Voyages 2022 by Cruising Club of America

Commodore’s Column Ahoy Voyages readers! As waves upon the ocean, the impact of COVID-19 continues for a second year to roll across the globe demanding our attention. Amid this uncertainty, we welcome the vicarious pleasure provided by the Cruising Club of America’s superb 2022 edition of Voyages. This year’s edition maintains a high standard, with members’ accounts of their many and varied adventures on the oceans of the world, close to home and far away. Our authors this year are from across the club. They include longstanding and more recent members, former and current award recipients, and first-time and repeat contributors. Thanks to each of the authors for the joy their stories will bring us all year long: Gretchen Dieck Biemesderfer, John Bullard, Jack and Zdenka Griswold, Mindy Gunther, Brendan Huffman, Ellen Massey Leonard, Ginger and Peter Niemann, Skip Novak, Randall Reeves, Ron Schaper, Trisha Schibili, Bill Strassberg, and Baird Tewksbury. Book reviewers Alex Agnew, Ellen Massey Leonard, and Tim O’Keeffe will entice you to read In Slocum’s Wake by Nat Warren-White, Addicted to More Adventure: Risk is Good, Enjoy It by Bob Shepton and Wooden Boats for Blue Water Sailors: Philosophy on Sailing, Design and Construction by Alfie Sanford. In Final Voyages, we remember friendships and passages and anchorages shared as we pay tribute to fellow members who have crossed the bar and sailed their final voyage. We are grateful to editors Maggie Salter and Bob Green for their eloquence in recognizing those who chartered a course for us at home and abroad and forged friendships around the world as they made adventurous use of the sea. On behalf of all CCA members, I extend our deep appreciation, gratitude, and congratulations to intrepid editors Ami and Bob Green for their successful inaugural edition of

Voyages. Thank you, Ami and Bob and your remarkable crew of editorial advisors, including Dale Bruce, Doug Bruce, Lynnie Bruce, Max Fletcher, Zdenka Griswold, Jack Griswold, Amy Jordan, and PC Brad Willauer. It has been an honor and a privilege to serve as commodore of the Cruising Club of America these past two years. Similar to an offshore passage, events and weather can present Commodore Bob Medland with his wife, Sally. unexpected conditions. In these cases, one has to adjust, and the crew has to pull together. There are none better than our crew — the members of the CCA. To so many, especially Vice Commodore Chris Otorowski, Secretary Jay Gowell, Treasurer Peter Chandler, Fleet Surgeon Jeff Wisch, the members of the governing board, and so many skilled, talented, dedicated, and selfless members, I owe a great debt of gratitude for keeping our ship on course and seaworthy during this Covid storm. We are all about having fun on the water and enjoying the camaraderie of one another on and off the water. I am reminded of John Masefield’s poem, “Sea Fever”: I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life, To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife; And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover, And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over. Wishing you fair winds.

About the CCA The Cruising Club of America is among North America’s foremost resources on offshore cruising and racing and, together with the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club, co-organizer of the legendary Newport Bermuda Race. The club is comprised of more than 1,405 accomplished ocean sailors who willingly share their cruising expertise with the greater sailing community through books, articles, blogs, videos, seminars, and onboard opportunities. Ocean safety and seamanship training through publications and hands-on seminars is a critical component of the club’s national and international outreach efforts. The club has 14 stations and posts around the United States, Canada, and Bermuda, and CCA members are actively engaged with the next generation of ocean sailors as they look forward to the club’s second century of serving the offshore sailing community. For more information about the CCA, visit cruisingclub.org.

Bermuda * Boston * Buzzards Bay Post * Gulf of Maine Post * Narragansett Bay Post Bras d’Or * Chesapeake * Essex * Florida * Great Lakes New York * Pacific Northwest * San Francisco * Southern California

Voyages

Chronicles of the Cruising Club of America

cruising club officers Commodore – J.W. Robert Medland Vice Commodore – Christopher L. Otorowski Secretary – John R. Gowell Treasurer – Peter L. Chandler

voyages editors Amelia and Robert Green voyages@cruisingclub.org

voyages committee Editor of Final Voyages – Maggie Salter (BOS/GMP) Past Issues Manager – Cindy Crofts-Wisch (BOS/BUZ) Associate Editor – John Rousmaniere (NYS) Editorial Advisors: Dale Bruce (BOS/GMP), Doug Bruce (BOS/GMP), Lynnie Bruce (BOS/GMP), John Chandler (BOS/GMP), Doug Cole (PNW), Max Fletcher (BOS/GMP), Bob Hanelt (SAF), Cameron Hinman (PNW), Amy Jordan (BOS), Charlie Peake (NYS), Krystina Scheller (BDO), Brad Willauer (BOS/GMP)

editors emeritus Alfred B. Stamford, 1962-1974; Charles H. Vilas, 1974-1988; Bob and Mindy Drew, 1988-1994; John and Nancy McKelvy, 1994-1999; John and Judy Sanford, 1999-2002; T.L. and Harriet Linskey, 2002-2010; Doug and Dale Bruce, 2010-2017; Zdenka and Jack Griswold, 2017-2021

design and layout Amelia and Robert Green; Claire MacMaster, Barefoot Art Graphic Design; Tara Law, Artist; Hillary Steinau, Camden Design Group

proofreading Amelia Green; Virginia M. Wright, Consultant; Editorial Advisors

printed by J.S. McCarthy Printers, Augusta, Maine

cover photo Celeste at anchor in the Tuamotu, 2020 See Ellen Massey and Seth Leonard's Sailing and Diving the Many Motu: A Long-awaited Return to the Tuamotu Archipelago on page 4.

copyright notice Copyright 2022, The Cruising Club of America, Inc. Copyright 2022, respective author(s) of each article, including any photographs, drawings, and illustrations. No part of this work may be copied, transmitted, or otherwise reproduced by any means whatsoever except by permission of the copyright holders.

VOYAGES 2022 4

Sailing and Diving the Many Motu: A Long-awaited Return to the Tuamotu Archipelago

74 Cape Horn 2004 by Baird Tewksbury, Pacific Northwest Station

by Ellen Massey Leonard, Boston Station Photographs by the author and Seth Leonard, Boston Station, Gulf of Maine Post

Why Japan? by Peter and Ginger Niemann, Pacific Northwest Station

A Night Approach to Cape Horn by Randall Reeves, San Francisco Station

When the Wind Is Howling, I Am Thankful for Our Culture of Safety

Mark Ellis Yacht Designer: A Man at the Right Place and Time by Mindy Gunther, Essex Station

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Sailing Solo to Hawaii

Book Review - In Slocum’s Wake by Nat Warren-White Review by Alex Agnew, Boston Station, Gulf of Maine Post

Book Review - Addicted to More Adventure: Risk Is Good, Enjoy It by Bob Shepton Review by Ellen Massey Leonard, Boston Station

FINAL VOYAGES Salutes to departed members. Edited by Maggie Salter, Boston Station, Gulf of Maine Post, and Robert Green, Essex Station

by Brendan Huffman, Southern California Station

117 GUIDELINES for Final Voyages, Photos, and Articles

The Coffee Bean Story

120 LAST WORDS from the Editors

by Trisha Schibli, Pacific Northwest Station

68 In Praise of the Familiar by John Bullard, Boston Station, Buzzards Bay Post

Book Review - Wooden Boats for Blue Water Sailors: Philosophy on Sailing, Design, and Construction by Alfie Sanford Review by Tim O’Keeffe, Boston Station, Buzzards Bay Post

by William Strassberg, Boston Station, Gulf of Maine Post

Trans-Atlantic with Jonah by Ron Schaper, Florida Station

Reflections: Watercolor Paintings from Shearwater by Gretchen Dieck Biemesderfer, Essex Station

by Skip Novak, Great Lakes Station

An Unexpected Maine Cruise by Jack Griswold, Boston Station, Gulf of Maine Post Photographs by Zdenka Seiner Griswold, Boston Station, Gulf of Maine Post

Marion and Gough Finale: The Last Voyages of Pelagic Australis

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Sailing and Diving the Many Motu A long-awaited return to the Tuamotu archipelago

By Ellen Massey Leonard, Boston Station Photographs by Ellen and Seth Leonard, (Boston Station/Gulf of Maine Post)

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Tumakohua Pass Beach, Fakarava issue 64  2022

VER SINCE WE FIRST SAILED to the Tuamotu archipelago 15 years ago, Seth and I wanted to dive the famous South Pass of Fakarava atoll. At that time, we were still fairly new to ocean sailing and certainly to scuba diving. We were partway along our first blue-water journey, our voyage around the world, and we were both in our early 20s. Seth and I had sailed Heretic, our primitive 38-foot copy of the Sparkman & Stephens yawl Finisterre, from Maine through the Panama Canal and across the Pacific to French Polynesia. Before the voyage, we had both been small-boat sailors and racers, but those 10,000 miles were our first offshore ones. As for scuba diving, we were complete novices. We had only breathed underwater for the first time in the British West Indies while en route to Panama. In the Galapagos, we had earned our advanced dive certifications. In the Marquesas, we had made our first dives without a guide from Heretic. We were keen on our new sport, but little did we know that when we reached the Tuamotu atolls, we would be hooked for life. Tuamotu means “many motu” in the local language, a motu being a coral islet (motu is both plural and singular). It’s a perfect name for this great arc of coral atolls stretching across more than a thousand miles in the South Pacific. An atoll is essentially a coral reef enclosing a lagoon, often with motu atop the reef. The Tuamotu islands — part of French Polynesia — lie right in the path of any sailor en route from Panama to Tahiti. They were long known to voyagers as the Dangerous Archipelago because of the hazards posed by the reefs before the advent of GPS and accurate charts. Today much of that risk is gone: Sailing there is no longer quite the sort of adventure where a misstep can bring grave mishap. While that’s very pleasant, of course, sometimes it’s good to have a challenge. Enter diving. Diving in the Tuamotu is all about sharks and fast currents. If you wish, it can also be about depth and decompression. Most

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Heretic in Rangiroa, 2007. of the diving takes place in the passes that lead into the atolls, and on an outgoing tide these passes are dangerous for sailors and divers alike. The ebb pours out of some of the lagoons at speeds exceeding eight knots, generating steep standing waves as it sets against the wind. Beneath the waves, the outflow creates a ferocious down-current, potentially lethal to any diver caught in it. All drift dives are consequently done on flood tides going into the lagoon. Sailors navigate these passes at slack water or at the beginning of the flood, when the surface is calm and the current negligible. The largest atoll of the archipelago, Rangiroa, has one of the strongest currents. When Seth and I sailed there 15 years ago, we managed to time our arrival for slack tide. Given that we were arriving at the end of a six-day passage (from the Marquesas, the archipelago about 600 miles to the northeast), our favorable timing was mostly luck, but we took it and wafted through the placid pass under only our genoa. Then we rounded the corner into the anchorage, tacked up into shallower water, luffed into

Ebb tide at Hao Atoll, 2018. weight-belt, this remains my most memorable, partly because it was memorable and partly because it was the first really challenging dive I’d done. In the same way, our first crossing of the Pacific remains my most memorable passage.

Bottlenose dolphins at Rangiroa’s Tiputa Pass. the wind, and dropped the hook. We were true sailing purists — and also impoverished 20-year-olds — and we never used our engine if we could help it. A few hours later, while taking a walk ashore, we saw what Tiputa Pass becomes on the ebb: With dolphins leaping from the steep white water, it was quite a sight, and not something we would want to be caught in. The following day, on the flood tide, we slipped underwater to experience Rangiroa’s phenomenal diving. We began by backrolling into the open ocean, right into a school of barracuda, and then descending to a school of gray reef sharks. I remember marveling at the otherworldly sensation of floating weightless in a water column that looked as clear as air and being surrounded by the predators who live there. Then we let the current take us into the pass, and we flew along faster and faster. It was exhilarating to the point where I actually ran out of air and had to breathe from the dive guide’s extra regulator. Towards the end, a huge manta ray was turning somersaults right in our path. Even now, with many dives under my

When Rangiroa’s fringe of palms dipped below the horizon in Heretic’s wake about ten days later, we vowed we’d come back someday. Through a series of very lucky circumstances, we managed to do so nearly a dozen years later. We had sold Heretic by then and had bought another old classic to replace her, Celeste, a 40-foot, cold-molded wooden sloop designed by Francis Kinney, editor of Skene’s Elements of Yacht Design. In 2018 we again made the long passage across the Pacific to French Polynesia, this time from Mexico. After a week or so in the Marquesas, we set off for the southern end of the Tuamotu chain to an atoll called Hao. The first time we’d sailed from the Marquesas to the Tuamotu, we’d enjoyed a pleasant and even-keeled, if slow, six-day amble downwind. This time would be different. Our angle on the trade wind was a close reach and the breeze was strong. Instead of swaying before the wind wing ‘n’ wing, we punched into head seas for 4½ days under triple-reefed main, jib, and staysail. Now in our 30s, we were too conscientious to rely solely on luck for either our weather forecasting or timing our tides. And so, of course, we got worse weather — strong headwinds — and we got the tides all wrong. (In fact, our tide tables were wrong.) We had to wait outside the atoll, tacking back and forth just offshore for five hours before the current moderated enough for us to sail into the lagoon. Sailing inside a lagoon is a treat for ocean sailors. The water is flat calm, but the wind blows strongly and consistently over issue 64  2022

Celeste tied to Hao’s abandoned wharf; Ellen on the bicycle.

the tops of the palms. It’s like a lake or a sheltered bay, but better because there’s almost nothing to block or shift the wind and because many of these lagoons are immense. You can fly along for hours without any pitching or rolling, your boat showing all the best of her performance qualities. Once inside Hao’s lagoon, it was quick — and extremely pleasant — work to skim across the water to the anchorage. The anchorage was in fact a crumbling wharf, convenient, and very sheltered. Hao is a sleepy place without any tourist infrastructure. The atoll is the site of the former French military base from which nuclear tests were launched between 1966 and 1996. Until fairly recently, no one was allowed to visit the place. Seth and I were curious to see it, in part because of its history. Ashore, there is still evidence of the military presence, in particular the enormous runway, which is all out of proportion to the tiny amount of local air traffic that now uses it. Underwater, we were saddened to see the state of the lagoon: murky, much of the coral dead, and with significant debris, seemingly thrown there at random. The lagoon was fortunately not what Jacques Cousteau called the “universal sewer,” but it did seem to have been the trash heap. There were a surprising number of reef fish and eels despite the debris and algae-covered coral. In a place like this there are no scuba operators. Seth and I are not strangers to diving on our own from Celeste, but the best 8

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diving in the Tuamotu is outside the lagoons and that makes it tricky. Even if it wasn’t ecologically irresponsible, anchoring on coral would be terrible holding. Free-diving down to secure a dinghy is easier and better, of course, but the ideal solution is for someone to operate the yacht or dinghy while the divers are underwater. If you are only two on board as we are, however, and you both wish to dive (one shouldn’t dive alone anyway), this isn’t feasible. So Seth and I were thrilled to be invited to join the Fafapiti Diving Club, a group of French teachers at the local school on Hao who had come together to buy a boat and an air compressor. These French divers were all very skilled and rather risk-loving and so preferred to make quite deep dives on the coral walls outside the lagoon entrance. Indeed, that is where most of the big critters were: reef sharks cruising above seemingly infinite schools of red bigeyes; manta rays turning lazy circles just below us at 140 feet and occasionally above us; schools of rainbow runners and sometimes a big tuna or amberjack; once or twice a five-meter-long tiger shark. After two months between Hao and an even more remote neighboring atoll, it was time to sail back to the Marquesas, where we planned to leave Celeste for the cyclone season after our visas ran out. We rode the back of a low-pressure system east for two days beneath overcast skies — easy reaching under genoa and single-reefed main — but we were slower than the

Clockwise from above: Ellen watches a gray reef shark over a ball of goatfish at Garuae Pass, Fakarava; orange-fin anemonefish, Garuae Pass; reef sharks in the shallows, Rangiroa lagoon.

system, and soon we were back to clear skies and trade winds well forward of the beam. We had a splendid reward for our upwind sailing, however, when we dropped anchor in the moonlight all alone among the spires of the famous Baie des Vierges on Fatu Hiva. We spent the following year entirely in the Marquesas, but in 2020 we returned once again to the Tuamotu. This time, our main destination was the place we had long dreamed of diving: Fakarava atoll.

Fakarava lies in the middle of the Tuamotu arc and is one of the largest of the group, its coral motu encompassing a lagoon with a surface area of over 1,000 square kilometers. Two passes lead into the lagoon from the ocean — the mile-wide Garuae Pass in the north and the narrow, coral-lined alleyway of Tumakohua Pass in the south. It is this pass in particular that has made the atoll renowned among divers and that has led to Fakarava’s status as a UNESCO biosphere reserve. The coral reefs are brilliantly alive, hosting thousands of reef fish, from little dartfish hiding in the coral to behemoth Napoleon wrasse issue 64  2022

Beautiful coral in the shallows.

“Tumakohua Pass has an exalted reputation and yet still we were bowled over by the beauty and health of its ecosystem.

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that can tip the scales at 400 pounds. Thanks to the health of the marine ecosystem, the reefs are also home to hundreds of sharks, including one of the biggest aggregations of gray reef sharks in the world. While we had expected our passages to and from Hao to be more or less upwind, we hoped to repeat the easy downwind passage we had made 14 years earlier. Instead, Celeste took us for a fast gallop to windward. With the wind well in the south — and thus forward of the beam — and the combined wind and swell height reaching 12 feet, it was a wet and bouncy ride. With only jib and staysail up, we had the lee rail buried nearly the entire time and were shipping so much water over the bow that we couldn’t open the center hatch for air. As we plotted our noon position each day, however, we found we were consistently making our fastest runs ever: 180 miles made good each day — once even a little more — and that in a boat with only a 28-foot waterline. We covered the 550 nautical miles and raised the atoll in only three days. 10

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Upon arrival, we decided first to dive Garuae Pass, and this turned out to be one of the most adrenaline-pumping dives I’ve ever done. Soon we were addicted to it and went back again and again. We would backroll into the open ocean just outside the pass during the height of the flooding current, and then we’d make a rapid descent to the coral shelf at 120 feet in order to keep from being swept into the lagoon before we’d seen anything. Down at depths close to decompression limits, we would hook onto outcroppings of dead coral and stare out into the blue at the parade of reef sharks. The current flowing over us was occasionally so strong that it threatened to tear my regulator out of my mouth. After about ten minutes of shark lookout — already almost enough time to require decompression — the guide would signal to let go, and we would lift off into the current. The first time the speeding water grabbed us, I estimated the current to be between four and five knots. I’d made decompression dives before, and wreck dives well inside submerged ships, but this was thrilling, exactly the sort of challenge I’d hoped for.

Tumakohua — South Pass — was beckoning, however. To get there, Seth and I sailed Celeste the full length of Fakarava’s lagoon, nearly 40 miles along the coral motu lining the windward side. The protected waters once again made for superb sailing. We were close-hauled on the way south against about 15 knots of wind, but it was a far cry from upwind ocean sailing. Instead of pitching against head seas and shipping green waves over the bow, Celeste heeled cleanly and flew along through the flat water. When we’re offshore, Celeste’s tiller is usually hooked up to her wind vane, but inside these lagoons we instead attached the tiller extension and stood out on the windward deck, steering her like she was a dinghy. The anchorage off the South Pass is not protected, however — it’s open to quite a lot of fetch across the wide lagoon — and so is only comfortable when there is little wind. Therefore, we were unable to dive the South Pass as much as we would have liked. Every time the wind got up, we’d retreat seven miles upwind to a perfectly protected bay tucked into the southeast corner of the lagoon. But when we could anchor near the dive site, it was spectacular.

Top: Seth sailing Celeste in the sheltered water of the lagoon. Above: Perfect sailing inside Fakarava lagoon, 2020.

I have never seen such pristine coral as where we began the dive at the drop-off at 90 feet down. Plate after plate of it staircased into the abyss. The first time we went, we were visited by five of the most enormous eagle rays I’ve ever seen, but the sharks were the stars of the show every time. There were literally issue 64  2022

Sailors like to sail, however, so after as many more dives as we could do, we set off for the less-visited atoll of Toau. We made the trip in just a couple of day-sails. First we had a perfect downwind trip back north over Fakarava’s smooth lagoon, and then after a night’s sleep, we exited the lagoon at slack tide and swayed downwind over the swell. We anchored in several different spots on Toau over the next week or so, doing a few dives from our dinghy, snorkeling, walking the beaches, and getting to know the few residents. Then we returned to Rangiroa. The overnight sail to this largest atoll, the site of so many of our best memories from our round-the-world voyage, was the sort to make any ocean sailor forget all the gales and upwind slogs he’s ever made. I had one of those night watches you don’t want to end, ghosting downwind with 12 knots on the quarter, a clear sky glittering with stars overhead, and phosphorescence shining in the wake. Perfect.

Ball of paddletail and one-spot snapper, Tumakohua (South) Pass, Fakarava.

hundreds of them swimming slowly past in phalanxes. In the mix were a species one doesn’t often see: blacktips — not blacktip reef sharks but the open-water species that are faster and more energetic. Just as in the North Pass, we drifted into the lagoon with the current, skimming over beautiful coral and colorful fish until we ascended beside a ball of snapper, scales shimmering in the sunlight. Tumakohua Pass has an exalted reputation and yet still we were bowled over by the beauty and health of its ecosystem. This was a place of which we would never tire. 12

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At first approach from the sea, Rangiroa looked the same as it had on our first visit 14 years before. But once we had dropped anchor, we realized that it now supports both a much larger local population and more tourists. There seemed to be more tourists even in the middle of the pandemic — this was October 2020 — than there had been 15 years ago. There were correspondingly more dive and snorkel boats, but happily it didn’t seem to have affected the marine life: Our dives were almost as good as that first one we had done when we’d been such novices aboard our primitive old boat, Heretic. While we didn’t see any manta rays this time, we instead were approached by an inquisitive great hammerhead. Being investigated by this iconic and critically endangered shark while floating 50 feet down, a quarter of a mile out to sea, in the disorienting world of the bottomless blue ocean, is an unforgettable experience. On our first visit, we had circumnavigated Rangiroa’s lagoon, reveling in the flat water and brisk winds, one of us always on bow lookout for coral bommies (most of the lagoons in the Tuamotu remain uncharted once you get away from the pass and village). We had taken about a week over it — the lagoon is nearly 1,500 square kilometers — and we’d stopped at a number of lovely motu, the two of us all alone

Fast passage to windward, 2020.

with the coconut trees and the reef fish. That little cruise had been perhaps the biggest highlight of our entire trip around the world. We knew we wouldn’t be able to replicate it — most of life’s best memories cannot be — and so instead we focused on diving the pass and the outer reefs. We did a couple of sunset dives, during one of which we saw big schools of tangs and surgeonfish spawning in little dances in the water column. But before we left the atoll — and French Polynesia — we did make two more sails over the rippled lagoon. Once again, we had the beautiful palm-fringed motu to ourselves, and we passed a few lazy days strolling the coral beaches and snorkeling from Celeste. We sailed back up to the pass on the day of our departure for the 2,400-mile passage to Hawaii, sliding through at just the start of the ebb. As we went, we were visited by Rangiroa’s favorite residents, its pod of bottlenose dolphins, perhaps the same dolphins we had seen leaping clear of the standing waves all those years before. Rangiroa was every bit as wonderful as we’d remembered, and we were every bit as sad to be leaving. And so, once again, as we watched Rangiroa recede in the waves astern, we vowed to ourselves that one day we’ll return.

