Ocean Navigator - May/June 2023

Voyagers effort to aid Vanuatu

A group of voyagers organized by liveaboard Luc Callebaut — who, along with his wife Jackie was interviewed in ON’s 2022 Ocean Voyager annual issue — is pitching in to assist the South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu after it recently suffered two tropical cyclones — Cyclone Judy and Cyclone Kevin — and also a magnitude 6.5 and a magnitude 5.4 earthquake. The assistance effort is being aided by such groups as the Seven Seas Cruising Association; the Grand Large Yachting World Odyssey 500; Byond Disaster Relief NZ; Bay of Islands Marina, Port Opua, New Zealand; and Noonsite.com. Callebaut wrote:…

NOAA updates custom chart site

NOAA’s Office of Coast Survey has been on a long program to digitize and customize the process of distributing nautical charts to users. The latest step in that process is an updated custom chart site with the release of NOAA Custom Chart version 2.0 (devgis.charttools.noaa.gov). NOAA is calling this “a dynamic map application.” It enables users to create their paper and PDF nautical charts that are derived from the official NOAA electronic chart the NOAA ENC. Users can create nautical charts with customized scale and extent, which can then be downloaded as PDF files. The data on the chart is…

Citizen science for voyagers

Cruising sailors leaving home often want to be useful in places they visit along the way. This can take the form of applying skills from their lives on land, like teaching or carpentry, or distributing supplies to distant places. But another way to contribute to the greater good is through citizen science. Citizen science happens when the public voluntarily helps conduct scientific research. Citizen scientists may collect data, analyze results, and even design experiments but the specific problem and the tools to address it are set up by professional scientists. Employing volunteers can broaden the geographic reach of a research…

Transpac Race gearing up

More than 60 boats have been entered in the 2023 Transpac race from Cabrillo Beach, Cali. to Honolulu (Ocean Navigator is a Transpac Race co-sponsor). The pace quickens now for the competitors and the race committee as the first start on June 27 approaches. Before the start there will be a skipper’s meeting and an aloha send-off party on June 24 on board the former US Navy battleship USS Iowa, which is docked in Los Angeles as a museum ship. There will be three starts: Tuesday, July 27 for 17 boats (some boats slated for this start are provisional as…

Notable New Titles: All Hands on Deck: A Modern-Day High Seas Adventure to the Far Side of the World

All Hands on Deck: A Modern-Day High Seas Adventure to the Far Side of the World by Will Sofrin Abrams Press—253 pages: $28 Will Sofrin, sailor and shipwright, was a man in a hurry. “The clock was ticking,” he writes. He and the men and women he sailed with had cleared out of Newport on what would be a 36-day, 6,000-mile voyage to California because a production company was waiting to make a movie. The year: 2002. Sofrin had signed as deckhand on Rose, a replica of an early 19th-century British frigate. The film would be called Master and Commander:…

Artificial intelligence comes to the cockpit

Integrated performance systems that display inputs like wind direction, heading, depth, position, etc., have been available for decades. Most recently the multifunction display has become the go-to device for combining all that sensor data in one place. Now an Oxford, Nova Scotia-based company named iNav4U has released a product called Wayfinder that not only integrates the display of sensor information but goes a step further and uses rules-based artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze the data and provide warnings and make recommendations to the vessel operators about how to proceed. Wayfinder was developed by Olivier Hendrikx, an experienced Swiss voyager who…

Boat Focus: Translated 9

When you’re preparing to sail in a race that hearkens back to an earlier age, a time when the equipment of the average ocean going yacht was much simpler, it makes sense to look for a boat that was a star of that era. When Marco Trombetti and Isabelle Andrieu, co-founders of the international translation company Translated, looked for a boat to sail in the fully-crewed Ocean Globe Race 2023, they chose a Swan 65 with a globe-girdling pedigree: ADC Accutrac was once owned and raced by British sailor Clair Francis. Aboard ADC Accutrac, Francis and crew finished fifth in…

Watermaker considerations

Watermakers have become such a common piece of gear on a power voyaging boat that it seems just about any unit will do. Some buyers take this idea to heart and will purchase their watermaker off the internet based solely on price. The reality, of course, is that there are factors in making sure the watermaker you choose is the right one for the type of voyaging you do. And those factors are not immediately apparent until you start to delve into the subject. According to Larry Schildwachter of Emerald Harbor Marine in Seattle, which sells and installs watermakers on…

Rescue communications

On March 13, on a South Pacific crossing midway between Galapagos and the Marquesas, s/v Raindancer with four people on board sank after an encounter with a whale. It was lunchtime and they had been in the cockpit eating pizza. In 15 minutes the boat, a Peterson 44, had slipped beneath the surface and the crew were surveying a sunny sea from the slim shelter of a liferaft and inflatable dinghy tied together. Before abandoning ship the crew gathered supplies and the captain, Rick Rodriguez, activated an EPIRB and sent out a mayday on VHF. Once in the liferaft they…

A tight spot to lose your bearings

Editor’s note: This experience of two cruisers shows the importance of having spares aboard if at all possible. We left Titusville, Florida bound for Vero Beach via the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW). There wasn’t a breath of wind, so we were motoring. After about three hours into our expected six-hour trip, we noticed a subtle change in the sound of the engine. Janet was at the helm, so I got up to check. Before I even reached the bottom of the companionway ladder, there was a horrible shrieking and the sound of metal grinding, then the engine’s overheat alarm sounded.…