Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2020 i Yachting World

Discovery Yachts has been restructured after going into administration and being immediately bought in a pre-pack sale late last year. The Southampton-based company, which builds the Discovery and Southerly range of yachts, is now owned by Binti Marine Holdings Ltd, a UK subsidiary of Binti Holding GmbH. Behind this is German businessman Werner Schnaebele, who originally bought shares in the company in 2018 and made a further loan in 2019. Since reinvesting to save the business he has become the controlling shareholder. Schnaebele currently has a Bluewater 50 catamaran in build. In 2018, following a management buyout of Discovery from its founder, John Charnley, some £2m was raised through crowdfunding. The largest of these investors was Schnaebele. But the company ran into trouble last year when Discovery Yacht Sales Ltd…

The Amel 60, Dehler 30 OD, X 4.0, Oceanis 30.1 and the radical ClubSwan 36 were named European Yachts of the Year 2020 at Boot Düsseldorf in January. The five yachts were chosen as category winners from a shortlist of 15 nominees, which represented a mix of fresh designs this year. A race yacht category was created for the first time, reflecting the surge in exciting designs for short-handed offshore racing. For the first time the 12-strong jury, of which Yachting World has been a member since the foundation of the awards in 2004, was able to gather all the shortlisted yachts together in one location. Jury members each sailed every yacht during six days of testing from Port Ginesta, Barcelona. The result is the most influential and widely respected…

Sustainable sailing Could your next yacht or your next refit make use more sustainable technology, and could you reduce your carbon footprint while being more self-sufficient? Our next issue provides some ideas and food for thought Refit choices What are the most useful, sustainable choices when it comes to refitting for ocean voyaging? Will Bruton talks to the YouTubers of SV Delos and looks more widely at what’s on the market Your future yacht? Toby Hodges investigates what future yachts could look like, from more environmentally friendly hull and deck materials to sails, antifouling and coatings On test: First 53 This handsome newcomer from Beneteau could well become one of their bestsellers. Matt Sheahan finds out why…

‘The trick with planning is to prioritise’ Well-prepared boats have dealt with half the battle when it comes to emergencies and challenges at sea. But beyond the boat and equipment, the mindset, experience and knowledge of skipper and crew play a huge part in making a successful outcome from a potential disaster. So what makes a good bar story out of a bad situation? What problems and challenges are we likely to face on the picture-perfect voyage and what does it take to cope and succeed? The trick with both planning for and dealing with problems at sea is to prioritise. Incidents such as fire, flooding and man overboard are fortunately rare if they have been considered. It is the problems more likely to occur that also need careful consideration.”.…

I’ve always used Nikon cameras. Currently, I’m using the Nikon D810 and for wildlife (and yachting) you need long lenses. I like the Nikon 200-500 f5.6 zoom lens as it gives me a range to compose a picture. Also in the bag is: ■ 16mm fisheye (not used on this trip)■ 17-35 f2.8mm wide angle zoom■ 24-70 f2.8 mid range zoom■ 70-200 f2.8 telephoto zoom■ 200-500 f5.6 long telephoto zoom. I also had a back-up camera body, flash gun, ND filters, cards, hard drive and, most importantly, a compact camera, the Sony RX100 that I always have ready in my pocket. This camera also fits in a housing for underwater shots hanging off a monopod. I found that a 10lt waterproof bag slung across my chest made access to the…

If you wanted to identify the best new yachts on the market how would you go about it? The obvious answer would be to set up a comparative on-water test, but with yards spread across the globe this presents a significant logistical hurdle. Yachting World has been a jury member for the European Yacht of the Year awards since its inception in 2004, a programme that enables us to set up such comparative tests. The testing panel has grown to include 12 judges from across Europe, each leading voices on boat testing in their respective countries. This time we were able to gather 14 shortlisted yachts at Port Ginesta in Barcelona for six days of testing. In terms of trends, 2019 saw the rise of the short-handed race boats. These…

The Mediterranean has a lot to offer sailors all year round. Among the highlights are fascinating cultural attractions, crystal clear water, and delicious food. With plenty of airports located along the most common cruising routes and cheap flights within Europe, keeping a yacht in the Med is easy and convenient. But what do cruisers do once the typical sailing season comes to an end? My husband, Ryan, and I have spent two years cruising the Med on our Tayana 37 and can share some of our advice on wintering options, shoulder season cruising tips, and more. WINTERING OPTIONS Mediterranean winters feature regular storms (one to three per month on average) and the weather varies a lot between countries. For example, mainland Spain is mild and sunny while the Ionian Islands…