About the Author and Photographers Ellen and Seth Leonard have sailed nearly 60,000 miles on rudimentary classic boats, including a global circumnavigation in their early 20s, a voyage to the Alaskan Arctic reaching the polar pack ice, and a second crossing of the Pacific to the South Seas Islands. In November 2020, after three seasons in French Polynesia, they made a 20-day passage from the Tuamotu archipelago to Hawaii and have since been working on Celeste’s maintenance, with one cruise among the Hawaiian Islands. Seth and Ellen were honored to be the recipients of the 2018 Young Voyager Award. Celeste is a 1985 custom cold-molded wooden cutter designed by Francis Kinney and built by Bent Jespersen in British Columbia. She’s 40 feet overall and 28 feet on the waterline. issue 64  2022

Ginger admiring a torii gate.

WHY JAPAN? “Like many cruisers hailing from ports on the west coast of North America, we’ve always had Japan on our minds as a natural leg of a Pacific voyage. And Japan gets rave reviews whenever the topic comes up among those who have sailed there.” by Peter and Ginger Niemann, Pacific Northwest Station

he beauty of the culture and country aside, Japan is an undeniably convenient stepping-stone for completing a North Pacific loop. Because of prevailing winds and currents, a Pacific Ocean circuit would logically include Japan on the return to North America. However many of the people we knew who had sailed to Japan had stopped only briefly to reprovision for the jump across the North Pacific. They hadn’t seen it as a cruising destination in itself. We had the impression that sailing in Japan was daunting — plagued by typhoons, currents, fog, fishing gear, forbidden ports, and impossible regulations. We had understood it was perhaps better visited

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by air and land than explored by sailboat. From March through May 2021, we had the opportunity to sail from Okinawa in the south up the west coast of the island chain to Hokkaido in the north. During this trip, we were surprised to learn that many of our preconceptions were false. The sailing was good, with predictable wind and many enchanting harbors — and shelter was never far away in case of a blow or typhoon. Also, recent changes in rules and technology have helped with Japan’s unique challenges. Rather than daunted during our cruise, we were charmed, and we can recommend Japan as a cruising destination and so much more.

A Typical Day

We weren’t certain what to expect in Japan as we navigated complicated pre-departure paperwork. As with any new country, once we arrived and settled in, a daily routine became familiar. This is what a typical cruising day was like for us: We depart at a time appropriate for the tidal current, just as we do in our home waters. Riding a fair current to the next stop makes sense, and if the day includes a transit through a pass, that timing is nonnegotiable. Arriving in the dark at an unfamiliar port has so many dangers that we try to avoid it. However, leaving in the dark is a different story since we’ve had a chance to see the layout of the port in daylight and spot unlit dangers, such as shallows, buoys, and snags. Accordingly, we tend to depart early, even before dawn if necessary, in order to arrive before sunset. We sail to a waypoint in the next port recommended by a friendly Japanese sailor. We head directly offshore as we depart to make sure we don’t encounter any nets set inshore, then turn to the course for our destination. Our friendly sailor will have warned us about those nets with a dramatic admonition to steer way clear, yet he himself sails quite close to shore. Go figure. We have good winds, maybe a beam reach in winds of 10 to 15 knots with reasonable waves. Our ketch, Irene, like most boats, loves these conditions, and so do we. We fly onward, enjoy a lunch and maybe dinner on passage. The VHF radio is quiet, unless we are hailed by Coast Guard or customs stations. Local sailors don’t anchor and usually

“ Cruising under sail in Japan is enjoyable, predictable, social, and rewarding. We now know that Japan is very much worthy of repeat visits and detailed explorations rather than just a stepping-stone home.”

Friendly people everywhere.

Helpful, friendly fellow cruiser Toshi-san. issue 64  2022

Peter chatting with coastguardsmen.

don’t use VHF radio. We sail with our AIS transmitting and thus attract attention from the authorities at a shore station or on a vessel. No matter. The conversations are polite and charming and always end with “Be safe!” and a warning to avoid surf, current, fishing nets, or weather. The miles roll by, and we approach our destination port, hopefully in full daylight. Only once have we arrived in the dark — it worked out well, but who needs that stress? As we approach, we are all business. This is when things can go wrong, so we consult our chart and get our plan together. Japanese ports are protected from storm waves by breakwaters — often multiple breakwaters — so you and your vessel will survive no matter the weather, but entering can be tricky, with doglegs and beacons. We weave our way in and enter a basin bordered by concrete walls. There is probably a fish co-op building, and perhaps an ice tower, as well as fishing boats tied up to the wall. We would never tie up in these busy spots, especially if the fleet is actively fishing. Instead, we make our way to the waypoint and tie up carefully. As always, we ask the first person we see, “Are we okay here? Daijoubu?” These waypoints are valuable. We once tied up just a few feet from a waypoint we had been given and were directed to move the few feet back to be precisely on the waypoint. This speaks to a reality in Japan: If a boat, especially a foreign boat, shows up in an unusual place, people may be upset. Yet if you are in the spot previously occupied by a sailboat, it’s always okay. We’ve found that it is important to respond to instructions. If you are asked to move, do it! No big deal. Unresponsive foreigners in the harbor can be extremely disturbing in a Japanese village. There may be some surge or waves from swell, tide, or traffic, and

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because the wall is concrete with bollards, spring lines and fenders are essential. We found our massive Yokohama-style fenders floating at sea and on the beach, and we’ll carry them on deck until we leave the country. It had been suggested that we need to carry a ladder in order to reach the top of quay walls, but Irene’s pin rail at the main shrouds provides a perfect step, and we get on and off the boat easily even at the lowest tides. The harbor scene is tranquil and attractive, with drying nets and colorful flags. We may take a walk away from the quay, admiring traditional houses and beautiful gardens, and perhaps a Shinto shrine or two. Back at the boat, we may find a Japanese sailor who has tied up next to us or even rafted to us. We enjoy drinks and discussions, and the plan for the next few days becomes clear. We hear about the local onsen (bath) and about delicacies available at a nearby restaurant. Maybe we depart early the next morning, or perhaps another pleasant day or two passes before we move on. Cruising at its best! Mixed among the fishing ports, which are free of charge, is a larger city with a marina, where we pay a fee similar to that charged by marinas everywhere. There are also free (or very inexpensive) pontoon floats available in smaller tourist towns.

A bit of history The classification of “closed” and “open” ports dates to Japan’s isolationist period from the mid-17th to mid-19th centuries, a response to problems encountered with unregulated trade and interaction with Western nations. Foreign ships were only allowed to arrive in certain “open” ports. The requirement remains to this day: A visiting foreign yacht is normally only allowed to enter “open” ports, which tend to be larger

commercial ports — fine as a base for inland travel, but not as scenic, enjoyable, or representative of the diversity of coastal Japan as the smaller “closed” ports.

What has made cruising Japan easier now than in the past? Luckily, in recent years the Japanese government has streamlined the process (it’s always a process!). With a closed-port permit obtained on entry, a foreign yacht may visit small, charming, ordinarily closed ports throughout Japan. Amazingly, this permit has no expiration date, so as of this writing we never need apply again should we return to Japan aboard Irene. This is good news given that Japan has hundreds of ports that are often adjacent to charming and scenic villages. We were granted our closed-port permit from the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism after several email exchanges before our arrival in Japan and a bit of back and forth due to COVID-19. In our three months of cruising, we were never charged a single yen to tie up for as many as several nights in these small harbors. We were only charged moorage at the occasional marina (two in Okinawa and one in Fukuoka) that we visited when we needed to empty garbage and

Charming little basin at Koniya.

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Ginger enjoys a private bath.

Fishing boats with cheerful flags.

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top off our water tanks. A Naikosen permit also facilitates cruising. This form documents a temporary import of the vessel to Japan. Once imported, the vessel is considered domestic rather than foreign for all customs issues. This allows travel from port to port without going through customs inspections each time. A very useful form indeed. We had read and heard that “knowing some Japanese” was needed. Ha! It’s impossible for most of us to pick up any new language to fluency while transiting a country for three months, much less such a complex one. Of course, we picked up some important words to be polite and communicate a few common things, but grammar and proper conjugation were definitely beyond our capabilities. Fortunately, smartphones can now read Japanese characters, and this convenience is amazing! Many government offices had someone who spoke English, and the young were often fluent, a result of their foreign language curriculum. Necessary telephone calls with officials were completed by asking the receptionist if they spoke English. Invariably they would transfer the call to a specialist in their office. Often a shy Japanese person would answer “no” when asked directly if they spoke English. In that case, Peter sometimes would jokingly say, “No problem, I speak Japanese. Ichi, ni, san, shi, go ….” Counting on fingers like a preschooler got a giggle, and often it turned out that the person had understated their English proficiency. There was always enough understood to solve whatever issue arose. There is a small but enthusiastic (and very helpful) group of Japanese yachtsmen who make arriving in small ports — the very places we want to visit — simpler. They share information and waypoints generously. Waypoints are a key to successfully cruising Japan — they’re literally like having a key to a port. One of the many pleasures of cruising in the country is greeting and chatting with fellow sailors. Expect to

Romantic memorial sculpture of Marilyn at Zamami Island, Okinawa.

Well placed and well-maintained buoys in Japanese waters.

“ The culture of Japan is worldrenowned. All of our expectations were met and often surpassed in hospitality, visual delights, and art of all types — culinary, industrial, architectural, horticultural, design, and public art.” get excellent advice on exploring any section of coast, where to dine, and dangers to avoid. Also, many ports have a resident yachtsman “ambassador” who assists in multiple ways — communication with officials, provisioning advice, route planning, and so on. These people are known by word-of-mouth. As an example, we had a sail shipped to a cruising ambassador in Hokkaido, where it was conveniently waiting when we arrived.

What did we love? The onsen, or public bath, is a wonderful place to relax and warm up after a chilly day of sailing. Many have a “family room” that can be rented for a private bath, which we preferred, not only because of COVID-19 concerns but also because we didn’t want to accidently break any rules of etiquette. For example, we have some discrete sailor’s tattoos that would be strictly forbidden in a conservative onsen. Japanese laundromats are efficient and spotlessly clean, and there issue 64  2022

are several to choose from in town. They sported the best machines we’ve encountered anywhere in the world! Many newer machines wash, dry, and include soap. Just load the clothes, pay, and come back in an hour for clean, dry clothes. Some of the laundromats were attended, usually by charming mature ladies. Our smartphones translated the instructions at the unattended laundromats. The culture of Japan is world-renowned. All of our expectations were met and often surpassed in hospitality, visual delights, and art of all types — culinary, industrial, architectural, horticultural, design, and public art. We were especially enamored of the culture of hospitality. Many people — officials, shopkeepers, fishermen, and bystanders — were willing to try to resolve any sort of problem we had, and many offered friendship. Unlike those in some parts of the world, government officials in particular seemed to want to help, even when a situation seemed unsolvable. We found that, in general, the Japanese people genuinely wanted to make a visitor’s experience positive.

What was unusual for a cruiser? No anchoring. Anchoring is only strictly forbidden in any port or near aquaculture. In the rest of Japan, it’s just not done. If one anchors, it is best done off the beaten track. Otherwise, it may be assumed that help is needed or your actions could cause alarm with the local population. We had expected to encounter officialdom — everything we had read prepared us. And in fact, when we arrived at our first port in Japan

Smartphone translating Japanese characters.

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and tied up, we were greeted by carloads of uniformed officials — customs, immigration, health, and Coast Guard. They coordinated with one another quite well, with one team waiting while another finished its business, but even so, at one point there were a dozen officers aboard Irene carefully taking swabs from every imaginable surface. What we had not expected was continued oversight from the Coast Guard and immigration, even with our imported-boat and closed-port entry permits. When we arrived at some of our destinations, Coast Guard officers would appear with forms to fill out — last port, next port — and, sometimes, a request to inspect down below. At first

“ Japanese laundromats are efficient and spotlessly clean, and there are several to choose from in town. They sported the best machines we’ve encountered anywhere in the world! Many newer machines wash, dry, and include soap. Just load the clothes, pay, and come back in an hour for clean, dry clothes.”

we were disconcerted, but we came to understand the expectations and even enjoy the interactions. The officers were always young, polite, earnest, and friendly. For many of these coastguardsmen, ours was the first yacht they had seen in their official capacity.

What about the storms, nets, traffic, seaweed, fog, currents? Japanese waters were not the most difficult we have navigated over the years by any means. The ports are well buoyed and lighted, and the coast doesn’t have many off-lying dangers. The southern islands do have plenty of coral, and all the normal cautions apply regarding careful piloting to avoid it. The northern islands have seaweed, current, fog, and small freighter and fishing boat traffic. This is no more difficult than those same challenges sailors experience in the Pacific Northwest. The shipping traffic we encountered behaved in courteous and predictable ways. Interestingly, VHF radio is not normally used in passing situations. Japan is well surveyed and charted. Our Navionics and C-MAP charts were good offshore, but many small ports were not charted in any detail. There is detailed Japanese charting available for all ports online and in regional booklets (S-Guide) now out of print, but we were loaned a copy by a sailor we met along the way. The Japan Hydrographic Association has an app (Apple only) that is reasonably priced and updated regularly, which includes fishing net permit locations, depths in harbors, and notices to mariners. The only catch is that it’s in Japanese — of course. The handy translate feature

Vending machines for SO MANY things.

on the smartphone helps decode the details. Cruising under sail in Japan is enjoyable, predictable, social, and rewarding. We now know that Japan is very much worthy of repeat visits and detailed explorations rather than just a stepping-stone home. There are no current published cruising guides for Japan. We used a number of online resources in addition to helpful information acquired along the way. We documented more details of our travel on our blog at oceanswell.blogspot.com. 2

PETER & GINGER NIEMANN Peter and Ginger Niemann began a liveaboard, sailing and cruising life in 2004 when they bought a 47-foot sloop, Marcy. She was in disrepair, but they fixed her up and departed on a four-year circumnavigation. Their journey took them from Seattle, Washington westabout via Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn. Highlights included South Pacific islands, a winter in New Zealand, Australia, and Madagascar; Rounding Cape Horn and exploring the Beagle Channel and Patagonian canals; and coming home via Hawaii and Alaska. Back in Seattle, Peter and Ginger got jobs, recharged the cruising kitty, found a new boat, Irene, a 50-foot

ketch with standing headroom for Peter, and departed again in 2016 on what turned out to be an eastabout circumnavigation via the Northwest Passage, Europe, the Suez Canal, Singapore, Japan, and Alaska. They returned to their homeport, Ballard, Washington, a seafaring district of

Seattle, in August 2021. They typically sail as a double handed crew enjoying the teamwork and communication of sailing together. Current plans involve a refit of Irene and exploration along the coast between Alaska and Washington States.

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A Night Approach to Cape Horn by Randall Reeves, San Francisco Station Editor’s note: In October 2018, Randall Reeves departed for a second attempt at what he called the Figure 8 Voyage, a solo circumnavigation of both the American and Antarctic continents in one season. He had something to prove. During his first attempt the previous year, knockdowns off Cape Horn and in the Indian Ocean had damaged his vessel, Moli (referred to throughout as Mo), forcing an abrupt retirement from the course and a return home to refit. The subsequent attempt went more smoothly, at least until the second approach to Cape Horn …

November 29, 2018. Day 56 of the Figure 8 Voyage. Mo and Randall round Cape Horn for the first time and continue heading east for a full circuit of the Southern Ocean.

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HOUR AFTER HOUR, WE RUN TOWARD THE SHALLOWS BELOW TIERRA DEL FUEGO. Hour after hour, wind is west at 30 knots and the barometer remains fixed at 1008 millibars. I know this is how the low will come on: pressure lines will trend east-west until a steep and slanting wave arrives from the north. With it will come the inevitable front and more powerful winds. But that wave and its winds have been due for some time. In the dark, I reach for a flashlight and train its beam on the barometer. The needle has not moved. I count to 300 and click the light again. The barometer reads the same. I’ve eaten dinner directly from the pot and then quickly donned an extra layer of fleece while my belly radiates its receipt of lentil stew. Now I am crammed into the starboard settee of the pilot house, kitted up in foulies and ready. I’m on bigweather watch and will remain so for the duration of the blow. Click the light again. My breath steams in the shaft of white. The barometer reads the same. Mo is tearing along under a heavily reefed working jib. Beyond her rails, night has consumed the sea, but not utterly. Often during a gale, cloud obliterates both sky and sea. A 24

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graybeard is heard long before its boiling embrace emerges into the dim cast of running lights. Tonight though, there is a full moon behind the veil above. The sky glows eerily, and against it the heavers are perceived as faint changes in shades of blackness. Thankfully, there’s not much to them. Not yet. Click the light. Count and click again. A falling barometer will be the first indication that our position in the low has changed, but still it reads the same. This is a climax, of sorts. It’s March 20, 2019. Day 167 of the Figure 8 Voyage. Three and a half months ago, we rounded Cape Horn from the north. That early morning was cold and gray with a strong westerly and a spitting rain, but the easy sea allowed me to slide Mo in toward the great rock, even to kiss it on the shins as we passed. Then on we sailed beneath Staten Island and the Falklands and onward in our attempt to round the entire Southern Ocean, returning here for a second pass before heading toward the Arctic’s Northwest Passage. The strategy for this second time around — to stay as far south as I dared — had been chosen for two reasons. First, at my target latitude of 47 degrees south, the circumference of the circle from Cape Horn to Cape Horn again was almost

Plunging breakers in the shallows between Diego Ramirez and The Great Cape.

“The main was down, the boom lashed to its crutch, the working jib was deeply reefed. Seas were still building.

”

2,000 miles less than at the more typical rounding latitude of 40 degrees south. Second, down here Mo would wallow in fewer calms. The continent-sized lows that wander below the capes tend to hoover-up everything around them, leaving vast windless spaces in between. The farther north of the lows one sails, the longer last the calms, the farther south, the more consistent the wind. As it turned out, lack of wind would not be a problem. By early December, Mo and I were beyond the Falklands and had turned to the east when our first major gale approached. Its winds built during the day but really came to force overnight with the anemometer touching 45 knots and more. The main was down, the boom lashed to its crutch, the working jib was deeply reefed. Seas were still building. Near midnight, I was dozing fitfully in my bunk when I felt Mo lift on a wave; then there was a heavy slam as green water roared into the cockpit and threw itself against the companionway hatch. Mo rolled, and I rolled with her from my bunk onto the cupboards. As she righted, I could hear the tinkling and splashing of water in the pilot house. I groaned at the thought that we’d yet again broken something vital. A year earlier, and during the first Figure 8

attempt, such a sea had put out a window. Grabbing a flashlight, I crawled to the pilot house. Here water dripped from the ceiling and streamed off flat surfaces, but there was no shattered glass. In the cockpit, the dodger’s plastic door was ripped open, the windvane paddle had been stripped from its socket and was gone; sheets were trailing in the water. It was a hard hit, but the wet below was merely from sea squirting in between the companionway hatch and the locked companionway slide. “Just keep the water out,” answered Eric Hiscock when others asked for his advice on a Southern Ocean passage. Easier said than done. After that, the south dished up a succession of powerful lows, a gale a week on average. But Mo had weathered all, and my resolve to sail hard and fast through even the worst of it had paid off. Leave the storm jib in its bag had been the vow, and it had worked. Sitting in the pilot house as we made for our second approach to Cape Horn, I was weary but also warmed by the glow of success. Or rather, near success. We had this one last obstacle to overcome. The metal body of the flashlight is cold in my hand. I click the light again. Now the barometer’s resolve has wavered; it reads 1007 mb. Within the hour, winds have veered into the issue 64  2022

A GRIB file showing an intense low south of the Cape and Mo’s plotted course.

northwest and increased to a standing 40 knots. On deck, I roll a fourth reef into the working jib. A pelting rain bites my cheeks. I begin to wonder at the intelligence of cutting in for the Horn on such a dirty night. When the prudent mariner of a small yacht speaks of his Cape Horn approach, it should be understood that his target waypoint is actually south of a small group of islands called Islas Diego Ramirez that are themselves some 50 miles south of the great Cape. The reason for the Diego Ramirez heading is water, or rather a lack thereof. This group of rocks sits on the edge of the South American continental shelf, where depths rise sharply from out of the abyss to as little as 300 feet. In the relative shallows between Diego Ramirez and the Cape, seas can break with fury if weather has been running foul to the west or if one encounters strong winds here during a rounding. The likelihood of both occurring at the same time is not insignificant and serves to concentrate the mind. The most famous, early stories of yachts encountering difficulties here were those of Miles and Beryl Smeeton, who, with John Guzzwell, attempted Cape Horn twice in their ketch, Tzu Hang. During the first approach in 1956, the yacht was pitchpoled in steep and breaking seas. Beryl, on watch in the cockpit, was swept overboard. The gale took both masts, damaged the hull, and left the boat half sunk. The saving of Tzu Hang on this occasion is a tale for the ages. Since then, it has become 26

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customary for small vessels to plan a rounding of Cape Horn via the deeper water. If weather looks to be moderate, as it did for Mo’s first pass, one can always alter course to the north. By midnight, the barometer reads 1005; three hours later, 1003. Now winds are well over 40 knots; seas are building rapidly. I have thoughts of bailing out, of gybing around for the safer run under Diego Ramirez, but now the angle of wind and sea would make that an awkward course. I carry on. Dawn. We are above and beyond Diego Ramirez and racing over shoal water, but now it’s not the depth that worries me so much as the east-setting current, which flows like a river around and around the Southern Ocean loop and must, necessarily, be shoved upward and accelerated as it meets these lifting depths. At first there is no change, but as daylight comes on, the seas stack up and double in size in a matter of miles. Their blueblack faces become sheer, their crests crash in on themselves with an explosiveness that surpasses anything I’ve seen during these months in the south. Mo is being thrown. Frequently she surfs with a roar. Twice before 0800, she is laid over and scoops a cockpit full of water. Both times she recovers without any assistance from me. We race on. I’m often asked why — why am I so attracted to long, offshore ventures? At first the question caught me off guard and

Above: In the south, chafe is a vessel’s worst enemy. Here Randall is renewing genoa sheets in a boisterous sea. Right: An immature wandering albatross glides in to inspect Mo’s decks.

my responses were halting. Wouldn’t anyone, given the opportunity, put at the top of his priorities list a solo sail around the world? The answer for me is immediate affirmation. But to others and when the long days of discomfort are weighed in, the sleepless nights, meals eaten from a can, the perpetual, clammy damp, hands so raw the skin sluffs off, the gut-gnawing fear of an approaching storm, the inescapable wrath of a heavy sea, and months of exposure to a remoteness that makes the crew of the space station one’s nearest neighbors — when all that is known, most choose not to go to sea and regard as crazy those who do. The Southern Ocean evokes my abiding interest because sailing here is like exploring an alien world. Down here, there isn’t the evidence of civilization that one finds in other, more hospitable oceans. Down here, there are no ships on the horizon, no jet contrails in the sky, no plastic trash ever clutters one’s wake. For months on end, there isn’t so much as a lee shore, and the waves, freed from such constraints, roam like giant buffalo upon a great, blue plain. Moreover, down here, the animals one encounters live in such an open and pure wilderness that you are likely their first human encounter. Many days Mo and I are visited by that marvel, the wandering albatross. As big as a suitcase and with a 12-foot wingspan, this bird lives most of its life beyond the sight of land, and most of that time is spent flying. It can glide in any direction in any strength of wind; so adapted is it to this environment that

it can even sleep while aloft. When my little ship is struggling to survive, this bird hangs in the air with an effortlessness that defies understanding. There, above that bounding wave, it is poised so still as to seem carved out of the sky. Or take the stars. Here on a clear and moonless night, the heavens shine such that our brother constellations recede into the melee of twinkling and are lost. On such a night, looking upward with binoculars is like dipping one’s hands into a basket of pearls. Look down and galaxies of phosphorescence spin in Mo’s wake. You ask me why? With my own eyes I have seen these things. That is why. The low is due to blow itself out by early morning, but at 1100, winds are still 35 knots and gusting higher. We are below issue 64  2022

At the height of a gale, Mo is passed by a mountainous sea with continuous break hundreds of feet wide.

the peninsula with Cape Horn several hours farther east, and I let Mo ease north to meet it. Though the cloud above us is beginning to thin, the coast is shrouded in fog, and it comes as a surprise when just after making the noon log, I sight land, a lone, dark hump on port beam, Cape Spenser.

