Uncategorized - Ocean Navigator

14 Apr

New sails for voyaging

Ocean NavigatorUncategorized

New sails can be one of the largest single expenses in the life of a cruising sailboat. As a boat owner, you have myriad sources for new sails, including local sail lofts, online sailmakers, and multi-national companies. You’ll also have to choose the type of sail material, construction technique, shape and size, as well as other design features. Like all things sailing, rarely does one best solution exist for upgrading sails. The following is an interview with three different actively cruising sailboats and their recent experiences with buying new sails. How did you know it was time for new sails?…

14 Apr

Winds Driving Waves

Ocean NavigatorUncategorized

Wave height and period are significant factors that voyaging sailors need to take into account when making a passage. This article looks at how waves form and how voyagers can use forecast info to help determine the location of big waves and avoid them. The primary driver for wave generation over the oceans is the force of the wind on the surface of the water. This force displaces surface water horizontally, which also results in a vertical displacement. Gravity then works to return the vertically displaced water back to an equilibrium level, and this leads to waves that propagate along…

14 Apr

Safety answers from an expert

Ocean NavigatorUncategorized

Not many people are better positioned to discuss Safety at Sea than former US Navy nuclear attack sub captain Mark Lenci. After 26 years in the Navy, Lenci now teaches the Cruising Club of America’s Safety at Sea Seminars. Mariners learn how to fight fires, recover MOBs, climb into life rafts, and shoot off flares. Ocean Navigator reached Lenci by email. Ocean Navigator: What’s the biggest value of attending a Safety at Sea course? Is it specific knowledge gained or is it more the experience of getting aboard a life raft or putting out an actual fire? Mark Lenci: In my opinion,…

14 Apr

Anchoring in a Crosswind

Ocean NavigatorUncategorized

By Bill Morris Once in a great while, we find ourselves trying to anchor under the most challenging of circumstances. Perhaps you have tried dropping the hook in soft sand on the west side of the Gulf of Suez during a sustained 50-knot gale. Or audibly detected the anchor going “clunk” on the flat rock “anchorage,” for lack of a better word, at Isla Santa Cruz in the Galapagos. While those are definitely close competitors, one very tough situation is anchoring bow to the swell with the wind blowing at a right angle across the deck. This unusual situation can…

14 Apr

Hiring a yacht agent

Ocean NavigatorUncategorized

Traveling by boat to multiple foreign countries on a continent other than where one lives has its challenges. Being American and “living” in Europe aboard our Nordhavn 64 Gratitude for more than a year now, we have been delighted by the new discoveries and learning opportunities offered along the way. Some of those opportunities, however, we could have done without, and one such learning experience, while a hassle, could have been far more costly in terms of time, money, and destinations unseen if not for the practiced help of a yacht agent. Our first encounter with a yacht agent was…

14 Apr

Story and photos by Craig SmithUncategorized

Marvin Creamer Marvin Creamer, a sailor who performed a seemingly miraculous instrumentless circumnavigation in the mid-1980s, has crossed the bar for the last time. A former geography professor at Rowan University in New Jersey, Creamer died on August 12, at age 104. Born in 1916, Creamer was long associated with Glassboro State College in New Jersey (later renamed to Rowan). He received his undergraduate degree from the school and later founded a chair in geography there in 1970. Creamer was also a sailor, and he melded his interest in geography and sailing to dive deep into the science and the…

12 Mar

Ocean NavigatorOcean Voyaging, UncategorizedAIS, electronic charts, Furuno, GPS, marine electronics, MFD, multifunction display, PBG, personal bathymetric generator, radar

Is there a piece of marine electronics that does so much yet has such a non-descript name? The multifunction display, usually dryly shortened to simply "MFD," is a powerhouse that can combine electronic charts, AIS, radar, GPS, voyage planning, tide data, performance instrument display, depth sounder display, engine gauge displays and a lot more. The MFD is more of a "Houston mission control" on your boat than some anonymous three-letter acronym, which is usually better suited to black box units that reside unseen behind a bulkhead. An example of the kind of power features available to MFDs was recently announced…

10 Mar

Ocean NavigatorOcean Voyaging, Uncategorizedbermuda, weather

For East Coast voyagers, Bermuda is an attractive option for an offshore passage. Either as a destination or a stopping point before proceeding south to the Bahamas and the Caribbean or east to the Azores and the Med. There's also the offshore races from the East Coast: Newport/Bermuda, Marion/Bermuda, Annapolis/Bermua and others. As such a popular destination, the weather surrounding Bermuda is naturally of interest to voyagers. And according to a recent study, those waters are experiencing increasingly stormy weather during the last 60 years. According to the study, the researchers noted "...a statistically significant increase (r = 0.94, p…

01 Mar

Sailor to attempt NY to San Francisco record in proa

Ocean NavigatorUncategorized

Starting in January 2021, New Orleans sailor Ryan Finn will attempt to break the New York to San Francisco sailing record sailing a 36-foot proa-style sailboat. The passage is expected to take roughly 60 days and cover 14,000 nautical miles. The 42-year-old Finn has reportedly sailed more than 100,000 nautical miles, including three transatlantic and five transpacific crossings. In 2016, he sailed from Los Angeles to the Panama Canal, completing the solo sailing expedition in only 18 days on a Pacific Proa. For this record attempt, Ryan will be sailing a Russel Brown-designed and built 36-foot Proa Jzerro. The design…

01 Mar

DYI electronic navigation

Ocean NavigatorUncategorized

Navigation software for viewing electronic charts, voyage planning and in-voyage navigation has come a long way from the early days of raster images on a computer monitor. Navigation software packages are offered by an assortment of companies as either software products to install on your laptop or as part of a dedicated piece of marine electronics. And most mariners are happy to go this route. There is a smaller group of voyagers, however, who take a more do-it-yourself approach to setting up a system for electronic navigation. These DIY-friendly cruisers like to get into the nuts-and-bolts side of the hardware,…