Uncategorized - Ocean Navigator

01 Mar

Read the factory manual

Ocean NavigatorUncategorized

Have you been paying attention to the warning signs on your boat? My guess is that you, like me, have been looking right past several important reminders. I’d like to encourage you to notice, stop and think. RTFM is my abbreviated code for “read the factory manual.” In the Power Voyaging column of Ocean Navigator, I have advocated for organizing your onboard tools and spare parts. Organizing your manuals is another important project to “dial-in” your trawler. It must be human nature that we think we can outsmart things and try to figure them out ourselves instead of reading the…

01 Mar

Using a 3D printer onboard

Ocean NavigatorUncategorized

At the start of the year, I purchased a 3D printer for my Valiant 40 boat, Ursa, and I’d like to share some of the experiences I’ve had with it. First the why: I’m based in Mexico right now, where I can get most things I need, but shipping times can be long and expensive, I’m often in the boonies, and there are a lot of projects on the boat that require small, hard-to-find parts. My aim was to be able at the very least to prototype if not create these parts quickly and, in more extreme cases, perhaps make…

01 Mar

The Magic of Landfall

Ocean NavigatorUncategorized

So many of our words and expressions come from the world of ships and sailing: taken aback, by and large, hand over fist, a wide berth, a loose cannon, chock-a-block, and landfall. Landfall, to a seafarer, is the moment he sights land. Not the moment he sets foot on land, but the instant – after months, weeks, or days with nothing but water on all sides – that the first solid speck appears on the horizon. It might be the summit of a 10,000-foot mountain, visible 100 miles away as something a little firmer than a cloud. A mariner who…

01 Mar

Optimizing Alternative Energy

Ocean NavigatorUncategorized

A successful ocean voyage depends largely on the way we manage energy on our vessels, be it from the wind, the sun, the ocean, the auxiliary engine or a separate generator. As offshore sailors, our goal is to gain not just maximum output from our energy sources, but the optimal mix in order to save fuel, money and time lost to repairs. Getting optimum performance from your vessel’s array of energy sources requires us to first of all select those systems best suited to our personal needs and those of the vessel. A small boat can often get by with…

02 Jan

Drama in the Vendee Globe solo world race

Ocean NavigatorUncategorized

After a start delayed by fog, the 33-boat fleet of Vendee Globe solo racers began the nonstop race around the world on November 8, 2020, from Les Sables-d’Olonne in France. The fleet was the largest yet for the race, which requires the utmost in ocean racing skill and determination just to finish, let alone the effort required to push one’s self and one’s boat as hard as possible to win. Normally, the race village and surrounding area is crowded with as many as 350,000 spectators, but due to COVID-19 restrictions, the race village was locked down and the surrounding area…

02 Jan

A rescue from a ship captain’s perspective

Ocean NavigatorUncategorized

On November 9, the 328-foot Finnish-flagged cargo ship Midas rescued three French sailors from the capsized 50-foot catamaran Hallucine in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Portugal. Included among the rescued sailors was French racer Regis Guillemot. A fourth crewman drowned when he was thrown overboard by the capsize. His body was recovered 36 hours after the rescue. Portuguese search-and-rescue authorities directed Midas to change course and rescue the three sailors, who reportedly spent one night on the overturned cruising cat before shifting to a life raft. Midas had left Riga, Latvia, and was en route to Florida when…

02 Jan

A digital sextant

Ocean NavigatorUncategorized

Sextants are wonderfully analog optical devices. A sextant user from the 1850s would have little problem using a modern sextant. Now a company in South Korea has begun offering something it calls the Korea Digital Sextant (KDS) that digitalizes the venerable sextant to make celestial navigation nearly automatic. The company is billing this device as the ultimate backup for GPS for both commercial and recreational mariners. The application of digital technology to celestial navigation started a long time ago, of course. The first pocket calculators that ran programs could be used to handle the number-crunching of sight reduction and the…

02 Jan

Prized pilothouse possessions

Ocean NavigatorUncategorized

In my more than 30 years as a boat builder/yacht broker, I have enjoyed visiting hundreds of pilothouses. From 30 feet to 100 feet, tiny to opulent, at boat shows for a quick walkthrough and underway for days on end. My career has allowed me to cruise thousands of miles offshore — standing watch, drinking coffee and observing (mostly with clients doing training deliveries). You can learn something from every boat you visit if you look around with an open mind. That’s how I’ve compiled my list of pilothouse add-ons. I travel with a camera and all of those clicks…

02 Jan

Snagged anchors and empty gas bottles

Ocean NavigatorUncategorized

Every corner of the world’s oceans has their own peculiarities. The roving squalls of the equatorial Pacific, the steep winter seas of the stormy northern Atlantic, the dreaded gales of the Gulf of Tehuantepec and the magically flat waters of the Great Barrier Reef are just four points on a star of widely varying conditions within the ocean sailor’s universe. However, when we add an overlay of human interaction onto the warm waters of the southern Tyrrhenian Sea, nature and humanity can collide in some outlandish ways. Every summer in the central Mediterranean, tens of thousands of tourists and hundreds…

02 Jan

Light in a pinch

Ocean NavigatorUncategorized

Routes from Florida to the Bahamas are as short as 50 miles, but they all involve crossing the Gulf Stream and hopefully arriving during daylight hours and early enough to clear Customs. For most sailors, this means an evening or night departure with an overnight sail, which is what we were doing when voyaging from Palm Beach to West End, Grand Bahama. Unfortunately, one of our steering cable ends broke off in the middle of the Stream, with a stiff wind blowing and a lumpy sea — in the pitch dark. I had a sick feeling while hanging upside down…