Above: Mo making fast time under a slate gray sky. Left: A tall sea just beginning to topple.

Mo has sailed more than 15,000 nonstop miles in the Roaring Forties. What should I feel? Proud of the accomplishment? Humbled by the privilege of exploring so long this timeless and trackless sea? Lucky to have survived with boat and self intact?

On we rush in these mad seas, but the low is moving past and the day has become fine and bright. Then, just after 1500, the Cape heaves into view two points off port, awash in sunlight. Even at a distance, I can see the breakers throwing themselves at her feet. Gray, hulking rock not so much barren as raw, jagged, and torn from eons of facing the worst, and when the sky clears, always the sea remains and the Cape remains.

Yes, all that, but not now. Now I only feel the relaxation of fatigue, of relief and release. After two tries, this circuit is closed. Wind is slowly easing. I let Mo push past the Cape with her reefs in. I make a hot dinner and then go to my bunk for a dreamless sleep. And under a night sky ablaze with the cold, blue light of stars, Mo sails on and on and on ...

It has been 110 days since we last saw this rock, looping around with the express purpose of seeing it again. In that time

This article was originally published in SAIL magazine, April 2021.

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March 20, 2019. Day 166 of the Figure 8 Voyage. Mo and Randall complete a full circuit of the Southern Ocean with their second Cape Horn rounding, having sailed 15,343 miles in the Roaring Forties in 110 days.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Born and raised in Northern California, Randall Reeves, 59, grew up reading and dreaming of the sea. He learned to sail on the rivers of central California and often “borrowed” the family sailboat for solo ventures to the San Francisco Bay. These turned out to be formative escapades. While in college, Randall interviewed world-famous solo sailor Bernard Moitessier for his campus radio station. He began his own solo adventures in 2010 with a twoyear Pacific loop in a 30-foot ketch. In October 2019, Randall Reeves became the first person to complete what he calls the Figure 8 Voyage, a solo circumnavigation of both the American and Antarctic continents in one season, this aboard Moli, a 45-ft aluminum expedition sloop built in 1989 by Dubbel and Jesse of Norderney, Germany. The double loop of the globe, comprising some 40,000 nautical miles sailed, lasted 384 days and took Randall twice around Cape Horn and up through the Arctic’s Northwest Passage. In 2020, Randall was awarded the Cruising Club of America’s Blue Water Medal. Randall sent in daily posts from sea that included high-resolution photographs, which he has used to produce his first publication, a picture book of images from some of the remotest places on the planet. The Figure 8 Voyage book can be purchased on his website, figure8voyage.com.

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An Unexpected

Maine Cruise

by Jack Griswold, Boston Station, Gulf of Maine Post Photographs by Zdenka Seiner Griswold, Boston Station, Gulf of Maine Post

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Kite in Criehaven, Maine’s most remote inhabited island. Inset: Courtesy of Flying Fish and the Ocean Cruising Club 31 issue 64  2022

Left: Peter Passano on Sea Bear with her new owners, Angel Collinson and Peter Willauer (BOS). Above: Red’s Eats, Wiscasset.

n the spring of 2020, Portland shut down. Restaurants closed, theaters, museums, bars, and barber shops all shuttered. And no one was going anywhere by bus, train, or plane. But we had Kite, our cutter-rigged Valiant 42, and we had the coast of Maine, as good a cruising ground as any we have found in our travels around the world. The coast measures about 228 miles, but the tidal coastline, including all the inlets and bays, stretches almost 3,500 miles and increases to more than 5,000 if you include Maine’s 3,166 islands. Kite was ready to go. We had worked on her over the winter in preparation for a transatlantic passage to Ireland. That was no longer going to happen. Kite would be our antidote to COVID isolation. We embarked on a long, leisurely summer cruise along the coast, with an emphasis on leisurely, our indispensable Cruising Guide to the Maine Coast by Curtis Rindlaub and Hank and Jan Taft in hand. We wanted to poke around old haunts and parts of Maine we hadn’t visited before, particularly some of the rivers and inlets formed by long, rocky necks left behind by retreating glaciers in the last ice age. Many of these anchorages are quite out of the way and normally we might just sprint by them on our way to the cruising grounds of Penobscot Bay and points further east. You can sail Maine for an entire lifetime and never see it all. This was our chance to explore our own backyard. Heading up the Sheepscot River, we spent a night on Gale and Charlie Willauer’s (BOS/GMP) mooring in Edgecomb, just outside the Ovens Mouth, where the tidal current rips through a narrow channel. We dinghied into their dock and walked up to the house for a drink. During a ferocious thunderstorm, we learned that their son and his partner were buying Sea Bear, the steel-hulled, self-built cutter belonging to Blue Water Medal winner Peter Passano (BOS/GMP). Pete has sailed Sea Bear all over the world and has done some impressive Southern Ocean voyaging, much of it single-handed. We wondered how pleased

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he must feel that Sea Bear would again be voyaging with this young couple. He and the new owners were outfitting her at a dock in Wiscasset, just a few miles up the river, so we set out to meet them the next morning. Wiscasset was a prosperous seaport in the late 18th century and, as a result, has a lot of pretty Federal-era architecture. One of its claims to fame nowadays is Red’s Eats, a small takeout shack on a street corner that serves lobster rolls. For some reason that we can’t figure out, Red’s Eats has become quite famous and is a bucket-list item for many tourists coming to Maine. A lobster roll is comprised of a bun (usually a hot dog bun) filled with lobster meat and either mayonnaise or butter. That’s it. There isn’t much difference from one lobster roll to the next, except maybe the amount of lobster. Nonetheless, even during this pandemic summer there was a line outside Red’s; they continued to churn out those rolls at $24 a pop. At the head of Muscongus Bay, we anchored near the Todd Audubon Sanctuary on Hog Island. One of the special things about the Maine coast are the many undeveloped, preserved wilderness spots open to the public. Organizations such as the Maine Island Trail Association work with landowners to make private islands accessible. Maine Audubon manages several coastal sanctuaries and local land trusts maintain numerous trails along the coast. Just about every day, we would anchor in some beautiful place, often by ourselves, take the dinghy ashore, and ramble about. Muscongus Bay is filled with small islands and rocky ledges. We were carefully picking our way through them at dead low tide on our way to Port Clyde when we passed Friendship, a small fishing village with a busy working harbor. We decided to pick up a mooring for an hour or so while we had lunch, figuring that the owner was off lobstering for the day. Pleasure boats are few in Friendship and, despite its name, it has been

Monhegan harbor. Below left: Olson house, Cushing. Below right: Hiking on Monhegan.

known to be downright unfriendly to yachties. As we brought the pendant aboard we saw a large lobster boat steaming directly for us. We braced ourselves for a not unjustified stream of crusty invective. The skipper pulled up next to us and let loose with a stream of … apologies! He was so sorry, he said, but he needed to use the mooring. Normally he’s out fishing, but he had to do some unexpected maintenance on his boat. He usually had another mooring available which we could have picked up, but a friend was using it. We left feeling badly that we had made him feel badly. We promised to come back another time and use his mooring. Tranquil, well-protected Maple Juice Cove in Cushing lies around Pleasant Point from Friendship. We dinghied into a nearby lobster operation with a working dock and fish store and asked if we could leave our dinghy there while we took a walk. No problem. The owner even promised to keep an eye on it for us because the dock was so busy. We’re usually welcome to tie up to these fishing docks, though we always make a point

to ask first. A short walk up a country road brought us to the Olson House, the handsome farmhouse that’s the setting for Andrew Wyeth’s famous painting, “Christina’s World.” The house, where Anna Christina Olson lived with her brother, is now owned and operated by the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland. Unfortunately, it was closed, one of many reminders of the pandemic we encountered, but cruising itself, socially distant by its nature, did not seem much different. In a world suddenly turned sideways, this was comforting. Escaping the inlets, ledges, and bays of the coast, we headed out to Monhegan, 12 miles off the coast. This craggy island of high granite cliffs and spruce forests has been home to an artists’ colony since the mid-19th century. It still draws artists, but also day trippers and vacationers who come for the solitude and remoteness as well as the beauty. Monhegan Associates, a private land trust, maintains 17 miles of hiking trails. Monhegan feels like a different world. It’s not an easy place to visit by boat, with a small harbor completely exposed to the issue 64  2022

“Nobody relishes the specter of diving into Maine’s

frigid waters to free a tangled prop or of losing the ability to maneuver while being carried toward a ledge.

”

prevailing southwesterlies, no anchorage, and no way to reserve a mooring in advance. But Monhegan is worth the effort. If the wind is not blowing from the southwest (which it usually is), you pick up a vacant mooring if one is available, then go ashore in search of the harbormaster, who can sometimes be found at the Fish House restaurant. With luck, you will be directed to an overnight mooring. If not, the mainland village of Port Clyde is not far away. Manana Island is next to Monhegan, on the other side of the harbor. Much of it privately owned, it is the site of an abandoned U.S. Coast Guard station and, in summer, a small herd of curious goats. We dinghied over to explore a bit and stumbled upon a fairly large tortoise in the grass. This was curious. As far as we knew, no tortoises are native to Maine. A Google search turned up the Maine Master Naturalist Program. That seemed to be just the ticket, and we sent them a picture. Very quickly we got a reply. It was an African spurred tortoise. Native to the Sahara region, they are apparently popular as pets, but can grow to over 200 pounds and live from 70 to 150 years, so they are often abandoned. This was the initial hypothesis for how this tortoise got to where it was, and it set off an excited flurry of activity among the master naturalists as to how to rescue it before the brutal Maine winter set in. Emails flew back and forth as they identified possible places that accept rescue tortoises and determined how they would get it there. Apparently, Delta Cargo has a live animal transport service: who knew?

One of the naturalists made plans to capture the tortoise. We agreed to help if we could. Luckily, before the whole enterprise was set in motion, he got in touch with the island’s homeowners to arrange a landing, and the mystery of the tortoise was solved. He was indeed a pet and had a name: Sammy. Every summer, Sammy is let loose on the island and picked up in the fall. We wondered if perhaps the owners’ great, great grandchildren would still be transporting a 200-pound Sammy to his summer home in the 22nd century. Zdenka took a picture. Perhaps influenced by our recent foray to the Olson house, we thought of it as “Sammy’s World.” Penobscot Bay has a justified reputation as a premier cruising ground. A little more than halfway up the coast and spoiled with picturesque islands, towns, and villages, it is the destination of choice for many cruisers coming to Maine; this year that was true in spades. Because of the pandemic, many more people seemed to be out cruising. Some were locals like us who had planned to be elsewhere; others came from neighboring New England states. There was a contingent of COVID escapees from the Caribbean—while Europeans had sailed home across the Atlantic, many cruisers hailing from the Americas headed to Maine. A happy consequence was that we were able to meet up with many friends, perfecting the art of socially distant sundowners in the process. Cindy Crofts-Wisch and Fleet Surgeon Jeff Wisch (BOS/BUZ) set an impressive example for us all; happyhour guests tied to the stern of their Oyster 53, Wischbone, sometimes with an empty dinghy as a COVID buffer. A less happy consequence of the pandemic was the plethora of mega-yachts, an unusual sight in these parts. Normally these things go from the Bahamas or Caribbean to the Med. This year they couldn’t do that, so many of them came to Maine. Fortunately, they seemed to stick around “social” spots, such as Camden and Northeast Harbor on Mount Desert Island, that have facilities to support them. Only sporadically did they venture out to the more pristine anchorages, such as the islands of Merchant Row, near Stonington.

Sammy’s world.

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Down East, the sparsely populated easternmost part of the coast beyond Mount Desert Island, owes its name to the fact that it is reached by sailing downwind in the prevailing southwesterlies. Here, there are only a few fishing villages, and the

coast has a wilder, more remote feeling. Rocky and rugged, it can be foggy, and this summer seemed foggier than most. Not that long ago, cruisers would often become fog-bound, unable to move for several days or longer. But with our chart-plotter, radar, and AIS, we are able to navigate easily even when we can hardly see past our bow. We often feel as if we are in some sort of video game. The bane of our existence, in fact the bane of all sailors in Maine, is the ever-present lobster pot. Lobstering is such a lucrative fishery that pots are ubiquitous. In many places, they look like a multicolored carpet, and you don’t think there can possibly be room to steer through them. You can never really relax, and navigating among the pots in fog raises the anxiety needle pretty high. Nobody relishes the specter of diving into Maine’s frigid waters to free a tangled prop or of losing the ability to maneuver while being carried toward a ledge. Even anchorages are affected. When we arrived at lovely Cows Yard, we saw no clear spot to drop the hook. Finally, we anchored in the best place we could find—near a ledge, with

Clockwise from above: Kite in the fog; Criehaven harbor; Lobstermen in the fog.

about a foot under the keel at low tide. The next morning, we had fouled three pots, which were wrapped around the prop, keel, and rudder. It took a good, painstaking hour to free ourselves. Happily, we were able to untie and retie the floats without cutting any of them. Soon, we were as far east as we could go. Another year, we would have sailed a quick overnight to Nova Scotia (where lobstering is not allowed in summer) or continued up the coast to New Brunswick and into the Bay of Fundy. But this year, Canada was off limits, with the border firmly closed. We anchored at Cross Island, an uninhabited National Wildlife Refuge. A lifesaving station, built in 1874 and long issue 64  2022

abandoned, still stands on Cross. The island has a large network of trails, and it’s easy to get lost—in a good way. You would feel far away from it all were it not for the U.S. Navy’s very-low-frequency antenna station right next door on the mainland. It is huge, with two arrays of 13 antennas each. Each array has a central mast, 997 feet tall, surrounded by an inner circle of 875-foot masts and an outer one of 800-foot masts. The station’s job is to communicate with the Atlantic fleet of “boomers,” nuclear ballistic missile submarines (commanded by a corps of aging captains?). We understand that in the event of a nuclear war, this antenna station might be a primary target. It’s sort of a spooky spot, and you can’t help but wonder if all those powerful radio transmissions aren’t somehow scrambling your insides. The small town of Cutler, the last decent anchorage before Canada, was our easternmost and last stop. Its narrow, 36

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Clockwise from top: The Basin on Hurricane Sound, Vinalhaven; old lighthouse at Mistake Harbor; bottom work at low tide, Winter Harbor.

attractive harbor is surrounded by houses. A pretty lighthouse sits on an island at the harbor entrance. The harbor is full of fishing boats and moorings, but there is room outside the mooring field. As we were about to drop anchor, we received a call on the VHF: “Sailing vessel in Cutler harbor, this is IceBear. We have a mooring that you’re welcome to use, would you like it?” The boat name was a bit unusual, and Zdenka remembered that one of her best friends from college had recently mentioned a sister who was in the midst of a circumnavigation on a boat called—IceBear? She answered yes, we would love to use the mooring, and by the way, was this Carol? After a stunned pause, the radio voice said yes, but how could you possibly know that?

Clockwise from top: Kite in Jonesport; Jack with our new Cutler friends on their porch; Cross Island with Navy VLF station beyond.

About the Authors

We spent a pleasant afternoon on the porch of this welcoming couple’s house, overlooking the harbor. Carol had a stack of photos from her sister and Zdenka’s university days, memories of a happily misspent youth. IceBear, whose handle Carol and her husband use when offering their mooring to visiting boats, was in Cape Town under COVID lockdown. We have often been struck by how small the cruising world is, but even so, this connection surprised us all. What began as a summer of dashed plans ended up being one of the best seasons we have spent cruising in Maine. As the pandemic outlook hopefully improves in our corner of the world, we plan to spend another summer enjoying this spectacular coastline, catching up with friends, old and new, along the way. With many thanks to the Ocean Cruising Club, in whose journal, Flying Fish, this article first appeared.

Jack and Zdenka Griswold sail Kite, their Valiant 42, out of Portland, Maine. In 2016, they completed a seven-year, west-about circumnavigation which took them through the Panama Canal to the Galapagos, French Polynesia, New Zealand, Fiji, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Australia, SE Asia, South Africa, and then home via St. Helena, Ascension, and the Caribbean. They were awarded the Vilas Prize for their 2015 Voyages article about their Indian Ocean crossing. Since 2016, they have cruised the U.S. East Coast, Bermuda, and the Canadian maritime provinces of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. They spent the past two pandemic summers sailing Maine, their home waters, and were co-editors of Voyages from 2017 until 2021.

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REFLECTIONS WATERCOLOR PAINTINGS FROM SHEARWATER

by Gretchen Dieck Biemesderfer, Essex Station

here is a pleasant symmetry between sailing and watercolor painting in that both use water and air to accomplish something: movement for sailing and images for watercolor painting. The various watercolor techniques for layering pigments — wet-on-wet, wet-on-dry, and dry-on-dry,

for example — create transparency and luminescence of colors that are unique to the medium. Technical terms used in watercolor painting are also evocative of life on the water. A wet splash of color is referred to as a wash. Adding a second color on top of that wash is referred to as floating. Backwash can occur when a very wet brush comes in contact with damp paper, flooding the paint already on the paper with paint from the brush and resulting in an interesting textural effect. 38

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Sailing provides particular challenges for watercolorists painting en plein air or “in the open air.” Painters usually have considerable travel baggage when painting outdoors, such as easels, paints, water or solvents, paper or canvas, brushes, rags, and chairs and tables. These items don’t fit comfortably on a sailboat in calm seas and can be dangerous in rough seas. Painting outdoors as the lights and shadows change in response to the movement of the sun is difficult even on land. Painting while underway is nearly impossible due to the rapidly changing scenery and the heel and movement of the boat. Painting on a mooring or at anchor has its own annoyances, such as the swinging of the boat, which may take the subject of the painting momentarily out of view. Because of these challenges, I take photographs from Shearwater, our Mason 43, to use as inspiration for my more involved marine paintings. Painting from a photo allows me time to add the desired degree of complexity without losing the unique vantage point of a boat on the water. Incidentally, it is also an excellent way to pass the winter months between sailing seasons.

Atlantic Sunrise.

Marion-Bermuda Race 2007 My first Bermuda race was the 2007 Marion-Bermuda Race. On the 2-to-6 a.m. watch, I witnessed the sky make a spectacular transition, from dark night with the stars and Milky Way as rarely seen on land, to the sun slowly emerging over the horizon to the east. As we sailed south of the Gulf Stream, there was just enough wind to keep the sails full and put some ripples in the water. Because we were sailing celestially, it was reassuring to see one of our competitors to our port and know we were generally racing in the right direction toward Bermuda.

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2013 CCA Maine Cruise

The 2013 CCA Maine Cruise provided several opportunities to generate images from unique perspectives. We started the cruise in South Freeport, Maine, where Shearwater had put in for some repairs after the 2013 Marion-Bermuda Race. We had a great sail on a beautiful and breezy day for our first-ever visit to Rockland. We explored Rockland and visited the Farnsworth Art Museum to see the paintings of N.C., Andrew, and Jamie Wyeth.

on a mountain of rock, the lighthouse is usually painted from a side perspective from the vantage point of the land. From Shearwater, we were able to get a face-on photo of the lighthouse and its supporting buildings as we passed on our way out of Blue Hill Bay. I tried to capture the sun reflecting off the buildings as well as the textures of the rock formations in the foreground and the spruce forest in the background.

Next stop was Castine, where the highlight was the Maine Maritime Academy and its ship bridge simulators. Trying to navigate a barge-tug combo through New York Harbor made us appreciate Shearwater’s relative nimbleness. We left Castine with sunny skies and light air moving down-east through Eggemoggin Reach. After a somewhat lazy passage, we entered the familiar waters around Mount Desert Island.

Leaving Bass Harbor in the early afternoon, we approached Southwest Harbor through Western Way. We took up a mooring at Hinckley’s, where we had been coming for years with our children, first on our Bristol 35, Daphnae, and then on Shearwater. From the mooring field, there is a wonderful view of Cadillac Mountain, Greening Island at the mouth of Somes Sound, and, in the distance, Little Cranberry. On Greening Island’s western shore, there is a house that has changed little over the past 25 years except for the addition of solar panels, which I didn’t include in the painting.

The iconic Bass Harbor Head Lighthouse in Acadia National Park was built in 1858 for around $5,000. Sitting

Bass Harbor Head Light.

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House on Greening Island.

Boothbay Harbor

For the past 10 years while sailing in Maine, we have made a point of visiting the Boothbay Harbor region, where we have some friends who have houses on Squirrel Island. We sailed west through Fox Island Thorofare between North Haven and Vinalhaven islands, passing Goose Rock Lighthouse at the channel’s east entrance. This island light stands like a sentry, its rusty-red tower base reflected in the water. At the head of Boothbay Harbor is the 1,000-foot pedestrian footbridge and its iconic Bridge House. Built in 1902 for the bridge tender, the house is now privately owned. This view of Bridge House is from the Squirrel Island mail boat, Novelty. I wanted to contrast the house’s weathered shingles with the rippling water and the reflection of the footbridge and structures.

Goose Rocks Lighthouse, North Haven. issue 64  2022

Bridge House, Boothbay Harbor.

Leaving Boothbay Harbor and heading southwest on the way to South Freeport, we passed the Cuckholds Light off Southport Island. Originally built in 1892, the iconic lighthouse’s circular wing with conical red roof and structural

nuances provide for various interplays between direct light, reflected light, and shadows. The solidness of the buildings and the rockiness of the island contrast with the movement of the water and the spray of the waves on shore.

Cuckholds Light.

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Sailing in Maine this summer for the first time since the pandemic began, we passed by all these Maine landmarks again. Changes in weather and time of day can affect the mood or ambiance surrounding the structures, but not their timelessness. The ruggedness of the Maine landscape and the relentlessness of the sea are in contrast with the seemingly fragile nature of the paper base and delicate washes of the watercolor medium. As we sailed throughout the summer, we photographed new images that will keep me busily painting for winters to come.✧

About The Author Gretchen Dieck Biemesderfer (ESS) is a retired epidemiologist. She started sailing, somewhat reluctantly, at the age of 30 with her husband, Dan Biemesderfer (ESS), on their first boat, a Cal 25. As their family grew, they moved up to a Bristol 35, Daphnae, and sailed more extensively to Maine and environs. In 1999, they purchased their Mason 43, Shearwater, and began sailing offshore in earnest. The Mason 43, from Pacific Asian Enterprises and designed by Al Mason, was built in 1984 by Ta Shing in Taiwan. Gretchen has participated in two Marion-Bermuda races, four Newport-Bermuda races, two Corinthians Lobster Run races, one Marblehead to Halifax race, and the 2015 Transatlantic Race.

