profile, there’s no mistaking the Predator 57’s European heritage. Huge hull-side windows and a deckhouse overhead that opens bring lots of natural light into the boat. Aft deckhouse doors can slide to open or drop flush with the deck. The cockpit has an L-shaped seating arrangement, a wet bar and a grill. A raised sunpad takes up the remainder of the stern, and most of the main deck is filled by the saloon, with a full galley placed below. The two-seat starboard helm station has a glarereducing black dash. A center companionway leads to the galley, two heads and three staterooms, including an amidships master with a breakfast nook. LOA: 57 feet, 9 inches BEAM: 15 feet, 5 inches DRAFT: 4 feet, 3…

The evening began like a fishing daydream. The sun was dropping. The flooding tide and a cool wind were roughly aligned. Four of my five children were aboard our 26-foot center console, which was rising and falling at anchor just beyond the surf line and a row of cottages on the Rhode Island shore. The older boys were slinging ladles of clam-belly chum over the gunwales, creating a plume that drifted toward a pile of boulders perhaps 100 feet away. The kids’ plan, conceived over dinner a short while before, had been as straightforward as it was promising. They hoped a sweet-smelling slick might draw a few foraging stripers to baited hooks resting on the bottom, offering a chance to wrestle fine bass on light tackle and be home at…

Propane, also known as LPG (liquefied petroleum gas), is a wonderful fuel for on-board appliances, but the cylinders must be stored and distributed with great care and installed in compliance with standards. (American Boat & Yacht Council Standard A.1 deals with LPG systems.) Propane, like its cousin butane, is a liquid that’s under high pressure, with vapor at the top of the cylinder. We only use the vapor, so the cylinders must be kept vertical unless they are designed for horizontal use. The liquid propane boils as the tank pressure drops through use and forms vapor at high pressure, which is reduced by a regulator before delivery to the appliance. A gauge is installed, usually on the high-pressure side before the regulator, to monitor cylinder pressure and assist with leak…

SPECIFICATIONS LOA: 49 feet, 10 inches BEAM: 15 feet, 8 inches DRAFT: 4 feet DISPLACEMENT: 42,000 pounds (base boat, dry) TANKAGE: 550 gallons fuel, 150 gallons water, 90 gallons waste HUL TYPE: modified-vee POWER: twin Cummins diesels (480, 600, 715 hp) SPEED (estimated): 26.5 knots top (480s), 30.5 knots (600s), 33.5 knots (715s) CONTACT: Carver Yachts, Pulaski, Wisconsin, (920) 822-3214. carveryachts.com Carver’s C50 Command Bridge is a three-stateroom, two-head sport cruiser built with resin infusion for weight savings, sound-deadening properties and structural strength. Carver consulted with naval architecture, design and engineering firm Donald L. Blount & Associates on the new yacht. “All models … have been developed in conjunction with DLBA for the hull structure,” says Josh Delforge, Carver (and Marquis) vice president of design and engineering. “On the C50,…