Articles - Ocean Navigator

Getting AC from the batteries

One of the more useful electronic devices on a cruising sailboat is an inverter. Simply put, inverters convert direct current (DC) battery energy into alternating current (AC) power. They can run much of our common household equipment like cooking appliances, power tools, TVs and electronic chargers. When there is no shore power or a generator available this is a great option. But there is much more to choosing, installing and using inverters.Let’s have a closer look. Basics Inverters are able to increase 12- or 24-volt DC energy into 120- or 240-volt AC silently and on demand. They can be made…

Clipper ship Sea Witch

Although it wasn’t the first clipper ship to be designed and built in New York, Sea Witch is one of the ships that marks the advent of the great clipper ship era in America. During a relatively short period of time, from the mid 1840s to perhaps a decade later, the rise of naval design, as evidenced in the design of clipper ships, transformed American shipping, propelling American ship design into world preeminence. All of this primarily occurred in just two places: Boston and New York. In Boston Donald McCay was making a name for himself with ships like Stag…

Pacific Cup activity ramps up

The first start for the 2022 Pacific Cup Race (Ocean Navigator is a race co-sponsor) is set for July 4th and the activity is picking up in anticipation of the opening gun. The race, sailed from San Francisco to Kaneohe Yacht Club in Kaneohe Bay in Hawaii, was first run in 1980. The number of race entries is set at 70, which is the official capacity for the field. According to Jim Quanci, Pacific Cup Yacht Club (PCYC) Commodore, the race committee had overbooked a few boats past 70, but that’s because some boats inevitably will have to pull out…

The modern way to book a marina

When cruising, my husband Tom and I usually spend nights at anchor, with only an occasional sojourn at a marina slip. This past summer we sailed our Sabre 30 Ora Kali from New Jersey to Maine and found harbors so packed with moorings that anchoring was virtually impossible. Luckily, these days there are ways to book slips and moorings using a smartphone. To compensate for the lack of anchoring areas, towns maintain guest moorings and most marinas rent them and I liked the ease of picking up a mooring pennant on a long haul with multiple stops. Our recent Maptech…

Lisa Blair completes Antarctic circumnavigation

Australian sailor Lisa Blair crossed her outbound track on May 19, 2022, to complete a solo unassisted non-stop circumnavigation of Antarctica, going into the history books for sailing it all below 45 degrees south latitude. Her circumnavigation took 87 days but Lisa is still racing on the Antarctica Cup Ocean Race track and if she arrives back in Albany, Western Australia, by June 2 she will have defeated Fedor Konyukhov’s 2008 time of 102 days port to port to set a new speed record. Lisa’s boat, Climate Action Now, is a Hick 50, designed by Robert Hick and built by…

New Round Iceland Race

In May 2022 the Royal Western Yacht Club in the UK announced a new ocean racing competition, the Round Iceland Race, which is set to start from Plymouth in the U.K. on May 14, 2023. This will be a serious ocean race, more than 2,600 miles of sailing, with the potential of facing challenging weather around Iceland. The race will take competitors westward out the English Channel, into the Atlantic to sail north to the Denmark Strait, rounding Iceland clockwise before heading back to Plymouth. From the RWYC press release: “This Category 1 race will be open to solo, double…

Twelve-Winded Sky

The prospect of racing a boat 2,000 miles from California to Hawaii can take an owner’s list of desired boat upgrades and make it considerably longer. That was the case for Mark Jordan’s Hanse 342 Twelve-Winded Sky, which is slated to start the Pacific Cup on July 4 (Ocean Navigator is a cosponsor of the 2022 PacCup). Jordan and his race partner, Randy Leasure, who will race together on Twelve-Winded Sky in the double-handed division, launched into an extensive series of refits and improvements to get Twelve-Winded Sky ready for the race. Jordan, who has been sailing for nearly 40…

Using electronic charting tools

Modern electronic charting on multifunction displays is a powerful tool for the voyager — they can know position and other navigational info just by glancing at a screen. With position data provided by GPS, and with some installations buttressed by input from the Galileo, the European analog of GPS, electronic chart navigation is accurate and convenient. In certain situations, however, voyagers can improve their navigation awareness and avoid possible problems by using tools that are a part of the electronic chart toolkit, but which might be turned off. In order to declutter the screen and show those elements a mariner…

Spinning up a solution to rolling

Rolling underway? Ugh! It’s the bane of power boating. It turns some folks green. Over the years, various methods of dampening this sickening side-to-side motion have been developed —paravanes, stabilizer fins and gyro stabilization. Now comes the new, new thing: rotor stabilization. We were recently given the opportunity to sea trial the very first American installation of one of these systems. As life-long delivery skippers who’ve run hundreds of passage-making motor vessels, sometimes by necessity in heavy seas, we were very curious to check out this rotor stabilization system. According to their Dutch maker Dynamic Marine Systems, rotor stabilization is…

In praise of the boom tackle

In 2016 my wife and I bought a 34-foot Cabo Rico, upgrading from the 27-foot Albin Vega we’d owned for 16 years. While we certainly appreciated the increase in speed, sea keeping and accommodation, gybing the big boat was a real challenge. We have solved that problem with twin boom tackles, one to port, one to starboard. Not only do these let us simply ease the boom over when we gybe — no need to touch the main sheet — but each tackle acts as an instantly available preventer against an accidental gybe. The tackles let us haul down on…