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When the Wind Is Howling, I Am Thankful for Our Culture of Safety by William Strassberg, Boston Station, Gulf of Maine Post

Visions of Johanna cruising Iceland’s east coast.

“Advocates of the phrase, ‘leaders are born not made,’ discount expertise and dwell on behavioral traits such as charisma, compassion, extroversion, boldness, etc. These personality attributes certainly play an important role in acquiring allegiance within a group. But when it comes to the complexity of command at sea and the risks linked to offshore racing and cruising, the inverse is true: leaders are made not born. The recipe for success includes sea time in challenging situations, an ability to weigh variables, and a sense to steer toward effective outcomes. Sharing this wisdom requires communication skills and an ability to inspire others.” — Ralph Naranjo

EFFECTIVE SKIPPER LEADERSHIP MAKES YOUR BOAT SAFER Skipper leadership and vessel safety are inevitably linked: Effective leadership translates vessel standard operating procedures and safety protocols into practice. Effective leadership empowers and enhances a vessel’s safety program. In The Art of Seamanship (International Marine/ Ragged Mountain Press, 2015), Ralph Narajano notes that when the wind is howling and everyone is engaged in efforts to keep things under control, communication is most effective with clear, confirmed communication, acknowledgment of problems, and a cohesive action plan. These principles center around concise communications, team understanding, and forethought. “A proﬁcient skipper must be as multifaceted as possible, not just in breadth of knowledge but also in the kind of wisdom that’s acted out on the pitching deck of a vessel at sea,” Narajano writes. “The ﬁnal challenge for any skipper is the transition involved in becoming a leader.” Leading a safety-driven team is natural for some skippers, but leadership skills can be fostered in all. Some skills are innate, others are developed with time and experience, such as effective communication strategies, enhanced teamwork, and operational protocols.

LEADERSHIP SKILLS CAN BE TAUGHT My leadership interests came to the fore during my career as an orthopedic surgeon, when I became involved in issues surrounding patient safety and safe surgical practices. The goal was to create a culture of safety in my practice and operating room, utilizing protocols, actions, teamwork, and communications centered around patients and safety. Many of the techniques I learned were derived from the aerospace industry and airline safety programs, with

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systems checks, standardized procedures and protocols, and open, decentralized communication. Now, I try my best to carry the same concepts and leadership skills on board my Visions of Johanna. Skills of seamanship and breadth of knowledge develop with experience, and successful leadership in turn creates an onboard atmosphere in which the crew buy in to the yacht’s rules, procedures, and safety protocols. This shared sense of responsibility is a good measure of a yacht’s safety program. Have your crew been discovered with their harnesses unclipped? Does the atmosphere aboard your yacht foster open communications, and is your crew comfortable raising concerns or disagreeing with a decision you have made? Answers to these questions are also markers of a yacht’s safety program.

LEADERSHIP AND COMMUNICATION SKILLS ARE IMPORTANT COMPONENTS OF A SAFETY PROGRAM

A skipper’s leadership brings all components of a safety program to fruition. I believe the transition to leadership that Naranjo speaks of is marked by the ability to bring a crew together to embrace and adhere to the safety-first philosophy, while creating a team that works together and cares for and takes care of one another.

Still, experienced captains can make major and dangerous errors. An airline industry example is United Airlines Flight 173, which crashed outside Portland, Oregon, in December 1978, killing eight passengers and two crew members. Although there was equipment malfunction, investigation concluded the crew’s carelessness and inability to work together effectively led to a preventable disaster: exhaustion of all fuel with loss of all four engines. How does a modern-day jetliner simply run out of fuel? The crew voiced concerns about low fuel levels, but they weren’t assertive. Ultimately, the captain’s isolated attention to landing-gear malfunction eclipsed the more serious fuel depletion. The crash of UA 173 highlighted the crew’s inability to work as a team and communicate with one another effectively and led the airline industry to adopt safety training for all crews, known today as Crew Resource Management (CRM).

CREW RESOURCE MANAGEMENT Could this happen aboard a yacht? Definitively yes. Here is a hypothetical: You are approaching the last leg of your overnight passage from Block Island Sound to Maine,

Left: Visions of Johanna anchored off Pitcairn Island. Right: Visions of Johanna anchored in Fagasa, American Samoa. Below: Visions of Johanna anchored in Dusky Sound, Fiordland, NZ.

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perhaps bound for Swan’s Island or Mount Desert Island. Your vessel has just made course for Jericho Bay, and you, the skipper, are down below troubleshooting your fridge compressor. You are in the “boat position”—butt up with head down in the bilge, trying to get your elbow to bend the wrong way to reach a part you cannot see. Focused on your problem when your crew comes below to tell you the boat could be caught up in a lobster-pot warp, you tell them to try to cut it, untangle the warp, or spin a 360 off it. They come back five or 10 minutes later to say they are concerned the boat is caught on the warp, drifting, and they are unable free it. You grumble that you only need a few more minutes to figure out the compressor situation, and they should keep trying to get unstuck. They go topside and try to deal with the problem, but perhaps they did not have the opportunity to share, or were uncomfortable mentioning, their concern about a 2-knot current slowly dragging the boat toward Horseshoe Ledge. And … you might imagine the rest. Preoccupation, narrow focus, and communication problems can and do happen aboard cruising yachts. To minimize opportunities for errors, a skipper can adopt the practice of Crew Resource Management. CRM training focuses on both interpersonal and cognitive skills. Best practices include situational awareness, problem-solving and decision-making, effective communication, and leveling of the organizational hierarchy.

COMPONENTS OF CRM Situational awareness extracts and integrates information to form a coherent picture of vessel status. Problem-solving is a multistep process whereby problems are identified and information is gathered to define potential solutions. Effective communication can be a challenge as human nature tends to defer confrontation. Yacht procedures should designate it the crew’s duty to communicate their concerns, as ineffective assertion is often linked with ineffective communication. People generally have a really hard time using unmitigated language that doesn’t hedge, qualify, weaken, or soften, but effective, assertive communication requires unvarnished and unambiguous messaging. Leveling of the organizational hierarchy facilitates team communication. It does not mean the skipper is not in charge. It does not create an equal or mutual command structure, nor does it alter the responsibility or authority of the captain. CRM makes it the duty of every team member to voice any concerns they might have. Simply requiring crew to speak up and voice their concerns

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goes a long way toward improved communications. The skipper’s encouragement, willingness, and desire to hear dissenting, conflicting opinions and concerns are a large part of the rest.

EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION IS PARAMOUNT

Skipper preoccupation, improper focus, and ineffectual assertiveness by the crew leads to poor communication...and dangerous outcomes.

In medicine, communication techniques changed remarkably during my surgical career. When I began my private practice in Maine in the 1980s, the surgeon was king of the operating theater, while coworkers played a relatively subordinate role. The first time I walked into

the recovery room in a rural Maine hospital, two nurses wearing classic nursing garb and caps jumped to their feet. They almost stood at attention as I did a 360 trying to figure out what was going on! By the time I retired from surgery, in another, larger Maine hospital, I would enter an O.R., announce my name, and ask coworkers to call me Bill. I would outline a brief plan of intended surgery, stating our shared goal. I explained that my focus was often on a small portion of the surgical field, and I could potentially miss a critical issue outside my immediate zone of attention, so they must please speak up if they saw anything they wanted me to consider. In

a span of 15 years, surgical practices morphed from a hierarchal structure to one emphasizing teamwork and communication. The revamped culture was enabled by conscious leveling of the command structure, protocols, and enhanced communication techniques that fostered a shared understanding of our common goals.

SBAR To enhance crew communication aboard Visions of Johanna, I utilize a technique called SBAR, an acronym for situation, background, assessment, and recommendation. Originated within the nuclear

Left: The wind is howling as Visions of Johanna departs Easter Island. Below: Kiatak anchorage, east coast of Greenland.

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submarine community, SBAR was later put into use in health care and surgical safety to facilitate prompt and concise communication.

SBAR if sidelined a second time (or the first time if situation dictated): Crew: Skip, I need to declare an SBAR.

Situation determines what is going on and identifies current status and any concerns in a brief description. The main goal is to communicate what is relevant—what is happening now.

The captain’s attention is now harnessed Captain: OK, talk to me. Crew: Situation: Boat speed has dropped to less than 1.5 knots, and I am sure we have caught a warp and are dragging a lobster pot. We have just entered Jericho Bay per your plan and are close by Horseshoe Ledge with a significant current running through the channel.

Background provides context of how we got here and backfills the story. Assessment surveys the situation and proffers solutions suggesting the most appropriate course of action.

Background: We were motor sailing and averaging 6.5 knots before you went below to suss out a problem with the fridge. I do not see any line behind us but something is on the keel or the prop. This channel is narrow and has port and starboard ledges.

Recommendation is an explicit statement of what is required, how urgent, and what action steps are necessary. SBAR is a natural tool used for exchanging information and empowers junior crew to speak out and proffer recommendations as the following 2 a.m. watch change demonstrates. The on-deck watch gives the following SBAR briefing: Situation: Good evening. All generally fine right now. Number 2 jib is up, and we still have a single reef in the main. Wind was 10–15 knots at the start of my watch, and over the past 30 minutes, it has built to 12–18 knots, becoming gusty and now forward of the beam. Background: Tonight’s forecast called for scattered thunderstorms, and I thought I heard thunder out there, but I’m not sure. Assessment: I see an increase in wind pressure and have a concern of impending thunder boomers. We need to get ahead of this and be ready for a squall. Recommendation: I’ve considered placing a second reef in the main and waited for you. I want to help you do it before I turn in. And it’s time to start a radar watch, checking for squalls on the quarter hour. SBAR is also used on Visions of Johanna as a specific tool for crew-to-captain communication. While I hope never to utilize it, our SOP allows a crew member to assert themselves by “declaring” an SBAR to the skipper in urgent situations. This works as a “red flag” for the captain, providing a low friction pathway for crew to alert the skipper to an issue of concern. For instance, after giving notice of lobster warp entrapment to the refrigeration-weary skipper, the crew could declare an

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The author’s Visions of Johanna.

Assessment: With limited maneuverability, we are drifting and are in imminent danger of grounding on Horseshoe or a nearby Ledge. We need corrective

action immediately to prevent grounding. Recommendation: We need you on deck. We need to either get more sail up and try to sail out to deeper water or get an anchor down immediately and get someone in the dinghy or in the water to inspect our propeller.

LEVELING OF ORGANIZATIONAL HIERARCHY Simply put, hierarchal leadership leads to errors, while leveling of the team structure facilitates communication and helps avoid them. For example, after Korean Air Cargo Flight 8509 crashed shortly after takeoff from London Stansted Airport, an investigative report said that the captain, irritated by the flight’s late departure from London, spoke in a derogatory and barking fashion to his crew, setting a tone that discouraged further input. When the plane went into an ill-fated bank less than a minute into the flight, the first officer said nothing even though his instruments indicated the plane was turned almost sideways. Leveling of hierarchal structure facilitates team communication and helps avoid errors. A captain who encourages input demonstrates a respect for the crew while fostering a culture that minimizes errors and promotes safety.

Visions of Johanna anchored off Easter Island.

HUMAN FACTORS AND AN ACCUMULATION OF ERRORS Malcolm Gladwell discusses airline tragedies in his 2008 book Outliers, noting errors are much more likely to be the result of an accumulation of minor difficulties and seemingly trivial malfunctions rather than one big horrendous event. “In a typical crash, for example, the weather is poor—not terrible, necessarily, but bad enough that the pilot feels a bit more stressed than usual,” he writes. “In an overwhelming number of crashes, the plane is behind schedule, so the pilots are hurrying. And in 52% of crashes, the pilot at the time of the accident has been awake for 12 hours and more, meaning that he is tired and not thinking sharply. And 44% of the time, the two pilots have never flown together before, so they are not comfortable with each other. Then the errors start—and it’s not just one error. The typical accident involves seven consecutive human errors. One of the pilots does something wrong that by itself is not a problem. Then one of them makes another error on top of that, which combined with the first error still does not amount to catastrophe. But then they make a third error on top of that and then another and another and another and another, and it is a combination of all those errors that leads to disaster. These seven errors, furthermore, are rarely problems of issue 64  2022

This event was heartfelt in Maine, as many of the 133 souls lost that day were Mainers and Maine Maritime Academy graduates. Unfortunately, deficiencies in vessel SOP’s, poor communications, and a harmful onboard culture can result in maritime tragedy. Boston-based author Rachel Slade wrote about the El Faro in her 2018 book, Into the Raging Sea (Ecco, 2018).

FIRE!

knowledge or flying skill. It’s not that the pilot has to negotiate some critical technical maneuver and fails. The kinds of errors that cause plane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication [emphasis mine]. One pilot knows something important and somehow doesn’t tell the other pilot. One pilot does something wrong, and the other pilot doesn’t catch the error. A tricky situation needs to be resolved through a complex series of steps—and somehow the pilots failed to coordinate and miss one of them.”

ERRORS AND A RAGING SEA In our maritime world, these issues still happen today. On October 1, 2015, the American container ship El Faro sailed into the eye of hurricane Joaquin and went down with all aboard, becoming the deadliest maritime accident in a generation. What was the El Faro doing anywhere near the erratic, unpredictable Joaquin, pinned between the Bahama’s Crooked Island and the hurricane?

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Above: The bridge deck on the wreck of the El Faro, with damage notations from the National Transportation Safety Board final report. Below: US Air Flight 1549 in the Hudson River.

Failures in crew communications and coordination also led to disastrous consequences for Air Canada Flight 797 in 1983. After a fire broke out around the rear lavatory while in flight, the jet landed in Toronto and immediately became engulfed in flames when the door was opened, killing 23 people. The investigation determined that misleading information about the fire and underestimation of the fire’s severity contributed to the accident. In safety-critical contexts, a failure in team collaboration can have severe consequences.

TEAMWORK, COMMUNICATION, AND THE SMELL OF SMOKE It was only eight minutes from noticing the smell of smoke and fire to the Mayday call. Could this situation happen aboard your ship? You bet! Imagine the smoke and fire occurred with you on a passage, halfway through an ocean crossing. Precise communication, urgent problem-solving, and teamwork are keys to a positive outcome. During any safety-critical situation aboard a yacht— i.e. smoke and fire, water ingress, dismasting, collision, hurricane, or medical emergencies—crews need to swiftly change from normal to emergency tasking in

order to respond to unexpected events. Success depends upon the need to accomplish separate and sometimes competing tasks, placing unique challenges on the critical component of leadership.

DEPOSITS IN THE BANK OF EXPERIENCE, EDUCATION AND TRAINING Most of us have heard of Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, famous for the 2009 “miracle on the Hudson,” when he safely landed US Airways flight 1549 on the Hudson River. Sully’s accomplishment is a demonstration of CRM in action: outstanding leadership actuating safety practices and protocols. The plane struck a flock of Canada geese about 4.5 miles northwest of LaGuardia Airport shortly after takeoff. Both engines failed, and Sullenberger assumed the conn while his co-pilot worked the checklist for an engine restart. Sully evaluated the options: Return to La Guardia, divert to the airport in Teterboro, New Jersey, or attempt a water landing in the Hudson. Sullenberger radioed a

BILL STRASSBERG Bill Strassberg assumes the position of chairperson of CCA’s Safety and Seamanship Committee in 2022. Bill has sailed Visions of Johanna across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and to high latitudes in Iceland and Greenland. While Bill has made his share of mistakes and mishaps over the years, he is pretty good about not making the same mistake twice. At the same time, he always seems to be inventing new ways to misstep, and he has learned that strict adherence to vessel procedures and protocols, combined with a crew that works as a team, helps build the Culture of Safety we strive for. His number one crew, his wife Johanna, no longer wishes to join him on long ocean crossings or in high latitudes. Nonetheless, she is always with him, perched on his shoulder while whispering sage advice and commentaries in his ear, such as “it’s time to reef!”

Mayday call to New York Terminal Radar Approach Control: “We’re turning back toward LaGuardia.” Then: “We’re unable.” Controllers suggested Teterboro. Sully replied: “We can’t do it … We’re gonna be in the Hudson.” Nine hundred feet above the George Washington Bridge, Sullenberger commanded, “Brace for impact” as the plane made an unpowered ditching. Sullenberger opened the cockpit door and gave the order to evacuate. Water rose in the cabin as Sullenberger walked the cabin twice to confirm it was empty. Nearby ships and the Coast Guard assisted, and no souls were lost that day. The NTSB final report credited the outcome to four factors. Among them were good decision-making and teamwork by the cockpit crew, and performance of the flight crew during the evacuation. Sully later said, “I never had an engine failure in 42 years in any flight I’d ever flown, but I was ready,” Sully said. Later, he elaborated, “One way of looking at this might be that for 42 years, I’ve been making small, regular deposits in this bank of experience, education, and training. On January 15, the balance was sufficient, so that I could make a very large withdrawal.” Sully has been quick to point out the positive outcome that resulted in all lives saved was due to the actions of multiple groups and teams.

CULTURE OF SAFETY AND CORE PRINCIPLES OF CRM On this occasion, Captain Sullenberger, a safety expert and CRM instructor, demonstrates the core principles of CRM: Situational awareness, problem-solving and decision-making, effective communication and leveling of the organizational hierarchy. Sully’s coworkers not only adhered to safety protocols and routines but were trained to be active participants in the safety culture. Vessel safety is a combination of safety protocols and gear, skipper leadership and crew participation. Practice of protocols and drills engages crew, bringing them into the safety process. Their involvement reinforces an onboard safety culture as the crew communicates and problem solves as a team. The true culture of safety is only realized when yacht protocols and skipper leadership result in a crew ethos that not only adheres to safety practices, but develops a crew that actively participates in the safety culture of the ship. The transformation of a crew, from one that follows safety protocols to one that participates and builds a culture of safety, is the mark of both a successful safety program and effective leadership. Incorporation of these principles into small vessel management will help make us better and safer out at sea. 2 issue 64  2022

Mark Ellis Yacht Designer

LOTUS (Nonsuch 30) The stern view of this innovative hull demonstrates a “harmony of shape that I’ve tried to achieve in my designs, in keeping with shapes I know will perform well.”—Mark Ellis.

A Man at the Right Place and Time by Mindy Gunther, Essex Station

oogle “Mark Ellis, yacht designer” and you get three pages of hits, far more if you include boats of his design for sale. Articles written about him. Lists of powerboats and sailboats designed by him. He even has a Wikipedia page! I have known Mark since he joined the Essex Station about 10 years ago. He and his wife, Barbara, have been active in the station, with close to perfect attendance records. Mark was chair of the Archives Committee and a member of the Technical Committee and is a member of the station Membership and Centennial committees.

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While Mark is a quiet man, he has a bit of an ego, but in a nice way as he is a genuinely nice guy. It is clear he likes the world to know about his designs and of the thousands of boats built from them. In the many conversations Mark and I had for this article, he always mentioned his “intuitive sense of shape and traditional esthetics,” as well as some chutzpah, which helped him design so many good-looking innovative boats. Mark is clearly a smart man. He has an intensity about him. He looks right at you when he talks to you, as if you were

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Nonsuch 33 reefed.

Whoever had title to the molds had to pay Mark a fee to use the design. This is an example of his business acumen at work. As long as his boats where being built, Mark continued to have an income stream. Genius among yacht designers!

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the only one in the room. His big smile and radiant eyes suggest he knows more than you, but he is still interested in what you have to say.

his creations at the drafting table. He feels privileged that his mentors where extremely forthcoming with their knowledge and ideas.

He sees himself as being in the right place at the right time as yacht design transitioned from wood to fiberglass and drafting tables to computers, although he continued to work on

Mark grew up in northern New York, where his family had a retail business and dairy farm. His family owned an island in the Thousand Islands on the St. Lawrence River, and he spent

Nonsuch rally in Toronto.

issue 64  2022

Volunteer 46 perspective lines.

summers sailing. The family and neighbors had lots of small craft available for him to explore, and he learned that there was nothing better than “messing about in boats.” As a young man, he spent hours teaching himself to draw boats. Mark says there was only one book available from which to learn, “Skene’s Elements of Yacht Design.” Since naval architecture schools focused on large ship design, he decided to get a degree in business administration from Boston University. A business education gave Mark a huge advantage as a yacht designer. He could run a business, understand marketing, and design boats. After one year of college, Mark went to work in New York, first at Derecktor’s Yard in Mamaroneck and then Minneford’s Yacht Yard in City Island, doing whatever menial task he was given, assisting in lofting, planking, making rigging, and even sweeping the floors. Doing so, he was exposed to every aspect of boat building. What a great way to learn!

Legacy 40, powering through waves.

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While attending BU from 1965 to 1968, he worked part time and summers as a draftsman and general office worker for C. Raymond Hunt Associates in New Bedford, Massachusetts. This was a great time to start as construction moved to fiberglass, cold-molded construction, and modern propulsion systems. Hunt’s office had developed and was working primarily with deep-V powerboats which were revolutionary in design and had only been around for about eight years. After completing his degree, Mark went to work for Philip L. Rhodes in New York City. Because Mr. Rhodes’ son Bodie and Jim McCurdy had just left the firm to start their own, Mark had the opportunity to work directly with Rhodes. The firm was well known for its designs of both power and sail boats of all sizes. Mark represented the firm during the construction of three large ketches being built in Germany. Again at the right place and right time, Mark not only traveled to Germany several times but met many people in the industry who were of great help over the years.

Legacy 34 perspective lines.

Volunteer 47 under spinnaker.

Looking to move out of the city, Mark was hired by Ted Hood in Marblehead, Massachusetts. There he worked as a draftsman/designer on sailboat rigs and accommodations. He was particularly involved with Robin, a 53-foot Ted Hood boat built by Maas in Holland. He often raced Robin with the Hoods on Sunday races in Marblehead. At some point, Ted sold the boat to Thor Ramsing, and several years later my father bought her and renamed her H.M.S. Day. Our family raced her for years both locally and to Bermuda and Halifax.

Niagara 35, the first Ellis production yacht.

In 1970, Mark moved on to C&C in Canada. Here Mark’s career got caught up with the changes happening not only in fiberglass boat design but the consolidation of various firms in the area. He worked largely on the design of custom ocean racers and was lucky enough to do a lot of ocean races aboard those boats. During this time, Mark became friends with Jim Eastland and Erich Bruckmann, both of whom became longtime friends and associates. After five years at C&C, Mark had the courage and confidence to start his own design business in Oakville, issue 64  2022

Ontario. He was just 30 years old. The first boat that he designed was the Aurora 40, followed by the Niagara 35, of which 260 were built. The revolutionary Nonsuch 30 came next. The Nonsuch combined the traditional catboat hull with a modern underbody and un-stayed mast, which Mark says was quite a risk, especially since the boat was built without testing. While the Nonsuch 30 sailed extremely well, it took time for the sailing market to accept the concept. Ultimately, between the 30, 26, 36, 22 and 33 series (in chronological order), over 1,000 were built and are still actively cruising and racing today. Mark decided early on in his career to own his designs and have the builder pay a fee based on a percentage of the factory price. Whoever had title to the molds had to pay Mark a fee to use the design. This is an example of his business acumen at work. As long as his boats where being built, Mark continued to have an income stream. Genius among yacht designers! Mark is also known for his powerboat designs, which is unusual among yacht designers. These designs include the Legacy, Limestone, and Bluestar lines. In 1994, he had begun designing powerboats with a deep-V forward with large-chine flat-surface aft, which allowed the boats to get on a plane at a much lower speed. Mark says he does not think anyone had done that before. Also in 1994, Mark started designing motorsailers, with the goal of improving both the sailing and power characteristics. According to Mark, previous motorsailers were displacement powerboats fitted with masts for stability. Mark’s efforts produced the NorthEast 400, a good sailboat with all the comforts of a powerboat that cruised easily at 8 knots. Thirty-four were built in Costa Rica. Afterwards, a larger version, the Bruckmann 50, was built at Bruckmann’s yard in Ontario.