FLYER is the 68ft S&S-designed ketch that won the 1977/78 Whitbread, and last year returned to racing after four decades following restoration. Flyer is one of those yachts that needs little introduction. Designed for the 1977 Whitbread Race by Sparkman & Stephens for Dutch skipper Conny Van Rietschoten, the 68ft aluminium ketch went on to win overall on corrected time. Van Rietschoten famously went on to win the 1981/82 race with his larger Flyer II, becoming the only skipper ever to win two of the round the world races, and confirming the Flyer dynasty’s place in yachting history. Flyer was designed as a one-off, but is an evolution of the successful Swan 65. She gained a couple of feet of waterline length, lost a tonne of displacement, carried more sail…

A new race to the Fastnet Rock and back has been launched by the Royal Western Yacht Club of England in Plymouth, to bring a classic format offshore race back to its home city. The event was created in reaction to the controversial announcement by the Royal Ocean Racing Club (RORC) last year that the two next Rolex Fastnet Races in 2021 and 2023 will finish in Cherbourg, a course it says was chosen to allow the event to accommodate larger numbers of competitors. The Lonely Rock Race will start from Ryde on the Isle of Wight and go out to the Fastnet lighthouse off the south-west corner of Ireland before returning to a finish in Plymouth. It mirrors the traditional 600-mile course of the 95-year-old Fastnet Race and will…

I’ve seen at first hand what a boat looks like when it’s upside down in open water. It’s not nice. I don’t ever want to see it again. It upsets me to hear cases of others who have faced the same terrifying situation. So, when I read the news of the 40ft racer Showtime losing her keel on her return from the Rolex Sydney Hobart Race my heart sank, just as it did when I read about the Hooligan and Cheeki Rafiki tragedies in 2007 and 2014, the Polina Star III sinking in 2015 and the capsize of Tyger of London in 2017. Losing a keel is as unacceptable as wings coming off an aircraft and yet here we are again with another major failure. Miraculously, in the case of…

Had any of the crew of the nine yachts that finished the inaugural Sydney Hobart Yacht Race in 1945 been able to comment on the race’s 75th edition, the phrase ‘walk in the park’ would probably have featured, such was the contrast in weather, and time spent at sea, between the first and most recent editions of this ocean racing classic. The 628-mile ‘Hobart’, as it’s commonly abbreviated, is renowned for its challenging phases and varied moods. The first priority for any competitor is just getting safely out of Sydney Harbour, awash with an armada of spectator craft. Then comes the navigator’s first dilemma heading south: inshore for breeze or offshore for current? If all is well you enter the fearsome Bass Strait in good order. You’ll need to; seasoned…

Tested by MATTHEW SHEAHAN Where we tested: Port Ginesta, Barcelona Conditions: 8-9 knots, flat sea Model: Amel 60 – very high standard spec also including optional extra furling staysail and furling Code 0. I’m guessing that rival manufacturers of bluewater cruisers know when their prospective clients have been to Amel. They realise when their prospects come to them to discuss the detail, and they’ll be holding a long list of questions about what is included in the standard specification. The list will be long. Very long. And if these potential customers then choose to reveal their budget based on this detailed list, the challenge for any of Amel’s rivals will be to suppress the inevitable sharp intake of breath when their sales staff hear the bottom line. Amel has long…

A satisfying feature of looking after this column for the last 16 years has been the latitude granted me by editors for selecting material. This has delivered enough slack to celebrate the less spectacular among the yarns of derring-do and sheer survival. ‘Travels with my Nan’, published by the ever-inventive Lodestar Books and written by Nick Imber, tells of three generations of a family growing up with a small barge yacht in the Thames estuary. The opening lines set the scene perfectly: ‘I first met her in Tollesbury and immediately fell for her. She was Essex Girl through and through, but not like the others, although she was shallow. There were only two problems. The age difference – she was born in 1904 and I was ten back then in…

ANDY RICE gets valuable tips from Volvo Ocean Race skipper CHRIS NICHOLSON on how to nurse your yacht through challenging weather To win, first you have to finish. Chris Nicholson needs no introduction to that old chestnut, having found himself in numerous hazardous situations in different parts of the world’s fierce oceans. In the 2005/06 Volvo Ocean Race, his Volvo Ocean 70 Movistar disappeared beneath him altogether when the boat sunk in the Atlantic. It’s worth noting that many of the most successful helmsmen in the Volvo Ocean Race have come from a skiff racing background, including Rob Greenhalgh, Ian Walker and the Spanish 49er gold medallists Iker Martinez and Xabi Fernandez. Chris notes that many of the best helmsmen are not just the fastest, but also the most sympathetic…

All seven crew from the yacht Showtime, a modified Ker 40, were rescued from a life raft after the keel of the yacht broke away on their return delivery from the Rolex Sydney Hobart Race. Showtime’s keel detached at around 0230 local time on 5 January when the yacht was approximately halfway between Sydney and Melbourne, beating upwind in 45-50 knot winds. The yacht is understood to have inverted immediately, approximately 17milesoffshore. Navigator Rob Buchanan told local reporters that the crew owed their survival to one crew member “doing one of the bravest things I’ve ever seen”. After they’d safely dived out from the inverted yacht, crew member Christian Charalambous removed his lifejacket to swim back under the boat and retrieve the life raft. “The boat was trying to kill…