Photo by Nerney.

Mark says his goal in designing boats was to create “classic good looks, pleasing lines, practical features, and excellent performance.” He was able to successfully blend the good looks of the older wooden boats with modern design, something missing in so many boats seemingly designed from the inside out today. He says his chutzpah and sense of self allowed him to be creative and take risks, he hopes without being pushy.

Limestone 24; Mark’s first powerboat design.

While he is no longer designing, Mark is proud that some of his boats are still in production, especially the Abaco 40 and 47’s and the Limestone line. Not one to sit on a rocker on his front porch, Mark remains active in the CCA and his current hometown of Essex, Connecticut.✧

Bruckmann 56.

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Photo by Nerney.

Mark Ellis, Designer.

Mark’s NorthEast 400 Lotus.

MARK ELLIS DESIGN - SAILBOATS 1970s Aurora 40, Niagara 35, Nonsuch 30 1980s Nonsuch 26, Nonsuch 36, Aloha 32, Nonsuch 22, Naiad 18, Niagara 42, Nereus 40, Aragosoa 40 – Steel Cutter, Nonsuch 33, Otter - Custom 32’ Catboat 1990s Rangeley - Custom 44’ IMS Sloop, Northeast 400, Volunteer - Custom 47’ Daysailer 2000s Alizé III - Custom 47’ Sloop, Bruckmann 50, Bonaventure - Custom 56’ sloop, Anomaly - Custom 45’ Cat Ketch MARK ELLIS DESIGN - POWERBOATS 1980s Limestone 24, Medeiros 20 (Limestone20), Bruckmann 28, Tadenac 22 (Limestone22), Osprey 22 1990s Pilot 37 published – first “chine flat” design, Pilot 39, Limestone 17, Legacy 40, Legacy 34, BlueStar 29.9, Holby Pilot 19 2000s BlueStar 36.6, Ventana - Custom 56’, Legacy 42, Holby Pilot 24, Limestone 26, Legacy 32, Abaco 40, Abaco 47

About The Author Mindy Gunther lived on a 47-foot schooner until she was 2 years old and got her first boat at age 6. She has raced four Bermuda Races, her first at age 13. She sailed back from Bermuda on the J-boat Shamrock V, after the vessel had sailed transatlantic with a full rig. This was a first for a J-Boat. Along with her husband, past commodore Bob Drew, Mindy has sailed transatlantic, cruised Norway, Ireland, Scotland, Labrador, Newfoundland, Malta, Greece, up the U.S. coast from the Bahamas and down the coast as far south as Grenada. Bob and Mindy spent many summers cruising in Maine as well. She recently purchased a Bowler 26. She is past rear commodore of the Essex Station, current membership chair, and a member of the Centennial Committee. She was co-editor of the Cruising Club News (now Voyages) and did the design and layout of the first nine issues of the Gam. She was awarded the Carl H. Vilas Award and the John Parkinson Memorial Trophy and was the first woman to receive the Richard S. Nye Award.

issue 64  2022

Sailing Solo

Credit: Margie Woods.

by Brendan Huffman, Southern California Station

recently completed my seventh race to Hawaii, the 2,120-mile Singlehanded Transpac from San Francisco to Kauai. The Singlehanded Sailing Society has organized this race every other year since 1978. Although the sailing was unusually slow on the first night and in the middle of the course, I had an absolute blast!

The race started June 19 in breezy San Francisco Bay, as I tacked out under the Golden Gate with a double-reefed mainsail and partially furled jib. Leaving the coast, the sun came out, and the wind shifted south and decreased enough for me to shake out the reefs. On port tack, Siren passed close to the South Farallon Island and encountered dozens of whales and hundreds of dolphins.

Two years ago, I purchased a Santa Cruz 33 designed and built in 1977 by the iconic Bill Lee and renamed Siren specifically for this race. A one-year postponement due to the pandemic allowed me and my team of volunteers an extra year of race preparations and practicing solo boat handling.

In light winds overnight, I converged with most of my competitors, their running lights adding color to the darkness. By morning, the wind shifted gradually to the northwest, and I set my new asymmetrical spinnaker, which helped me scoot ahead of several boats.

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As I leaned forward to open the halyard clutch, the tiller momentarily slipped out of my hand and Siren rounded up into the breeze, heeling far to port as I released the afterguy to recover. Within a span of a few seconds, water rushed into the cockpit and through a portlight I had forgotten to close. As luck would have it, the computer for my primary autopilot had been installed directly below the open portlight, and it shorted out.

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Hawaii

The northwesterly continued to build, and for the next two days the fleet sailed a steady tight reach in 20 knots as I headed for my first waypoint, known as “the ridge,” where the wind tends to drop and back to the northeast. This year, the wind dropped entirely for two to three days. The fleet drifted around, occasionally making forward progress on zephyrs. During this period, I took in the beauty and serenity of the ocean, enjoying the blue depths, cloud formations, and sunrises (and I managed to pull a stubborn fishnet off my rudder). On one of these still afternoons, I sat in the shade of my mainsail, legs hanging over the rail, and stared into the depths of the Pacific. As I refocused my vision on the surface, I noticed several tiny crustaceans swimming next to Siren, one of which was making more headway to Hawaii than me! The trade winds eventually filled in, and most of us positioned ourselves farther south of the rhumb line to avoid a strong highpressure system ahead. This paid off as we found stronger winds.

The second half the race was all downwind. I carried symmetrical spinnakers most of the day and winged out my headsails overnight without losing any significant speed. Rarely did the wind speed drop below 20 knots over the last 800 miles of the race, and Siren came into its own, running at a steady 8–9 knots and surfing down waves at 12–14 knots. Fantastic sailing was made even better by being alone at the helm with no crew on deck, just Siren and me skipping across the Pacific. The wind continued to build steadily, gusting up to 30 knots as we got within 400 miles of the finish. After four hours of blissful spinnaker sailing, topping out above 15 knots, I prepared to drop the spinnaker. As I leaned forward to open the halyard clutch, the tiller momentarily slipped out of my hand and Siren rounded up into the breeze, heeling far to port as I released the afterguy to recover. Within a span of a few seconds, water rushed into the cockpit and through a portlight issue 64  2022

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At this point, I reached a sad conclusion: I was out of contention with under 400 miles to go and just as Siren was in its downwind element.

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I had forgotten to close. As luck would have it, the computer for my primary autopilot had been installed directly below the open portlight, and it shorted out. After dousing the chute, I lashed the tiller while I installed my backup autopilot, a simple tiller arm. Unfortunately, while effective in normal sailing conditions, the tiller pilot was unable to effectively steer in heavy air with large cross swells. At this point, I reached a sad conclusion: I was out of contention with under 400 miles to go and just as Siren was in its downwind element. The wind held at 25–30 knots during the next 36 hours. Even with a partially furled headsail, Siren was surfing at 13–14 knots down the larger waves, just not the desired course. After losing my primary autopilot, I inventoried other potential system failures, not to mention my backup autopilot, which sounded stressed. Most concerning was the gooseneck fitting on my boom. I pressed on and was rewarded with a glorious last day of the race. I woke up at dawn after a nice rest. The wind speed had decreased to the low 20s. I set a spinnaker and promptly broke a fairlead for the foreguy. Taking this as a bad omen, I switched back to wing and wing. With 130 miles to go, I decided to live in the moment and hand-steer as much as I possibly could and take in my last day alone on an open ocean. 62

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Approaching Kauai later that afternoon, I could see the large cloud formations over the island still 40–50 miles away. The first of several squalls overtook me but provided a full rainbow, the first clear one of the entire race. After sunset, the skies went dark with low cloud cover, but I could make out flashes of light on the island. At first, I was concerned I had navigated to the wrong island because my charts didn’t show any lighthouses in the area of the flashes. After ruling that out, I wondered if the Navy was on maneuvers and why they were so close to Kauai. Before too long, I realized the day was July 4, and I was looking at fireworks along the coast of Kauai. As I got within VHF range, I gave the race committee my ETA. A blip appeared on my chartplotter that turned out to be an Express 37 in the faster division. Soon his running lights were within sight, and we raced to the finish. Within 5 miles of the finish, a fresh squall brought stronger winds and heavy rain. I enjoyed an exciting beam reach blasting along at 10 knots toward Puu Poa Point, but I could not see land through the rain. Instead, I relied on my chartplotter to guide me between the reefs and the finish line. The race committee could not see me and asked me to turn on more lights. As luck would have it, the rain subsided a bit as I crossed the line, and the race committee was able to identify Siren before we sailed onto a reef. (The Express 37 finished soon after me). My dad, Fred Huffman (SAF), sons, and girlfriend met me in Kauai, and we enjoyed a fun week of excellent tropical

weather and socializing with the other racers, including CCA members Jim Quanci and Robb Walker (SAF), who won our division. Hanalei Bay is beautiful and even better and more scenic from the anchorage. We enjoyed a picturesque although choppy sail down the island’s green coast to the marina in Nawiliwili, where Siren was hauled out and placed on my trailer for the return trip aboard a Matson freighter. I was fortunate to have an energetic team of volunteers, particularly my dad, through this process, some of whom took vacation days from work to help me prep and provision Siren in Sausalito the week leading up to the start. I am so thankful! Siren is now berthed in Sausalito, where I plan to do more shorthanded racing in 2022 while I prepare for the 2023 Singlehanded Transpac. ✧

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I pressed on and was rewarded with a glorious last day of the race.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Brendan Huffman is a third-generation sailor out of Los Angeles, where he enjoys coastal racing and cruising around the Channel Islands. Brendan was a co-captain of the UCLA sailing team and is a US Sailing-certified basic keelboat instructor. He works for UK Sailmakers in Marina del Rey, California. In addition to his Santa Cruz 33, Siren, he also owns a Catalina 42, which his family actively cruises in the Channel Islands. bhuffman33@gmail.com

issue 64  2022

Voyage to the South Pacific on Stortebeker III by Trisha Schibli, Pacific Northwest Station with excerpts from the log of Chris Denny

n 1981, my husband, Kaspar, and I sailed south from Victoria, British Columbia, with my brother, Chris Denny, in his 33-foot wooden yawl, Stortebeker III. Chris needed crew, but more importantly, he needed to learn celestial navigation to complete his dream of sailing to the South Pacific. What better way to learn about the sun and stars, azimuths, and LOP (line of position) than to take your teacher along and sail to the open ocean? Once clear of Cape Flattery, our track took us about 100 miles off the west coast of Washington and Oregon to give Chris an offshore experience. It was an eventful trip, long before the days of GPS, reliable

Chris and Kasper (aft) taking a sight.

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depth sounders, and small boat radars. Shortly after we departed from Daphne Island, we ran into thick fog. It was then that Chris discovered his chart folio started at Cape Flattery, 60 miles from our home port. Luckily, Kaspar and I had sailed and raced in those waters many times and managed to remember the general headings through the islands to eventually run on the 20-fathom depth contour toward Cape Flattery. As we groped our way into Neah Bay at the end of our first-day run out the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Kaspar shouted, “Stop the ship!” Suddenly we were in 6 feet of water according to the Seafarer sounder’s rotary flashing dial (remember those?).

Chris’s logbooks with hammer and coffee beans.

Somewhere in the bottom of a locker was the sounding lead (so much for order in that locker). Over the side, the long lead line found no bottom. We were relieved, and amused, that the Seafarer flasher had gone around once and was reading 66 feet, not 6. The next day, still in thick fog, Kaspar piloted us out of the harbour. Timed runs and careful compass courses should have taken us well into the Strait of Juan de Fuca and deep water, but without warning we spotted breakers ahead. It turned out that after some repairs the previous evening, Chris had thrown his steel toolbox just inside the cabin and under the bulkhead mounted compass, creating a 20-degree error. Another lesson learned for Chris, and thankfully no harm done. His tools were duly stored elsewhere. The Washington/Oregon coast is notoriously rough and windy to offshore sailors. For Chris, this was the first time at sea in his own boat, and Stortebeker III was leaping and rolling. At breakfast, the coffee percolator went flying, toast was abandoned, and the cabin sole became his “galley counter.” Breakfast was Chris’s favourite meal, so it was a rough introduction to life at sea. Wind and fog came and went during this portion of the trip, allowing for the odd sun shot to confirm our DR (dead reckoning). As we approached Point Reyes off San Francisco,

ost sailors know that besides tending M the sails and needs of the boat, food and drink become a focus at sea. Often, supplies are limited. Somewhere between Hawaii and British Columbia, Chris ran out of coffee and wrote in his log what has become known in the family as “the coffee bean story.” again in the fog, Kaspar taped the Zenith long-wave radio to the main hatch slider to keep the direction-finding antenna lined up fore and aft. With this rig, we homed in toward the point on the DF “null.” We were so intent on watching for breakers ahead that we were a bit shocked to look up and see the lighthouse, which felt like it was overhead. Our passage from San Francisco to San Diego was less issue 64  2022

Stortebeker III and Chris when we left them at the San Diego Yacht Club.

eventful, with fair winds and clear skies. The celestial navigation lessons were full on, and Chris was ready to graduate to practicing on his own. Kaspar and I bid him farewell in San Diego and headed back to work. Chris picked an ad off the notice board in a local chandlery and signed on a new crew, Sharon. She, too, wanted to practice celestial navigation. After a few stops in Mexico, they set sail for Tahiti, 3,800 miles away. All went well for the first week, but on Dec. 21 the Autohelm tiller pilot (“Otto”), so vital on a shorthanded voyage, developed a problem. To quote from Chris’s log: Poor Otto had a seizure @ 18:00 hrs. He just kept flashing his lights and squeaking. We suddenly realized that the poor soul had us way off course. We balked at the thoughts of turning back or steering the 2,100 miles ahead of us! Sharon took the tiller. The rain was streaming down her new, white, Line 7 wet-weather gear. Down below, I prepared to operate. The Aladdin lamp was turned up bright, the table cleared, and tools readied. Sharon kept (Stortebeker III) squared up to ease the motion. I completely dissected Otto’s brain & found 1 or 2 drops of water and a solder drip, which could have been shorting with a little water on it. I put it all back together carefully & with bated breath we turned him on. He worked perfectly and still is! Needless to say, we are very relieved and have our fingers crossed for Otto. Otto did keep working, and on Jan. 21, Chris and Sharon arrived in Tahiti, pleased with themselves at finding that little 66

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island in the Pacific. Sharon flew home to California, and Chris cruised the islands for a couple of months with friends before beginning his single-handed passages home via Hawaii. This entailed two long legs, each requiring more than a month at sea. Most sailors know that besides tending the sails and needs of the boat, food and drink become a focus at sea. Often, supplies are limited. Somewhere between Hawaii and British Columbia, Chris ran out of coffee and wrote in his log what has become known in the family as “the coffee bean story”: I had run out of ground coffee, and I have no instant, so for three days or so, I have been suffering various teas, both regular and “ hippie,” from “Heath to Heather” to “Feeling Free.” I found them all unsatisfactory to say the least. I was enjoying hot chocolate but ran out, then graduated to Ovaltine but ran out of milk powder. Just when I was resigning myself to some “Kamile” tea, I found a pound of coffee beans ... unground!! I never realized how structurally sound a coffee bean is. If you try to hit one with a hammer, it will side slip and shoot off to a hiding spot somewhere. I did manage to crack one with the pliers, but after doing five this way, I decided it was a bit slow going. The cheese grater popped to mind, so I unearthed it and gave it a try, The sixth bean was reduced in this way, however, it took five minutes and caused a dreadful abrasion on my forefinger and thumb. I was nearly going mad by this time, drooling for my first pot of coffee in days.

I evaluated every piece of mechanical equipment on the boat in the light of its possible usefulness to grind the coffee, but nothing, nothing could work. I pounded beans number seven and eight on the threshold using the companionway drop board in its guides as a guillotine, but it was awfully slow going and the salt spray made rather a mush of it. I eyed a sheet winch. It looks like a coffee grinder, but damned if I could figure out a way of making one grind coffee without wrecking the winch. I decided that would be going a bit far! Beans nine through fifteen were lined up in a row along the hinge in the table. “As I close the hinge the little devils will all be pulverized,” I thought, but I only succeeded in straining the hinge and leaving little coffee bean impressions in the mahogany. By this time the bacon was fried to a crisp, and I had one thimbleful of cracked beans! I finally hauled out my trusty pressure cooker and rusty claw hammer. I threw a handful of beans in the bottom, closed my eyes, and bashed the hell out of them with the end of the hammer handle. A few beans got away, but most of them succumbed after ten minutes of pummeling. I let the pot perk for a good twenty minutes, as the grind was what you would call coarse. The coffee sure tasted good though; it was worth every minute of the hour that it took to produce it. A few days later, the log continues: I burst out laughing this morning as I reached down to find out what it was I was stepping on and found it was a coffee bean, and it wasn’t alone! Chris also ran out of pipe tobacco, but that’s another story. He made it back to Victoria in August 1982

after a successful 11,000-mile voyage in just under a year. As Chris approached Victoria, Kaspar and I sailed out to meet Stortebeker III and threw him a tin of pipe tobacco. Sadly, Chris died in 2011, but he had accomplished his dream of sailing to the South Pacific, and Stortebeker III had certainly proven her seaworthiness.

Stortebeker III

Designed by H. Rasmussen and built by Abeking & Rasmussen, Stortebeker III was launched in 1937 at Lemwerder, Germany, near Bremen (A&R #3170). She is 33 feet long with a 5-foot draft, yawl rig, and has a tight planked mahogany hull. To prove her seaworthiness and promote A & R, she was sailed across the Atlantic Ocean in 1937 by Captain Ludwig Schlimbach. She has had various owners over the years, one of whom was John Franklin-Evans, who later owned our wooden yawl, Starfire, in the late 1960s. To quote Chris’s log once more: . . . By the way, Franklin-Evans made this trip (HA to BC) in May 1954 in 31 days. I’ ll be sure to beat that. I’m on Day 23 now, three more should do it. After Chris’s voyage and several more owners, Stortebeker III was shipped back to Germany and is now undergoing restoration in Hamburg. Kaspar and I sailed Starfire up the Elbe River to Hamburg in 2015 to meet the current owner and view the ongoing work on Stortebeker III (see their blog at stoertebeker3.de). 2

Trisha on watch on

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Stortebeker III off the Trisha and Chris Denny grew up cruisOregon coast. ing extensively with their parents on the British Columbia coast and later sailed and raced in the Victoria area. Chris, an industrial designer, loved the challenges of fixing up an old boat or car and overhauling the engine. He owned Stortebeker III from 1979 to 1995. Kaspar and Trisha were married in 1971 and have owned wooden boats ever since. After closing their marine business in 1992, they headed offshore on Starfire, a lovely 53-foot yawl designed in 1962 by Alan Buchanan. That five-year voyage took them west about around the world via Japan, Australia, the Red Sea, Suez Canal, Mediterranean, transatlantic to Panama, and home to Victoria, B.C. In 2005, they set sail again, heading down the Pacific, around Cape Horn and up the Atlantic to cruise part of each year in northern Europe and the Mediterranean. Unable to cruise in 2020 due to Covid-19 restrictions, they rejoined Starfire in 2021 and sailed from Crete, Greece to Turkey. Trisha and Kaspar received the CCA Far Horizons Award in 2015 in recognition of their extensive offshore voyaging.

issue 64  2022

In Praise of the Familiar By John K. Bullard Boston Station, Buzzards Bay Post

Hadley’s old oak.

esides my membership in the CCA, I have been fortunate to be a lifelong member of the OPYC — the Other People’s Yacht Club — and as such, have been fortunate to sail to some faraway places. After college, I joined the Burnes family in 1969 on a transatlantic race onboard Adele, a 45-foot Ted Hood-designed yawl. Later, we cruised the Irish coast accompanied by the Guinness family, who always had a keg of the “product” tied to their mizzen mast. With the Burnes family, I continued toward Lisbon, Cape Verde, and then back across “the pond” to Grenada, where I lived aboard for three months. Several years later, after completing graduate school and while working in New Bedford, I was asked to join George Lewis and his crew on the one tonner Lively for a year of hard racing. We campaigned in the national and world One Ton Cup championships, honing our skills against the best in the world. I headed the Sea Education Association from 2002–2012, teaching college students the science and history of the oceans. During these years, I was fortunate to sail SEA’s brigantines in Polynesia, the Sea of Cortez, Hawaii, Sable Island, Bermuda, and other memorable points. 68

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While I have loved these distant ports and am grateful for the opportunities that brought me there with other members of the CCA, the harbor that has the firmest grip on my heart, the one my wife Laurie and I love to get away to more than any other, happens to be a little more than 10 miles from where we dock our boat in the port of New Bedford. It is Hadley Harbor on Naushon Island, a place where time stands still, where you can catch your breath, slow your heart, and get in touch with yourself. I had no idea this love story would develop when my father and mother took me on my first overnight sail to Hadley when I was six years old. They had a Yankee-class sloop named Tempest that had been a rare collaboration of three well-known boat designers, L. Francis Herreshoff, W. Starling Burgess, and Frank Paine. Tempest was beautiful, but I remember how cramped we were in this narrow, low-freeboard sailboat. We enjoyed swimming and happy hour with close friends, the Underwoods, on their Concordia sloop, Kestrel. After dinner, as I was getting myself into my sleeping bag, I looked up through the companionway at the sail on top of the main boom. “Dad, I don’t remember putting a sail cover on the mainsail.”

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Hadley Harbor on Naushon Island, a place where time stands still, where you can catch your breath, slow your heart, and get in touch with yourself.

“No, Johnny. The sail is covered in mosquitoes. You had best quickly zip up your sleeping bag.” Too late. I spent the night in a bag full of mosquitoes. Despite that first overnight on a boat, I fell in love with sailing. And with Hadley Harbor. Go figure. Of course, I was not the first to fall in love with Hadley. Or with Naushon. After the ice receded from Cape Cod and the islands 10,000 years ago, Paleo-Indians began occupying this newly available terminal moraine. Their descendants, the Pokanauket branch of the Algonquin tribe, settled these coasts and islands and began the heritage of stewardship that continues today. The Algonquin word nashin, meaning “in between,” can be ascribed to all the Elizabeth Islands, which lie between Vineyard Sound and Buzzards Bay, and more specifically to Naushon, which lies between the rushing waters of Woods Hole and Robinson’s Hole. After thousands of years of his ancestors fishing and hunting this area, the Algonquin sachem Seayk sold Naushon — then called Catamucke, meaning “great fishing place” — to Thomas Mayhew and his son Thomas Jr. in 1654. The Mayhews had bought their rights from the British Crown,

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owing to the “discovery” in 1602 by Bartholomew Gosnold of Martha’s Vineyard and the Elizabeth Islands. Gosnold’s stay in Cuttyhunk and subsequent return to England led many local scholars to believe that Shakespeare’s The Tempest was inspired not by Bermuda, as is commonly thought, but by Cuttyhunk. In 1682, Wait Winthrop, grandson of Massachusetts’ first governor, bought the island. The Winthrop family owned it until 1730, when they sold it to James Bowdoin. The Bowdoins and others owned it until 1856, when John Murray Forbes bought Naushon and most of the other Elizabeth Islands. Now in the form of a trust, the islands are owned by the Forbes family. Hadley Harbor is most likely named for John Hadley of England, who, in 1730, invented the octant, which greatly improved the art of navigation by allowing mariners to more easily calculate their latitude. Hadley had no local connection to Naushon. Native Americans and these four families have strictly limited development of these islands. Development pressure has been especially intense during the Forbes family’s 160 years of stewardship. Since the Industrial Revolution, many nearby islands and locations have been developed to the point that they’d no longer be recognizable to their early inhabitants. Outdated septic systems fail to remove nitrogen, and the Rowing group, Hadley.

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Evening sail, Hadley.

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Since the Industrial Revolution, many nearby islands and locations have been developed to the point that they’d no longer be recognizable to their early inhabitants. Outdated septic systems fail to remove nitrogen, and the resulting entrophication strains the rivers, watersheds, and bays we love.

resulting entrophication strains the rivers, watersheds, and bays we love. I’m on the board of the Buzzards Bay Coalition with Tally Garfield, a member of the Forbes family. As we work to save the bay (and Vineyard Sound), we recognize how fortunate we are that one side of the bay and sound is protected by the Elizabeth Islands chain, with its working farm, very few houses, and mature forest of oaks and beeches. This is what has drawn Laurie and me to Hadley Harbor, first on the Concordia yawl Captiva, which we owned for 30-plus years, and now on our Shannon Voyager 36, Captiva II. We go whenever we can, even if our Saturday chores aren’t over until mid-afternoon, packing away some food and beverage, casting off the lines from Pope’s Island Marina in 70

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Captiva on anchor, Hadley Harbor.

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New Bedford, and sailing or powering across Buzzards Bay to Woods Hole. The trip is just long enough to leave mainland worries behind.

mosquitoes aren’t as abundant as I remember. Ah, kids today. They don’t walk three miles uphill to school in the snow as I used to either!

If it’s early or late in the season, we usually find one of the moorings that the Forbes family kindly puts out free of charge for visitors in the inner harbor. If we go in the summer and all the moorings are taken, there will always be a few spots to anchor. And there is plenty of room in the outer harbor, which is protected from most wind directions.

Then there is the Cormorant. Not the bird, though there are plenty of those. Cormorant is a black and tan ferry that has been carrying the Forbes family, their employees, and guests, as well as their farm equipment, back and forth between Naushon and Woods Hole several times a day for decades. When its whistle blows, we watch the procession walk slowly downhill for the short ride back to reality.

Once anchored, it’s time to let the endless attraction of Hadley take over. It could be the horses moving from one field to the next on Naushon. Or the setting sun illuminating the leaves on the southeastern shore. Or the great blue herons and egrets patrolling the harbor, “a great fishing place” since the days of the Native Americans. It is always fun to watch young families enjoy Hadley. Whether they are swimming, paddling, learning how to sail, or testing their rowing abilities, their joyful sounds carry over the water and take me back to my first night. I marvel that the

We sit on deck after dinner and and sip the last of the wine. Gradually the light fades, and it is harder to pick out details on the land. Individual leaves fade into branches, which give way to the dark shapes of trees. The first star I see turns into two, then 10, then a hundred, and finally the Milky Way finds its way up from the teapot’s spout. Ten miles from the hurley burley of the mainland with its city lights, the universe surrounds us. We are in a magical place and ready for our dreams to take over.

Cormorant loading in Hadley.

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Hadley’s stillness.

The next morning, as we come up with the sun and hot coffee, the dew glistens on the deck and the only activity are the birds working. The quiet lets our minds wander to earlier times. To lost youth and the wonder of a first overnight. Our journey here was so short, yet we have traveled so far. The wonder of a new day. Everything is possible.✧ Laurie Bullard.

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Shannon Voyager 36 Captiva II, Hadley Harbor.

About the Author John Bullard has been on or near the water most of his life, both professionally and recreationally. His career has included two stints at NOAA, most recently managing all living marine resources in federal waters from Cape Hatteras to the Canadian border. He also served as mayor of New Bedford for three terms, bringing the city into compliance with the Clean Water Act by building a modern wastewater treatment plant, which had a significant positive impact on Buzzards Bay. John served as president of Sea Education Association for 10 years. SEA teaches college students about the science, history, and policies of the oceans, including six weeks of an open-ocean voyage. He currently serves on the boards of the New Bedford Ocean Cluster, the Buzzards Bay Coalition, and the Westport Planning Board, and he is working with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to restore the historic schooner Ernestina/Morrissey. John serves on the CCA Environment of the Sea Committee. John started sailing with his parents at a young age and was racing Beetle Cats before he was 12. He raced through college and then did a couple of transatlantics, a few Bermuda Races, a Halifax Race and a Miami Montego Bay race. His racing career culminated with George Lewis on Lively as they finished seventh in the One Ton World Championships. John and his wife, Laurie, have cruised their Concordia yawl, Captiva, throughout the Northeast for 35 years, finally succumbing to power three years ago.

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Cape Horn 2004

by Baird Tewksbury, Pacific Northwest Station

n December 2004, I received a telephone call from Boston Station member Vernon Gray inquiring if I could be in Chile in three weeks. He and wife, Ellen, had just been offered berths aboard a fully crewed Swan 76 for a sail in southern Patagonia, with a chance of sailing around the Cape depending on the weather. The previous year, I had sailed a chartered Farr 42 with Vern and Ellen in the Stockholm Archipelago (see Voyages 2003). In early January, I arrived in Punta Arenas and ambled down the commercial pier to see a pair of spreaders (the hull was 20 feet below the waterline — can you say “big tides”?). I yelled, “On board Gloriana!” A voice from within the dark companionway responded, “Oh no, not Tewksbury!” I was still absorbing the bit of shock when my insulter emerged: To my great surprise, it was the captain, John Kenyon. The insults were well deserved. John’s previous boat, Cyclos III, a 130 Huisman, had spent many weeks over the previous years in my home port of Vancouver, British Columbia. In that time, I had great fun getting to know his gang and having them crew with me in Dragon Class one-design races. I might have been slightly abusive in the heat of rounding a mark or hoisting the spinnaker, but nothing serious. Now, I was to be a part of John-boy’s crew. What a great start. Vernon and Ellen arrived shortly after, and once their gear was stowed, we motored towards a very flat Straits of Magellan. I can no better describe these cruising grounds than with this account of Drake’s passage from Hakluyt’s Voyages:

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The 21st day (of Aug.) we entered The Streight, which we found to have many turnings, and as it were shuttings up, as if there were no passage at all, by meanes whereof we had the winds often against us, so that some of the fleet recovering a Cape or point of land, others should be forced to turn back again, and to come to an anchor where they could. In this streight there be many fair harbors, with store of fresh water, but yet they lacked their best commaditie : for the water is there of such depth that no man shall find ground to anchor in, except it bee in some narrow river or corner or between some rocks, so that if any extreme blasts or contrary winds do come (whereunto the place is much subject) it carieth with it no small danger. The land on both sides is very huge and mountainous, the lower mountains whereof, although they be monstrous and wonderfull to looke upon for their height, yet there are others which in height exceede them in a strange maner, reaching above their fellowes so high that betweene them did appeare three regions of cloudes. These mountains are covered with snow : at both the Southerly and Easterly partes of the straight there are Islands, among which the sea has his indraught into the streights, even as it hath in the main entrance of the freat. This streight is extreme cold, with frost and snow continually ; the trees seeme to stoope with the burden of the weather and yet are greene continually, and many good and sweete herbes doe very plentifully grow and increase under them.

Hours later, we anchored in a bay, which at that time had not been named. I knew from past CCA member Tony Gooch’s cruising guide that the few protected harbors were either too small or too deep for Gloriana; she would require moorage in less-protected areas. Captain John, having had several seasons in these waters, was well aware of the restrictions. I had always thought that moorage was a simple matter of tying off to a few trees at appropriate distances and angles. I was quite quickly disabused of that notion on my first trip ashore. The vegetation was so thin and fragile as to be useless. Over the years, Captain John had found that the ideal moorage involved using the moraine silt from a disgorging creek as a holding ground for both anchors and tying off the stern to boulders ashore. The proof of the pudding was disclosed our first morning. The overnight katabatic wind williwaws had been no greater than 30 knots, but when I went ashore to retrieve the lines, I found we had moved the half-ton rocks five or more feet. We traversed old Joshua Slocum’s Milky Way in rain and 20-knot winds and had several uneventful anchorages. Before entering the Beagle Channel, we encountered our first big blow. With both bow anchors out and tons of chain, we stood half-hour watches in full foul-weather mufti, including ski goggles. To avoid the williwaws spinning the boat and wrapping the chains, we occasionally engaged the always-running engine as a counterforce, which was quite tiring — hence the 30-minute watch rotation.

Masthead photo of Swan 76 Gloriana in ice.

Crew defends Gloriana’s Awlgrip from ice chunks near Seno Garibaldi glacier.

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After the overnight squall (top winds registered at 60 knots), we were delighted to enter the Beagle Channel with a mere 30 knots pushing us along. In this breeze, the boat made hull speed with just a small triangle of unfurled staysail (“the bikini bottom”). We took photos in the stretch of water known as Avenida de Los Glaciares (“avenue of the glaciers”), until we reached the biggie, Seno Garibaldi glacier. The weather being quite stable and sunny, we ventured a bit too close to the face and were taken by surprise when a wind shift blew the calving ice bits inward and threatened a stranding. Fortunately we caught on early enough to fend our way out using the dinghy and boat poles. We barely saved the Awlgrip paint job. Exiting the fjord, we encountered Cape Horn-sized sea lions — halfton beasts that were quite nasty as they guarded their harem. All photos were from the deck of the mothership — the dinghy

Author Baird Tewksbury sailing in Sweden 2004.

would have been an hors d’oeuvre for these giants. Adding to the excitement were our first condor sightings. The sunshine break closed and off we went down the Beagle at hull speed under a handkerchief of sail. Regular radio check-ins with the authorities are required while navigating these waters. In addition, we were approached regularly by patrol vessels — the Chilean–Argentina not-socold-war was ever-present, and our Chile-registered vessel would have been a tempting prize, so we made a point of staying in communication with the Chilean Navy and were very careful to navigate on the Chilean side of the channel. As you might guess, navigation is radar-based; GPS is useless because the chart is based on late-1800 surveys. Upon arriving in Puerto Williams, we anchored out, having too much draft for the Micalvi moorage. There we had our second run-in with winds over 60 knots, requiring the ski goggles/mufti/engine routine. Since we still had use of the boat for another five days, it was a matter of waiting and hoping for a long enough break between storms to try a passage out and around the Horn. Luck was with us, and on day two, with the wind down to 25–30 knots, we made a west-to-east daylight passage. The wind then eased further, allowing the crew to dinghy us ashore to visit the fabulous Cape Horn monument, lighthouse, and related buildings (including a chapel). Tea with the lightkeeper’s family and a crude wooden passport stamp sent us on our way. Back at anchor in Puerto Williams, we experienced one last storm and a delightful shoreside lamb assado. The departure

About the Author This is Baird Tewksbury’s seventh article for Voyages (and its predecessor, Cruising Club News). Past topics have included Cuba (2002), Sweden (2004), Queen Charlotte Islands (2005), Prince William Sound (2007), Galapagos (2008), Change of Course (2010), and British Columbia (2011). Baird began sailing in the 1950s on dinghies and Thistles on Lake Erie and collegiate dinghies at Yale. In the 1960s, he sailed in races on Long Island Sound, the Bermuda Race, Annapolis to Newport, Buenos Aires-to-Rio, the St. Francis Big Boat Series, and the Newport to Ensenada and other Mexican coast competitions. From 1964 to 1965, he was a deck officer and navigator aboard the USCGC Eagle. Since the 1970s, he’s focused on local and offshore cruising, with trips to the Caribbean, Med, Round the Horn on a Swan 80, Phuket-Andaman Sea, Maine and Nova Scotia, the Great Lakes (Trent-Severn Canal, Georgian Bay, North Channel), Florida, Bahamas, South Pacific (Tuamotus and the Society Islands). He’s also raced his classic Dragon for 20 years.

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from the airstrip at the naval base was an adventure as well. Our aircraft was a Bombardier short-takeoff twin engine, but because of the 25-plus knots flowing directly down the strip, all the pilot had to do was rev the engines and the takeoff was near vertical. ✧

In all, the best sailing adventure of my life.

The Cape Horn Monument was solemnly inaugurated Dec. 5, 1992. The Chilean chapter of the Chilean Association of Cape Horners erected it in memory of the seamen from every nation who perished in the battle against the inclemency of nature in the seas around the legendary Cape Horn. Chilean sculptor José Balcells Eyquem created the 7-meter-high monument, which consists of two independent pieces, each made of five steel plates 6 mm thick, and is designed to withstand gusting winds of up to 125 mph. The Chilean Navy constructed the monument between October and November 1992. The monument was paid for with contributions from maritime companies and public and private entities related to the sea from Chile and many other countries. Many of the donors were direct relatives of Cape Horners as well as shipowners who had made the voyage. The structure failed on Nov. 29, 2014. I have been unable to find details about the storm force that took it down or the subsequent reconstruction. At the base of the hill upon which the monument rests are two tablets, one with the details about the memorial and the other with this beautiful poem (see below) by Sara Vial, a writer from Valpariso.

I am the albatross that awaits you at the end of the earth. I am the forgotten soul of the dead sailors who sailed around Cape Horn from all the seas of the world. But they did not die in the furious waves. Today they fly on my wings toward eternity in the last crevice of the Antarctic winds. Cape Horn Monument 2004.

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GOUGH ISLAND A Mission to Kill Mice and Save the Albatross by Skip Novak, Great Lakes Station

n mid-September of 2020, when I let go the lines at the pontoon in Cape Town and watched Pelagic Australis motor out of the basin at the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront, I breathed a monumental sigh of relief. She was bound for Marion Island, 1,400 miles to the southeast of Cape Agulhas, a tiny subantarctic particle in the southern Indian Ocean. The success of this voyage would save the Pelagic Expeditions charter business from bankruptcy, but getting to this pivotal moment had not been easy. And what unfolded during the next nine months was an extraordinary story of ducks in a row falling like nine pins. With COVID-19 restrictions in full force in South Africa, a strict 14-day quarantine and testing of the team to protect researchers and base personnel already on the island was fundamental in our planning for Marion. In addition, we had to navigate the quagmire of permit applications from the South African government and resolve visa problems for incoming crew. We had pulled off no mean feat when the lines were slipped. It was a cliff hanger right up to the moment of departure. Now it was up to crew Chris Kobusch, Dion Poncet, and Juliette Hennequin to get the film and research teams down to the island, offload three tonnes 78

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Top: A wildlife park at Ship’s Cove. Bottom: Great Wanderer and chick.

of kit, and then standby to help them film for the next six weeks. Theirs was the easy part—dealing with the relative simplicity of a cathartic ocean. “To be truly challenging a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. Otherwise, you are doomed to a routine traverse ….” I’ve often quoted that one from actor and author Sterling Hayden, as I find it not only highly amusing and spot-on, but even more relevant when you have extracted yourself from a financial pickle, so common in the yacht charter business and magnified beyond all proportion during the last year and a half of COVID-19. Why wasn’t I on board? This was certainly a trip of a lifetime, and having sailed by Marion five times on around-the-world races, it would have been a privilege to have stepped ashore. But there was more at play that kept me landside. Having dispatched Pelagic Australis from the Falklands back to Cape Town (see Chris and Sophie’s YouTube story on Marion) during the southern winter when it was obvious the normal charter season in the southern South American sector was stillborn, the Marion project was already on the cards as a possibility if everything fell into place. In short, I could not quarantine and prepare the boat at the same time. This would be a two-team operation. What followed in the middle of that speculative venture was the possibility of a double-stage delivery, taking researchers and cargo to Gough Island later in January and February. Gough is an outlier of Tristan da Cunha in the south Atlantic, 1,200 miles southwest of Cape Town. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), through its Gough Island Restoration Programme, was scheduled to begin its second attempt at establishing a base of operations

The Met station at Transvaal Cove.

“To be truly challenging a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. Otherwise, you are doomed to a routine traverse ….” on the island to eradicate an aggressive mice population preying on the albatross colonies. In March of 2020, the team on the island had to abort the project due to the onset of COVID19. I would be skippering the first trip down at the end of January, and skipper Chris Kobusch and mate Sophie O’Neill would be doing the second trip at the end of February. Again, due to a 14-day quarantine requirement before boarding, two separate crews were needed. This, therefore, required another monumental bureaucratic effort to set up and pull off. No time for me to be at sea.

Skip and Lara on a bird seed run. issue 64  2022

Gough Island Station.

And what’s more, in the middle of all this project planning — let’s say being in the right place at the right time — I had started a six-month serious negotiation with Greenpeace to purchase Pelagic Australis. While many of my colleagues languished in parts of South America with nothing or not much to do, I was more than flatout. When it came my turn to sail the first of the two Gough voyages, I was chomping at the bit to shove off and rest a tired mind and soul. This voyage started out with the required two-week lockdown in a hotel room in Cape Town. After final testing, we were then bussed in negative pressure to Pelagic Australis, where we cast off after a team photo. Leaving Cape Town in any direction can be a shock to the system, with often a four- to five-meter swell greeting you when clearing the outer seawall. That afternoon though, after we motored through the lee under Green Point, a honking southeaster filled, with wind on the beam and a flat sea that gave us a cracking start. By nightfall, we were roaring along fully pressed with a second reef, full Yankee, and staysail — perhaps too much sail, but I was loving it, blowing away the cobwebs. We threaded our way between a few south-about tankers making heavy work of it against the southeast swell — dramatic big-ship imagery in the fading light of an African sunset. Of the eight researchers we were delivering to Gough, only one was an experienced sailor. The rest all went down with varying degrees of seasickness. I can only imagine that if anxiety does play a role in this unenviable condition, there was probably plenty of it being passed around. Empathy was in short supply, 80

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Displaying great wanderers on Marion.

but there was no lack of sympathy by the crew. This was a rough and woolly start to these landlubbers’ adventure, and I can surmise that if there was any other way to get to this remote island, even a high-altitude, low-opening (HALO) parachute drop, they would have taken it. Chris and Sophie were, of course, left ashore, having prepared the boat. I put together a local Cape Town crew of Carl “jack of all trades” Martin, Tor Bovim, at 22, aspirant yachtsman who had the “right stuff”, and my 18-year-old daughter, Lara, who was an old hand, having made several Pelagic voyages when little. Upon graduating from high school in November, she worked

1.5 tonnes of bird seed and equipment out of the forepeak and making ready transport ashore.

on board starting in the bilges, making small change for her gap-year travel. She got her Standards of Training Certification and Watchkeeping (STCW) sorted before Christmas and was awarded a work contract for the voyage. After the blow petered out late the next day, we all settled into a routine of midlatitude sailing, running due west along the latitude of the Cape in variable conditions. The tactic was to get somewhere near northeast of Gough or even a bit farther west before dropping down south, fishing ourselves between the travelling low pressure systems running along on the edge of the Southern Ocean. It was mighty pleasant with buckets of seawater thrown over your head first thing in the morning (no other takers!), fishing lines run out, and generally T-shirt weather. With things settling down, the researchers came to life, and we had ample time for them to explain their mission on Gough as they lounged on deck and in the pilot house. We were carrying 1.5 tonnes of birdseed in the forepeak, plus plenty of miscellaneous kit. The researchers’ job was to catch and sequester two species of land birds, one a bunting and the other a moorhen, and care for them throughout the life and aftermath of the helicopter bombardment of the entire island with poison pellets that was to start in May, supported by the South African ice breaker, S.A. Agulhas II. These two bird populations were fragile, numbering in the hundreds, if that, but the main point was they were both endemic to Gough and only Gough. If the RSPB is committed to anything, it is to stop losing species. If this advance team was successful in capturing

and caring for enough of those two species, they would survive. The reality was that many burrowing petrels would be collateral damage in this exercise, but because there are so many, they would bounce back in even greater numbers within a season or two. I know this from the successful rat eradication on South Georgia. And then, about halfway to the island, the autopilot failed. After we made several attempts to sort this out, it was obvious we had to hand-steer. It was a blessing in disguise, as this gave focus to our researchers, who, with few exceptions, gladly took the helm. This let the crew off the hook to run the rest of the show. Once again, it just goes to show people are happier when kept busy and kept in a routine. In fine weather on day eight, we raised the island and late that afternoon anchored on a rocky bottom in no shelter under the South African base. There is no easy landing here, and because the island is so small, swell wraps around the headlands and it is seldom calm. The eight RSPB researchers, having survived eight days of cabin fever, were almost walking on water anticipating the landing. I explained we would have to first inflate the tender. We managed to get them all off safely that same afternoon, timing runs into a bouldery cliff face between the sets. The base people cleared the area of aggressive fur seals by knocking rocks together, an old trick. Luckily, shores like these are often kelpbound, which helps knock down swell, but that can be a struggle for an outboard to plough through. Once ashore, they scampered up a dodgy wooden ladder and then had a 40-minute walk to the base, carrying day rucksacks, as all their baggage was still issue 64  2022

Skip above Ships Cove.

South Atlantic watersports.

“With no one to take care of, the four of us youthful (if not all in age then certainly in character) crew took midocean swims, caught fish, and made sushi extravaganzas followed by Lara’s pies and tortes that appeared daily.” on board. That plus cargo would have to be jibbed up on a crane that is swung out over the cliff above a tiny inlet a few hundred meters to the north. Formerly, people were also brought up in this fashion in a cage, but looking at the whole operation—the rickety rusty crane, the 40-meter drop hard by a jagged cliff face, and most likely a suspect maintenance schedule—that 40-minute walk over difficult terrain would look very attractive. That evening we managed to get their kit bags off, and the following day the cargo. The off-loading routine had Carl and Lara hoisting kit out of the forepeak with the gennaker halyard—boxes, cases, and the 40-kilo sacs of birdseed that were loaded six at a time into gravel bags. Tor and I stayed in the inflatable receiving gravel bags let down on the halyard two at a time. We ran them into

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the inlet, communicating with the crane driver on handheld VHF via a relay from another guy on shore. Big rollers were incoming, but miraculously they bounced off the back wall of the inlet, cancelling themselves out, and we could hook up the gravel bags with the dinghy almost stationary, although heaving up and down by a meter or two. This is exciting and satisfying work, if you can get it. By early afternoon we had offloaded the lot— and just in time, as the swell was on the way up—only to be informed by the base that a case of beer had been left behind (base supplies!) as well as someone’s ukulele! Next trip! Those would have to wait, because the wind had changed by the evening, and during the night we lay side-on and into the kelp line and were snatching at the anchor. When raising it early the next morning, it caught badly, and the windlass took to the load, bending the shaft. It was still operable—just. We motored around the corner, eastabout, into Quest Bay, which is open roads but was surprisingly flat and windless. This was the site of the original base in the Glen, established in the 1960s, and had a reasonable rocky beach landing. After repairing the autopilot motor, we spent the day dinghycruising and taking a token step ashore below a vertical wall of vegetation. It was obvious why this place was abandoned: It’s so remote and rugged that access to the rest of the island was untenable for research, especially the southern end, where the bird colonies are more prolific. Having been to quite a few Atlantic outposts, I had never seen anything so dramatic as Gough. Steep to from the shore, rugged volcanic features, heavily vegetated and wet—I imagined myself walking through it, exhausted. Walking on the open terrain of South Georgia, by comparison, is like a rambler’s gentle outing. Although Gough is UK territory and part of the Tristan Shoving off with a load of kit.