Series superyacht builders Southern Wind unveiled this 90ft (27m) performance catamaran in January at the Düsseldorf Boat Show, a project that could be a forerunner of a new breed of superyacht-sized multihulls. Multihulls may be the fastest-growing area of the sailing market, but so far there have been only series production options or full custom boats. The SWCAT90 concept, developed with Southern Wind’s long-term partner Nauta Yacht Design, has been designed to hit that semi-custom, in-between sector. Nauta’s founder, Massimo Gino, explains that the cat has 50% more deck space than similar sized monohulls and in fact the overall space and volume is comparable to a 128ft (39m) monohull. Olivier Racoupeau, responsible for the naval architecture, thinks the speed potential of this carbon composite cat also looks very promising and…

A recordbreaking non-stop voyage around Antarctica and the Americas has earned American solo sailor Randall Reeves the Ocean Cruising Club’s prestigious Barton Cup. The club observes that the voyage is one of the most notable sailing achievements in the last two years. Reeves, from California, first attempted the voyage in 2017. On the first, he was knocked down three times in the Southern Ocean and had to divert to Ushuaia for repairs before ultimately being forced to retire in Tasmania. In 2018, he set off again and by October 2019 he had successfully completed the epic voyage, a distance of 40,000 miles solo, and a first in ocean sailing. Reeves’s yacht Moli is a robust 45ft aluminium cutter built in 1989 by Dubbel & Jesse and formerly owned by Tony…

Sailing, whether it be peripatetic cruising as a lifestyle or carving up the seas in competitive round the world ocean racing, can sometimes harbour a tinge of guilt. We should at least spare a thought for saving the watery part of the planet that we sailors so enjoy. Making a scientific contribution in one form or another while at the same time living our passion is now a trend, but the idea is nothing new. In fact, explorers through the ages have often relied on a scientific mission to help launch projects through patronage. Captain Cook’s voyages immediately come to mind. Fitzroy and Darwin on HMS Beagle was another, both producing enormous amounts of new specimens and data now stashed away in the vaults of London’s Natural History Museum. Sometimes,…

‘High latitude sailing with wildlife photography mixed in is my idea of heaven’ “Orca – port bow!” The cry came from the pilothouse. A sense of excitement swept through the boat as 24 hours earlier we’d taken the decision to sail overnight from Beaver Island to Seal Island where it’s known that orcas are often sighted… but not always. It was a bit of a gamble. Our alternative was to sail to the Jason Islands, regarded as one of the jewels of the Falklands, where we’d definitely see albatross, penguins and seals. But we’d already had some great encounters with those and the prospect of killer whales won our hearts, and now we were here and so were the orcas! We were in the last few days of our 14-day…

Sonar and forward-looking sounders are often seen as the preserve of those whose primary interest is fishing. However, a huge amount of effort has been invested in these products over the past few years and the latest models can be powerful tools for both cruising and racing yachts. They offer sufficient clarity, for instance, to be able to pick out areas of seagrass and patches of sand in an anchorage. Much of this improvement is thanks to the availability of CHIRP transducers that, unlike a traditional sonar, can distinguish between multiple targets through scanning using a signal of varying frequency. This enables them to show individual fish, rather than just indicate a shoal, to resolve vegetation growing on the seabed, and distinguish between a sandy/muddy shoreline and a rocky one.…

ROUTE 1: Mainland Spain to the Balearics, Sardinia and Corsica Leave your winter berth in early May and head for the Balearic Islands to spend two months. exploring Formentera, Ibiza, Mallorca, and Menorca. From Menorca, head for Sardinia at the beginning of July. Spend July and August sailing western and southern Sardinia. In September, explore the eastern coast of Sardinia and Corsica, then head for your winter berth. ROUTE 2: Sicily to the Ionian and Aegean Greece Set off from Sicily, Malta or southern Italy in mid-April and head east, towards Corfu. Check into Greece in Corfu Town, then pick your way south, visiting the Ionian Islands. In early June, transit the Corinth Canal and head north to explore mainland Greece and Halkidiki. In August, make your way south following…

TOM CUNLIFFE NOMINATES LADY BELLE It’s 50 years since my wife and I were beating down the West Solent in our first tiny yacht and saw a cloud of sail running in from seaward. She was smaller than we’d imagined but, being a gaff yawl with every stitch set, she’d looked bigger than she was. She proved to be Lady Belle, a Falmouth quay punt built by Harley Meade in 1909. During our far-off youth we lived in a wooden-boat community on the Hamble River. Lady Belle became a part of this. We always lusted after her and when she came up for sale half a dozen years ago, my daughter and her husband bought her. So, still on the Hamble, she puts to sea with a young family, teaching…