Route of Pelagic Australis; Map by David Pratt.

group, fishing licenses are sold to South African ships—lucky for us, because the SA Edinburgh’s lobster boats came alongside and peppered our decks with rock lobsters and bycatch fish in return for a few hundred rands. Late the next day we said our goodbyes to the base over the VHF and then circumnavigated the island before setting a course directly back to the Cape. I can assure anyone who is likely to pass by and stop here that there is not one obvious landing place on the island, save for Quest Bay with the wind in the westerly quadrant. Steep to all around, surf breaks everywhere, and in fact, if you care about these things, it is illegal to go ashore anywhere without a permit, and it’s nye on impossible for a cruiser to get one. The run to Cape Town was great sailing, running the first three days wing and wing with the mainsail down to the fourth reef trimmed amidships, our Pelagic tactic to make things easy and safe. With no one take care of, the four of us youthful (if not all in age then certainly in character) crew took mid-ocean swims, caught fish, and made sushi extravaganzas followed by Lara’s pies and tortes that appeared daily. In just over seven days, we were tied up in the docks and would soon hand over to Chris, Sophie, and crew and seven more researchers for voyage number two.

MARION ISLAND: Pelagic Australis’s Last Voyage.

id I mention I did get ashore at Marion? In April, still under contract, Chris, Sophie, our youth squad, and I had to return to the island to pick up three of the film team that had been left ashore at the base during the southern summer. There was no quarantine required before leaving Cape Town, but we could not have any contact with the base personnel on the island due to the risk of bringing COVID-19 ashore. We ran down the 1,400 miles in seven days, comfortably imbedded in the Roaring Forties. Our job was to recover depots of equipment left on the issue 64  2022

Yellowfin Tuna and Sushi.

Wing and wing on the way back from Gough.

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beaches. This included dismantling a wooden storage hut down along the coast and delivering it back to base—all part of the original permit’s conditions. It sounds straightforward, but it took five days to accomplish. Due to the size and rounded shape of the Island, there was significant swell everywhere on every day. We had to move our anchor position many times as the fronts went through one after another, and at 46 ° south with the onset of winter, it was getting chilly, with snow already sticking to the high ground. The cliffs above the east-facing Transvaal Cove host the South African Meteorological Station that has been in existence since the 1940s. It is a science station now, but like so many of these remote pieces of real estate that originally claimed scientific research as a motive for occupation, it was a simple land grab back then, much the same as what happened in present-day British Antarctic Territory during World War II. A British base established in Terra Australis in the early 1940s had the convenient excuse of monitoring German activities in the South Atlantic. This ruse was only revealed when Foreign and Commonwealth Office files that had been closed to the public were discovered by historical researchers in 2010. Let’s call it “the Great Game” of the Southern Ocean. Despite their beauty, Marion, and its outlier Prince Edward Island, are not for the cruiser. They are even more off the beaten path, on the way to nowhere. Gough, which is sort of on a logical route of a north/south passage of the Atlantic if making for Cape Town, is on the edge of the South Atlantic high at 40° south. Why not at least give it a look? This is hard to justify for Marion though, and again a rigorous permitting process from the South African government is designed to keep you off the island. And that brings me to a funny story we heard from the people on Gough about a single-hander who, not long ago, spent several days on the island enjoying himself while getting his engine fixed with help from the base personnel. We heard the same story on Marion. Clever chap! We sailed into Cape Town on April 21. Within three weeks,

Changing out of our dry suits to dismantle the gear hut at Kildalkey Bay.

Greenpeace had taken ownership of Pelagic Australis, after 18 years of adventures in the Southern Ocean under the Pelagic Expeditions brand. We had little time to reflect during what was a tumultuous year and a half for us, let alone the world, but looking back on it now, we managed to cherry-pick our way through a pandemic and survive by grasping what could be construed as far-fetched projects given the time and place. Having good people on board and on shore was no less significant. All this underpins the value of small boats to get stuff done if you are willing to duck and dive through layers of bureaucracy, not to mention Southern Ocean weather systems. In 18 months, from the start of the pandemic, during the swan song of Pelagic Australis, I had set foot on four of the South Sandwich Islands, on Gough, and on Marion. They were all new territory for me, which was a fitting and satisfying end to a great Pelagic story. Pelagic Australis has been re-christened as Greenpeace’s Witness. 2

SKIP NOVAK Best known for his participation in four Whitbread Round the World Races, Skip Novak continues to explore our world. Winner of the Blue Water Medal, CCA’s prestigious award that was given for years of voyaging to high latitudes, his expeditions continue to thrill. Skip joined Vinson of Antarctica, the Pelagic 77 he brought to fruition from concept to launch, and in July of 2021 completed Vinson’s first science expedition to Svalbard, supporting German geologists.

issue 64  2022

c i t n a l t a s n Trawith Jonah

by Ron Schaper, Florida Station

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t wouldn’t be fair to blame the hurricane on him. After all, we’d set out from Fort Lauderdale on Sept. 1, 1971, the heart of hurricane season. And the fact that the driveshaft coupling on Eshowe broke shortly after we left and prevented us from using the engine wasn’t his fault either. But when you add up the series of adventures, scrapes, and mishaps that turned a sail from Florida to Spain’s Balearic Islands into a 66-day odyssey — well, there had to be some reason for it, right? Superstitious sailors have long pointed the finger at the Jonah figures among them. As the Old Testament tells us, God ordered Jonah to go to the city of Nineveh and preach against its wickedness. Instead, Jonah set sail for Tarshish. When a huge storm hit, the sailors blamed Jonah because he’d disobeyed the Lord, and when they threw him overboard, the storm ceased. Ever since, sailors thought to bring bad luck, foul weather, and all types of nautical misfortunes have been branded Jonahs. Should such a sailor be found to have gone missing from morning chores, the crew might justify their role in his disappearance with “he got the Jonah’s lift on the middle watch.” They’d seen to it that he didn’t continue to bring bad luck. Now we on Eshowe wouldn’t have gone so far as to give a Jonah’s lift to our shipmate — but there’s no denying we were tempted. Who was this Jonah? He was the little brother of a smoking-hot blonde I was trying to get closer to. She lived on a houseboat in Fort Lauderdale, and when I told her of my upcoming delivery to Europe, she asked if her brother could go along “for the experience.” It was my hope that by taking him under my wing, she would be ever so grateful. Eshowe, a steel 46-foot ketch, surely would’ve benefited from some motoring or even motor-sailing ability, but the driveshaft coupling could not be fixed at sea. We plodded on, through the Sargasso Sea, which was like sailing through a meadow. We caught so many fish that our freezer was full. Small, white puffy clouds streamed toward us, the barometer fell, and the breeze built. We had no forecast of Hurricane Ginger, the famous wanderer. In 1971, boats did not have single-sideband radios and high-seas weather reports. We shortened sail until we were running under bare poles and streamed long anchor warps in a loop over the stern to slow us as we roared down the faces of huge waves. This drogue helped keep us from broaching and perhaps kept many breakers from crashing over us from astern. It was too dangerous to remain on deck, so we were mostly secured below, wedged into our bunks, with lee cloths, pillows, and blankets. But there are times when you just have to go to the head, as our Jonah did. He opened the locker above the toilet. A glass bottle of Listerine fell out and broke in the open toilet. Genius Jonah figured the best way to fix this was to pump it out. Alas, broken glass does not through a head pump. Rebuilding a head is always a treat. Doing so during a hurricane brings new challenges. When the storm abated, we found ourselves in thick fog with little or no wind, somewhere off Nova Scotia. I discovered that nights spent rolling in the swell, sails dripping with water, straining to hear ships and knowing that if we heard one, we couldn’t maneuver out of the way, were more frightening than the hurricane’s shrieking winds. Land birds often arrive on boats offshore. Mid-Atlantic, a little chickadee-sized bird came aboard for a rest. He worked himself below and found that the best perch was on the fiddle of the gimbaled stove,

“ Land birds often arrive on boats offshore. Mid-Atlantic, a little chickadee-sized bird came aboard for a rest. He worked himself below and found that the best perch was on the fiddle of the gimbaled stove, where he drank some water, ate some crumbs, and slept the night away. ” where he drank some water, ate some crumbs, and slept the night away. In the morning, when it is not uncommon to find these guys feet up on the cabin sole, our little sojourner looked fit and rested as he flitted up to join us in the cockpit. Four of us were watching as he took flight, flying low to the water to avoid the buffeting winds. As we speculated as to where he might find landfall, an enormous fish leaped from the ocean and swallowed him down in one fluid motion. We were dumbfounded. “Did you see that!?” we bellowed in disbelief. We all felt we had just witnessed the death of a shipmate. Do you remember the story of Jonah? Could there be a clearer allegory? While this delivery occurred early in my sailing career, I’d been studying navigation and was getting pretty good at celestial navigation, practicing aboard Eshowe with two others who were experienced with taking sights. So I was somewhat surprised the morning I relieved Jonah from his early watch and saw the sun rising behind us. Generally, when sailing from North America to Europe, one expects to see the sun rising ahead of the boat, in the east. The sun was in the right spot. We weren’t. Eshowe was fitted with a grid-type compass. The course was set on the rotating ring, which displayed parallel lines; to steer the set course, one issue 64  2022

simply kept the line on the compass card in line with and parallel to the grid. A simple glance at the compass, even from a distance, showed if you were on course. Unless, that is, if you were 180 degrees off course! With a freezer full of fish, Martin, the boat’s owner, decided to add a little variety to the day’s mahi-mahi by making fish and chips. Even with a gimbaled stove, a pot of hot cooking oil is a bad idea at sea. All was well until Martin opened the oven door, which jammed the gimbal and spilled boiling hot oil on his arm, wrist, and hand. After his shrieks of agony subsided, we wrapped his arm in ice packs and plied him with various painkillers. Several days later, when we arrived in the Azores — 31 days out from Fort Lauderdale — Martin was treated at the hospital, free from infection. An interesting thing happened upon arrival in Sao Miguel. After a month at sea, I was anxious to get some exercise and hike into town. Sailing uses mostly upper-body muscles, and your legs don’t get much of a workout. A few hundred yards up the pier, my legs were already complaining. It didn’t take long to hitch a ride in a truck heading my way. As I struggled to communicate with my friendly driver, I was glad I had taken time to study a Portuguese-English phrasebook at sea. We stumbled along in broken Portuguese for about 10 minutes — until I discovered he was from Texas and had just arrived in a 150-foot tug from Louisiana! In good-ol’-boy Southern English, he invited our entire crew aboard for a steak dinner and strawberry shortcake. Then, as they burn several hundreds of gallons of diesel an hour, they seemed happy to give us 150 gallons of fuel. Thanks to the efforts of a young engineer on a Dutch ship, we were able to repair our broken driveshaft coupling. This repair held until we were two days out of the Azores. As we approached the Straits of Gibraltar, the levanter was blowing. The unrelenting easterly winds directly out of the Mediterranean increased the prevailing head current, making it impossible for us to make headway. After tacking back and forth between Gib and Morocco with no easterly progress, we decided to put into Cadiz, Spain, to wait out the weather. We gingerly sailed up to a commercial fishing dock, where we soon discovered another byproduct of our Jonah’s presence: Cadiz was in the throes of a cholera epidemic. At least the local fishing-boat mechanic helped us finally fix the shaft coupling. With a large cask of local vino stowed below and a dry-cured pig

rump — with hoof and fur intact — hanging from the mizzenmast, it was smooth sailing at last. With calm seas, we could do a bit of cleaning about the boat. Jonah removed all the well-used food-encrusted burners and grates from the stove and proceeded to give them a real scrubbing in a bucket of soapy water in the cockpit. The water immediately turned black with stove filth, so out with the old and in with the new, right? Does the old expression “throw the baby out with the bathwater” have relevance here? I’m afraid it does. Jonah dumped the dirty water, along with all of the stove parts, over the side. Under the burners of a propane stove, there is a tiny orifice where the gas comes out; the burner then evenly distributes the ignited gas. No longer for us. Now we had been left with only that tiny hole. With a great deal of care, a match could be held near the hole when the valve was cracked open on low. Up would shoot an 18-inch-high blowtorchlike flame, as the cook placed a pot over it to squash it down. That was how we did our cooking for the remainder of our hexed voyage. Thank you, Jonah. Our 66-day voyage from Florida landed us on Mallorca in November. I wended my way through Barcelona, Paris, and London before heading back to New York and then Florida to join my next boat and new adventures. Oh, the hot blonde in Fort Lauderdale? She moved out of state with no forwarding address. Jonah, indeed.

The South African flagged ‘Eshowe’ means “the sound of the wind through the trees.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Growing up in a commercial fishing family and spending summers on a small island, Ron could not help but be a sailor. Years of running and delivering, cruising and racing sailing yachts have provided plenty of experiences to share. Captain Ron holds a 100-ton USCG license and sails his Sabre 402 out of Hillsboro Inlet, Florida. A version of this article appeared in Cruising World July 2010. 88

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BOOK REVIEW

Wooden Boats for Blue Water Sailors: Philosophy on Sailing, Design, and Construction ***

by Alfie Sanford great wave books ,

2021

Review by Tim O’Keeffe, Boston Station, Buzzards Bay Post

ize, rig, deck layout, accommodations, tankages: when planning for their ideal boat, many experienced cruising sailors have wrestled with deciding on the proper combination of features. When it comes to material and method of construction, it’s easy to be swayed by long-held prejudices— frequently based on outdated generalities and a small sample of personal experience. In today’s environment, wood is often low on the list of options. In his new book Wooden Boats for Blue Water Sailors, Alfie Sanford (BOS/BUZ) makes a forceful argument that wood, using the cold-molding method of construction, is a superior material for building hulls for oceangoing cruisers. In the opening chapters Sanford lays out his bona fides. He begins with a description of his nearly 60 years of big boat sailing in 29 different vessels, most often as skipper or navigator. His keen intellect and training as an architect led him to investigate the weaknesses he saw in many of those boats and to contemplate alternative methods of construction that might prevent such problems. As experienced a sailor as he is, Sanford’s boat building and designing history gives even more weight to his opinions. Along with his brother, he co-founded Sanford Boats in 1975, where from 1978 to 1982 they built 21 Alerion Class Sloops. Those replicas of Nathaniel Herreshoff’s personal boat were some of the first cold-molded boats in the country turned out on a production basis, and they’re still going strong today. He later set up shop in the San Francisco Bay area doing extensive repair work on yachts and commercial fishing boats, as well as building a few vessels in both steel and wood, culminating with the construction of Fancy, a 53' cruising sloop of his own design. With her he tested some of the cold-molding techniques he had formulated during this period. In particular, he created efficiencies for a one-off build and devised an economical method for joining a prebuilt interior to the exterior hull. While generally pleased with the results, he noted multiple places during the building process where improvements could still be made. These ideas ripened over the next two decades, leading him to design the 40' oceangoing yawl Starry Night. She was built to Sanford’s advanced cold-molding specifications

by Pease Brothers Boat Works in Chatham, Massachusetts and launched in 2008. Having made clear his enthusiasm for cold-molded wood construction, he sets out his case in the middle chapters of the book. Sanford writes, “Everyone likes wooden boats. Most people think the liking is romantic and obsolete. I wish to show scientifically that wood makes a superior boat, and to explain why.” He proceeds to do this with extensive comparisons of various types of construction that include variations of wood, metals, fiberglass, and carbon fiber. He uses tables and clearly drawn diagrams to augment his precise and very readable prose. His mathematical training shows but doesn’t prevent readers with a less scientific bent from understanding the material. In the concluding chapters, Sanford presents how this collected wisdom can be employed to make a wooden boat that is stronger, more durable, and easier to construct—resulting in lower labor costs. These chapters are aimed at taking the experienced builder through the entire construction process. Numerous sketches go a long way to help the nonprofessional follow the reasoning behind the suggested improvements. His step-by-step description does not reference the building of any actual boat, but rather is, as Sanford puts it, “a thought experiment.” And while he has added a great deal of original thinking to the procedures, he readily credits a host of past and present designers and builders for their essential contributions. I think knowledgeable readers will value Wooden Boats for Blue Water Sailors for making clear many of the advantages of cold-molding in this attractive, well-structured book. Even allowing for his obvious predisposition to wood, his reasoning and facts are compelling. Having read the book it would be hard not to give serious consideration to a method of construction that has so many positive attributes. Wooden Boats for Blue Water Sailors is available for sale at bookstores and online retailers. issue 64  2022

BOOK REVIEW

In Slocum’s Wake ***

by Nat Warren-White outskirts press

Review by Alex Agnew, Boston Station/Gulf of Maine Post “Boys who do not like this book ought to be drowned at once.” —Arthur Ransome on Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World

CA member Nat Warren-White’s account of his circumnavigation on his Montevideo 43 Bahati is elevated by association with Joshua Slocum’s historic work of adventure literature. Despite the huge differences, there is a comparison to be enjoyed between the two accounts, and it is well worth the time to pull out Sailing Alone while reading In Slocum’s Wake. A nontechnical travelogue, In Slocum’s Wake has a mission: to persuade mere mortals to follow in Bahati’s wake, to imply how much easier it is to sail on a modern boat with a crew, to thank his 50-odd crewmembers, wife Betsy, and son Josh, to credit those who advised him, to document the voyage, and to demystify circumnavigating. Slocum’s account demonstrated his amazing skills and confidence, and we have thrilled at reading every racy, amazing page. Nat’s account is more introspective and demonstrates his character, humility, intelligence, and generosity of spirit, while suggesting that if he did it, then so can we. Few of us believe sailing alone Slocum-style is either sane or safe. But we get Nat’s idea that Bahati’s voyage is within reach — if we just have the guts, optimism, commitment, and passion. Quick summary: Captain Nat’s trip on Bahati: five years, west-around, more than 50 crew, 43' LOA, 13' beam, 6.4' draft, net tonnage 16, gross tonnage 18. Captain Josh’s trip on Spray: 3.3 years, west-around, one crew (plus ghost), 36' 9" LOA, 14' 2" beam, 4' 2" draft, net tonnage 9, gross tonnage 13. Nat’s dream, hatched in the 1960s, took more than 40 years to pull off. Nat’s wife supported the dream, but only after trying to talk him out of it. In the end, Betsy supported both onshore and at sea. It’s amusing to learn that possibly the worst part of the trip was the first couple of weeks in the north Atlantic trying

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to get from Norfolk to the Caribbean in November. The leg from Norfolk to Bermuda took 12 miserable days, and Bermuda was not the destination. But Nat and Joshua are both optimists, probably a requirement for a circumnavigation. From Nat: “In a world that focuses so much on the ‘bad guys,’ it’s helpful to be reminded that the vast majority of people living on Earth are compassionate, generous and well-meaning.” And from Slocum: “Dangers there are, to be sure, on the sea as well as the land, but the intelligence and skill God gives to man reduce these to a minimum.” Both Captains Nat and Josh capture the wonder of the voyaging life, practical and spiritual, with every page. Yet ocean sailing participation continues to decline. This is not due to the expense since there are so many capable and durable voyaging sailboats available at low cost. Nat is one of a dying breed in that he was raised sailing and got a thorough education in it from his parents. Then he successfully trained his son, Josh, who turned out to be a key to the success of the Bahati voyage. Nat raised Josh well, and Josh has paid it back in spades, continuing a family tradition. Call it privilege or luck, but it is increasingly rare. It is fantastic to hear that Bahati is now back at sea with a young family and a voyage in the making. Well done, Nat. As CCA members, it behooves us to encourage the next generation by passing on copies of both of these books. The book is available from local bookstores and online. Alex Agnew is executive director of Sailing Ships Maine, a sail training nonprofit that manages schooner Harvey Gamage, the high school sail training vessel owned by Phineas Sprague Jr. Agnew is associate publisher of Ocean Navigator and Professional Mariner magazines. He is a part-owner of the Valiant 32 Haiku and the Swan 40 Chase.

BOOK REVIEW

Addicted to More Adventure: Risk Is Good, Enjoy It ***

by Bob Shepton Review by Ellen Massey Leonard, Boston Station

ho in their 86th year would sail throughout the islands and coast of Scotland, then England to the Canaries via Biscay and Madeira, and make yet another cruise of Scotland in the cold and gales of autumn? Of course, none other than the unstoppable polar sailor and mountaineer Bob Shepton. The Reverend Bob Shepton, an ordained minister in the Church of England, has been traversing the high seas and making first ascents of formidable walls and peaks for more than 35 years. A climber first, it was natural that when he began sailing he would combine the two endeavors, just like the renowned Bill Tilman. Bob has been awarded the Royal Cruising Club’s Tilman Medal twice. In 1995 he received the Blue Water Medal for his circumnavigation of the globe via Antarctica and Cape Horn aboard his 33-foot Westerly sloop, Dodo’s Delight. But that was in some ways just the beginning. Most sailors know Bob today for his many sailing-to-climb trips to the most isolated regions of the Arctic, often with the “Wild Bunch,” a group of first-class climbers and all-around intrepid people. A few years ago, Bob wrote an excellent book recounting many of his adventures. Addicted to Adventure: Between Rocks

Bob in North Africa with the Royal Marines in the early 1950s.

and Cold Places (London: Adlard Coles, 2014), opens with a disastrous fire during his winter on board Dodo’s Delight in the Greenland ice. It goes on to tell tales of pioneering routes on un-climbed cliffs, of a dismasting in Antarctica, and of a Northwest Passage transit, to name a few. But he left many stories untold. This new independently published book fills the gaps, and is available for purchase on Amazon. Addicted to More Adventure: Risk is Good, Enjoy It begins with Bob’s early youth, in North Africa in 1954 with the Royal Marines. Evidently not finding the desert warfare training to be enough for his level of energy, he and two fellow Marines set off on a 50-mile trek across the hot desert to Tripoli. They covered those miles in one day, and even had time to drink coffee with a Bedouin in his tent. Today, adventurers completing something similar, would probably call it an ultra-marathon and make a bit of noise on social media. Not Bob. It was just a “yomp,” a hike, to him. This kind of refreshing understatement characterizes the whole book. Whether he’s describing the frequent gales he and his young crew encountered on the long passage from Antarctica to Easter Island or the difficulties of landing climbers onto big walls from the deck of Dodo’s Delight in Greenland, he does so with humor, lightness, and understatement. In addition to the high latitude stories, Bob tells us about a delivery to Peru, another from the Mediterranean, and exploring regions closer to his home in Scotland. The book ends with the trip to the Antarctic island of South Georgia that he made aboard Novara with Steve Brown. Throughout, Bob includes excellent photographs that add to the stories. Having read both books, I marvel that one person has packed so much superb adventure into his life. If you are not already familiar with Bob, and especially if you are, I urge you to read this book. I hope you will enjoy it as much as I did.

issue 64  2022

Final Voyages Edited by Maggie Salter (BOS/GMP) and Bob Green (ESS)

R. Snowden Andrews Jr. Leonard J. Baker John Bankston B. Devereux Barker III Arthur S. Billings Zenas F. Bliss Jesse Bontecou Andrew A. Burnett-Herkes Dorothy L. DuPont Pierre S. du Pont John Paul Ekberg III

Duane M. Hines F. Harvey Howalt James A. Hurst Jr. Henry R. Keene Sr. Bruce Kirby Andrew S. Lindsay Donald F. MacKenzie D. Scott McCullough Brian O’Neill Walter R. Paul Richard W. Pendleton Jr.

R. Snowden Andrews 1931–2020

ichard Snowden Andrews Jr., a longtime resident of Guilford, and most recently Madison, Connecticut, passed away at his home October 20, 2020, surrounded by family. Denny, as he was fondly known to friends, grew up on the water, sailing spring and fall in Manhasset, New York, and spending summers at his family home in Guilford. In the off-season, his leisure time was often on the water in a layout boat or hunkered down in a duck blind overlooking a spread of decoys, intent on bringing home dinner. Denny attended the Choate School, then graduated from Saint Lawrence University before serving in the U.S. Navy, patrolling the coastal Atlantic. Denny loved the outdoors. He was an avid and accomplished ocean sailor, blue-water racer, and sportsman.

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R. Snowden Andrews

He supported many organizations including Ducks Unlimited, the Mystic Seaport, and others with missions to preserve sporting heritage and historic landmarks. Denny learned to sail on Long Island Sound racing one-design sailboats. His favorite one-design was the Star class.

James D. Phyfe Sr. John R. Pingree Jon A. Rolien Peter C. Ross Diana K. Russell Charles P. Schutt Jr. Kaighn Smith Gordon L Thayer Jr. Frank H. Trane Charles D. Whittier

He had a truly gifted touch on the helm and bought home more than his share of silver. He was a member of a winning U.S. team in the Admiral’s Cup and competed for many seasons of racing around the buoys in Long Island Sound. A typical season included Larchmont Fall Series, followed by the Block Island Race, and gearing up for either a Newport Bermuda Race or the Marblehead to Halifax Ocean Race. He claimed to enjoy the sail back from Bermuda more than the race down, and the Marblehead to Halifax race typically led to cruising Nova Scotia’s Bras d’Or Lakes and the coast of Maine with his wife, Dorothy, his close friends, and his four sons. Sailboat racing was a passion, but he was also known as an accomplished boat handler in all conditions. Other bluewater sailing included two transatlantic passages, one on his C&C Redline 41, Pampero, and another aboard the J Boat

Shamrock V on her historic return to the U.S. He spent many winters in the Bahamas on his Peterson 46, Pampero, and in later years on his Grand Banks 42, also Pampero. His trips up and down the east coast of North America from Newfoundland to the Bahamas and beyond logged many miles. There are very few pretty harbors on the Atlantic coast he didn’t spend a night in at least once. Although he belonged to several yacht clubs, including the New York Yacht Club, Storm Trysail Club, Off Soundings, and Sachem’s Head Yacht Club, the burgee that most often flew atop the masts of his four Pamperos was the Cruising Club of America burgee. He loved the CCA and everything it stands for in seamanship, extensive offshore boat handling, and genuine love of sailing and cruising. Lee Andrews

Leonard J. Baker 1929–2021

eonard J. Baker passed away at sunset January 20, 2021, in Huntington Beach, California. He was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1929. He attended Michigan State University, graduating with a degree in electrical engineering, and then went on to MIT, where he received his master’s in aeronautical engineering. He joined the U.S. Department of the Navy, where he headed the Polaris missile guidance section. He received the Navy’s Outstanding Achievement Award and the Navy Superior Civilian Award. In 1961, he took a position with Northrup Grumman in Southern California. Len then went to work for TRW Systems and was instrumental in the success of Apollo 11. He finished his career as president of Mykotronx, Inc. Len started sailing on the Charles River in Boston and continued on the Potomac River near Washington, D.C. Upon moving to southern California,

Leonard J. Baker

he bought his first boat, a Coronado 25, Frenesi. In 1973, on his new Cal 34, he embarked on a three-month sailing trip from Los Angeles to Acapulco with his wife and teenage daughters. He was privileged to be invited on many long-range cruises and races. He helped deliver Deception, a Mull 43, from Seattle to LA and then raced her to Mexico and Hawaii. He served as her navigator on the Transpac Race in 1977, when only a sextant was available for navigation! His last sailboat before crossing over to a powerboat was Georgetown, a Cal 43. He then had a Defever 43 and an Offshore 48. He named his boat Georgetown, because that is where he met and married Paula, his wife of 57 years. They raised two daughters and developed a community of lifelong friends through sailing. They spent most of their time sailing with friends in the Caribbean and up and down the coast of North America from Alaska to Central America. Len was a wonderful captain and always treated his crew with respect. He was a skilled navigator, knew how to repair anything on any boat and was a great cook! Len was honored to join CCA in 1994 and was an active member for over 20 years. He served as cruise chairperson, entertainment chairperson, and rear commodore. He and Paula greatly enjoyed the company and camaraderie

at many CCA events including a memorable charter to Baja, California. Len was the consummate party planner. Always hosting cocktails on his boat in Cherry Cove or his house in Huntington Beach, he made sure his guests were well taken care of. It’s no wonder he served as entertainment chairperson for CCA. As their summers were spent at Catalina Island in Cherry Cove, Len was active in the Cherry Cove Yacht Club and eventually became commodore. He was also a member of LA Yacht Club, serving as captain and rear commodore, and Long Beach Yacht Club. Len and Paula enjoyed traveling onboard cruise ships. They took over 50 cruises sailing to Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, Europe and the Mediterranean. Len lived a long, active and full life. He was a true friend to many, guiding and inspiring every day. He is survived by his two daughters, Leah and Leslie and his four grandchildren. Leah Baker Camper

John Bankston 1941–2020

ohn Bankston was born in Zebulon, North Carolina, and graduated from Griffin High School in Griffin, Georgia, in 1958. He earned a bachelor’s degree in building construction and planning from the University of Florida in 1963. John and his wife, Susan, moved to Clearwater, Florida, in 1964, where they started a family and John began his own commercial contracting business. He and Susan had learned to sail in Rhodes 19 sailboats with the St. Petersburg Yacht Club Junior Sailing Team. John was hooked! The first sailboat they bought was a Snipe. Both he and Susan actively raced onedesigns, winning the J/24 Florida State Championship in 1980. John volunteered for several years as an instructor for the Optimist Club of Clearwater, issue 64  2022

John Bankston

teaching youth in the Optimist pram. He was instrumental in the early planning stages of the Clearwater Sailing Center and later started youth sailing at the Clearwater Yacht Club using the international class Optimist dinghy. John became a member of the Cruising Club of America in 1987. He spent many years in offshore racing, participating in and organizing CCA cruises and rendezvous. In 1975–76 he served as commodore of the Florida Offshore Racing Association. He sailed in long-distance regattas, including the Regata del Sol al Sol from St. Pete to Isla Mujeres and the Daytona to Bermuda, where he won first in fleet. In their new Outbound 46, Watercolors, John and Susan won first in class in the Caribbean 1500 from Hampton, Virginia, to Tortola, British Virgin Islands. While there, he spent the winter anchored on a mooring in the U.S. Virgin Islands National Park, working with a team of park volunteers. After retirement, he and Susan sold their home and cars, put furnishings in storage, and took off in early April 1988 on their Passport 40, Whisper. Their plan was to move through the Bahamas quickly in order to arrive in Venezuela before the hurricane season. They stopped on the uninhabited island of Warderick Wells in the Exumas. The only other boat anchored there was a trawler named Moby, owned by a most 94

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charming Irish Bahamian, Peggy Hall, who was accompanied by her dog, Powerful. No sooner were the Bankstons anchored that Peggy came over in her dinghy to introduce herself. She was the new warden for the Exuma Land and Sea Park, an area designated for protection from fishing and development by the Bahamas National Trust. The park consists of a 22-mile-long string of islands set in pristine emerald-green waters. They learned Peggy’s dream was to build a park headquarters in Warderick Wells. She had an agreement with Operation Raleigh, which was founded by Prince Charles, to construct the building, but the foundation would have to be certified as adequate. When she learned that John was a retired commercial contractor, she asked if he would delay his departure for a week because she was expecting delivery of a jack hammer from Nassau. Even though John was burned out from construction, he and Susan agreed to put their cruise on hold so he could help clear the area and operate the jackhammer. When the foundation was complete, John wrote a letter to Operation Raleigh certifying that it was solid. When they stopped at Waderick Wells on their return from Venezuela, the Bankstons found a new Land and Sea Park headquarters! They assisted Peggy by dinghying visiting scientists to uninhabited islands for research, operating the radios in the headquarters, and chasing poachers while riding shotgun in Peggy’s superfast dingy! It became apparent to the park that the sea bottom was being harmed by the growing number of visitors. In 1992 John organized a team of dedicated fellow cruisers to install a system of donated moorings from Shroud Key to the north and south to Belle Isle. After diving the designated locations for the moorings, he determined two different types of moorings and ground tackle would be needed depending on whether the bottom was rock or sand. The mooring equipment was delivered by Sea Dragon, out of Fort Lauderdale,

which became the operation headquarters as they moved along the island chain. The whole process took several weeks, requiring the volunteers to sail back and forth to Nassau every couple of weeks for provisions and to take on water. For more than 30 years of offshore cruising and racing, John proudly flew the CCA flag, always volunteering wherever a need arose. He has returned to the sea again with billowing sails and an arc of visibility to the horizon. Sail on, John. Susan Bankston

B. Devereaux Barker III 1938–2021

. Devereux Barker III passed away June 16, 2021, contented and at peace, having chosen to avoid further treatment for cancer. Born November 8, 1938, Dev grew up in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and lived in nearby Manchester-by-the-Sea his last 40 years. As a young child, Dev was given a Brutal Beast, a class of sailboat designed for small children by Starling Burgess. On weekends, he and his father sailed his Flying Saucer in the harbor, where his father taught him the rudiments of racing techniques. With a twinkle in his eye, Dev would say, “I was hooked by the Brutal Beast,” and he indeed had a lifelong love of sailing. As a teenager, he skippered the Ray Hunt-designed 110s and 210s in the junior program at Pleon Yacht Club, where he was elected commodore at the age of 18. After graduating from Harvard in 1960, Dev joined the Navy Reserve and spent two years at the United States Naval Academy, where he ran the sailing program. He organized the logistics and crew for the academy’s boat, the Aldendesigned Royono, when it competed in the 1960 Buenos Aires–Rio Race. Dev drew an excellent crew from the academy, and made lifelong friendships with crewmembers (and CCA

B. Devereaux Barker III

members) Bart Dunbar, Larry Glenn, and Konnie Ulbrich. Dev wrote the story of the race for Yachting Magazine. After his time at the Naval Academy, Dev was a winch-grinder aboard America’s Cup defense candidate Easterner. On the staff of Yachting from 1962 to 1972, Dev combined his passion and talent for writing and sailing. He raced in the Southern Ocean Racing Circuit and the Onion Patch, often with the late Ted Hood. Dev organized the crew on Ted’s 53-foot Robin for the 1968 Bermuda Race, which Robin won overall on corrected time. Dev remembered calling his father from Bermuda with the news of Robin’s win: “A high point of my life.” Dev joined the NYYC Race Committee in 1963 and became chairperson in 1968. Two years later at the age of 31, he led the committee in a decision to disqualify the Australian America’s Cup contender, Gretel II, following a collision at the start of the race. Forty-three years later, he and John N. Fiske Jr. wrote a short book about the controversial decision, Gretel II Disqualified: The untold inside story of a famous America’s Cup incident (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013). Dev often sailed with the late Bradley Noyes, who Dev greatly admired as a mentor. In 1973 Dev sailed from the Canary Islands to Antigua aboard

Brad’s Tioga, a Hood design built by Maas in Holland. The 60-foot boat had fore and aft tandem centerboards to add stability when flying a large spinnaker downwind. When the aft bronze centerboard let go in mid-Atlantic, one of the crew bravely dove under the boat in heavy swells to secure the large plate to the side of the hull. This dangerous maneuver was successful, and the spinnaker was flown during daylight hours for the entire passage. Dev turned 35 the same day the halfway party was celebrated. He wrote in his journal, “Men have their great adventures, and this certainly is one of mine.” Dev credited his Uncle Gardy for introducing him to the joys of slower, relaxing cruising on Star Song, a 42-foot Aagie Neilson design built in Denmark at Walsteds. Dev and his family cruised New England and Canadian waters on Star Song for several years, especially loving the Bras d’Or Lakes, where he purchased Boulaceet Farm near Baddeck in 1984. Dev built the C&C 40 Expectation and in 1980 raced her to Bermuda. The next year Dev raced Expectation to Halifax with his family as crew (his wife and sister-in-law were both pregnant at the time). Dev was chairperson of the Bermuda Race Committee in 1990 and 1992. He sailed a total of 12 Newport Bermuda Races in his lifetime. Dev joined the CCA in 1972 and was a member for 49 years. He was chair of the Boston Station Membership Committee in the 1980s. Most recently, he edited the quarterly newsletter, Waypoints from 2017 to 2020 and co-chaired the 2019 fall meeting in Boston. Dev worked for HUB International insurance firm in the Boston area for 36 years, retiring in 2010 as senior vice president. A loving friend, husband, and father, Dev devoted his time to others, always willing to lend a hand when needed. For the past six years, Dev was chairperson of the board of directors at Triform Camphill Community in Hudson, New York, where his daughter, Holly, lives with other special

needs adults. Dev leaves Jilda, his wife of 40 years, five children, and four grandchildren. Nancy W. McKelvy

Arthur S. Billings 1934–2021

rthur Billings was born and raised in Presque Isle, Maine, and died January 17, 2021, in St. Petersburg, Florida. He graduated from the University of Maine in 1956 and then from Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine in 1960. He married Patricia Trenkle, and they moved back to Maine where he completed an internship and residency in radiology. He became a partner of diagnostic radiology at Brighton Medical Center in Portland, where he was chairman of the radiology department from 1972 to 1992. He lectured at the New England College of Medicine in Biddeford and served on the school’s board of trustees.

Arthur S. Billings

Dr. Billings devoted his life to his patients, but he gave his heart to sailing. As a native of Maine, he knew the joy of open water and took every opportunity to sail throughout New England. Art’s early interests in sailing included cruising in a 30-foot Herreshoff and a 30-foot Pearson. Art and Tricia’s first issue 64  2022

sailboat, however, was a 14-foot slooprigged Tanzer, which they sailed locally on lakes. They became hooked on sailing and soon bought a Mariner 28 sloop to explore the Atlantic waters off the coast of Maine. In 1992 they purchased a Bristol 47.7, Cynosure, and circumnavigated the world from 1992 to 2001, a lifelong dream of Art’s, as well as completed a 3,100-mile voyage from the Galapagos to the Marquesas and 40-plus-day voyage from St. Helena to Tobago. Art and Tricia made numerous passages between islands in the Pacific and Indian oceans. During these passages, Art and his “first mate” encountered many storms and calms, avoided pirates in the Malacca Straits, and rounded the stormy Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. More than a few times, Art offered his medical expertise for injuries inflicted by machetes in various locales and donated his onboard medicines to officials in Vanuatu for the benefit of the locals. Art and Tricia spent a couple of days working on a pearl farm on Ahe in the Tuamotus and marveled over the rafters full of peanut butter jars brimming with black pearls in the thatched hut where they stayed. A brief stay in a village at the top of a promontory in Vanuatu was one of the highlights of the circumnavigation. They enjoyed the company of the scantily clad natives through dancing and shared meals. Art was able to share his medicinal training with the local medicine man. He was awarded the CCA circumnavigation pennant for this voyage. Upon their return from the circumnavigation and seeing the world from the water, Art and Tricia retired to Treasure Island, Florida. Dr. Billings was a proud member of the Cruising Club of America, which he joined in 2010, as well as the Portland Yacht Club, St. Petersburg Yacht Club, the Seven Seas Sailing Association, Sail and Power Squadron of St. Petersburg, and the Freemasonry. Art will be dearly missed by Tricia, and his three sons, Stephen, David and 96

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Michael, and their families. Art instilled his love of the water in all three of his sons, and they continue as capable mariners today. Tricia Billings and Renee Athey

Zenas W. Bliss 1925–2021

enas W. Bliss II was a 51-year member of the Cruising Club of America. Zene was a lucky man to have lived a full life to the end. He was born in Providence, Rhode Island, and grew up there, summering in Matunuck, where he was always close to the ocean and the New England coast he loved. His father, Zenas R. Bliss, was navigator and tactician for Harold Vanderbilt; one of his most memorable experiences was going aboard Vanderbilt’s Rainbow and Ranger, the 1934 and 1937 America’s Cup contenders. After graduation from the Moses Brown School in 1944, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and went off to train for the imminent invasion of Europe. He was a soldier of the 11th armored division, entering combat in the fall of 1944 under the command of General George Patton. He sustained a lifetime of discomfort from frozen feet in the winter of 1945, during the Battle of the Bulge. When his service ended in Germany at the end of the war, he returned to Providence to earn a degree in engineering at Brown University in 1949. Before and after the war he spent nearly all of his free time sailing and racing a wide range of boats. He won the Navigator’s Trophy for the Monhegan Races in 1962 on Legend and in 1965 on Carillon. He became a member of the Cruising Club of America in 1969. He crewed on four Newport Bermuda Races and return deliveries as navigator on Legend and Carillon, winning class B and C honors in two of the races. In addition to his racing experience, he enjoyed summers cruising the New England coast with family and friends.

Zenas W. Bliss

In early 2000, he acquired what would be his beloved Raptor III, a Jarvis Newman 52-foot lobster yacht. He spent every summer on Raptor III for almost 10 years as he cruised New England waters with his son, Zenas F. Bliss, and grandson, Zenas F. Bliss Jr. (Fraser). On the CCA Down East cruise in 2014, they covered nearly 900 miles of voyaging up the coast to Roque Island and return to Point Judith, Raptor’s home port. Charles Starke (NYS) recalled, “Zene was a good friend for many years. We initially met in 2006, in the middle of the Bering Sea on a cruise to Siberia by recognizing the CCA burgee on our hats! We sailed together many times, including a trip to Nova Scotia together on my boat in 2010, and sailed parallel courses and rafted on the Maine CCA cruise in 2014. “The story I remember most fondly was the description of how the captain on the J-Class Ranger took him, at age 8, down to the keel cooler on Ranger for an ice cream while they were sailing. He even got to steer Ranger. “Zene his wife, Janet, along with myself and my daughter went on a memorable safari together in Africa in 2011. I remember Zene and Janet very fondly.” In addition to his times on the water he also enjoyed global travel including 11 trips to the African continent and adventure travel on six of the seven

continents with family and friends. Zenas F. Bliss

Jesse M. Bontecou 1926–2020

esse M. Bontecou, a lifelong resident of Dutchess County, New York, died in Vassar Hospital November 16, 2020, after a brief illness. Jesse was born in New York City in 1926. The family moved from Rye to Millbrook in 1927 for his parents’ love of foxhunting and riding. Jesse’s father started an Angus herd in 1928. Jesse attended several one-room schoolhouses on and around the Shunpike before attending Millbrook School, graduating with the class of 1944. He attended Yale, transferring to and graduating from the New York Maritime Academy at Fort Schuyler. As a merchant seaman, he made several transatlantic crossings in Liberty ships. Jesse married Ruth Lyon in 1947, and they had four children, Jay, Tim, Mark, and Ruthie. He loved the sea and Rally Farms, the family Angus cattle farm in Millbrook, and was lucky enough to be able to pursue both passions. Rally Farms occupied his weekdays from dawn to dusk. He was never afraid to get his coveralls dirty, nor did he ever ask anyone to do something he would not do himself. Jesse not only showed and raised Angus cows from his well-respected herd, but also promoted the Angus brand while serving on the board of the American Angus Association, including 12 years as vice president. He also was central to raising the crops that the herd of 275 brood cows consumed. Jesse and Ruth were divorced in 1973. He married Gayle in 1974. His love of sailing and the sea was evident from an early age. He built a 13-foot sailboat, Blue Teal, when he was 13, then singlehandedly and without parental permission sailed her from Point Judith to Block Island and back. He puttered about Narragansett Bay in

Jesse M. Bontecou

the lapstrake Dyer Dow dinghy that was tender to his grandfather’s yacht, Felicia. He was a member of the Conanicut Yacht Club in Jamestown, Rhode Island. In 1955, he joined Ray Hunt in England to help crew Ray’s new Concordia, Harrier, at Cowes Week. They did extremely well, winning six out of six races. In 1956, Jesse purchased Harrier and proceeded to win the Annapolis to Newport race in 1957. He raced in many a day race in and around Narragansett Bay and the surrounding area. Jesse competed in 14 Newport Bermuda Races, two Buenos Aries to Rio races, and many more. In 1977, Harrier finished second in class and seventh in the fleet in the Marion Bermuda Race. He did extensive cruising up and down the east coast in Harrier. The CCA moorings were a blessing when mooring in the Great Salt Pond in Block Island. Anchorages in the Elizabeth Islands were favorite short-trip stopovers as well. Several extended cruises included rounding Cape Horn with Tom Watson aboard Palawan. He was never happier than just messing about on his beloved Harrier. He was often joined by his crew, John Quinn, John Parsons, Dick Hutchinson, and sons Jay and Tim on the day races. His love of birding found him and Gayle, his wife of 46 years, traveling around the world on ecotours,

filming their winged friends. When his legs refused to listen to him and he became wheelchair bound, he resorted to his computer for birding reports and sightings. Jesse was very active locally in politics, serving on both the Millbrook and Stanfordville, New York, town boards, the Patterns for Progress board, the Soil and Water Conservation board, and as a director of the Bank of Millbrook for 36 years. He was instrumental, with his friend George Perkins, in establishing the Dutchess Day School. He served as board chair for many years and then as an honorary board member, 50 years in total. He was a board member of Millbrook Prep school from 1950–1954 and was given the Millbrook Medal for his 70 years of service and philanthropy. This note placed in a cupboard in his summer home in Rhode Island is indicative of his humor: “Please place all pots and pans upside down. Mice can’t defecate up.” Jesse’s humor, energy, and joie de vivre will be sorely missed. Tim Bontecou

Dorothy L. DuPont 1928–2021

orothy “Dot” Elizabeth Lane DuPont, 93, of Evergreen Woods, North Branford, Connecticut, passed away peacefully on March 26 after succumbing to pancreatic cancer. She was the widow of Benjamin DuPont. Dot is survived by her daughter, Margaret du Pont, and her husband, Joseph Fortin of East Calais, Vermont; her sons, Benjamin DuPont, Jr. and his wife, Pamela, of Chester, Connecticut, and Lane DuPont and his wife, Elizabeth, of Newport, Rhode Island; and her granddaughter, Alta DuPont, and grandsons, Chase, Stefaan, and Julian du Pont. Just days prior to her passing, Dot welcomed her first great-grandson, Pascal du Pont. Dot met Ben at a sailing event when Ben was at Yale and Dot was at Vassar. issue 64  2022

Dot was a generous philanthropist, avid reader, and accomplished photographer. Jeb N. Embree

Pierre S. du Pont 1935–2021

P Dorothy L. DuPont

In 1958 they purchased the Block Island 40 yawl Rhubarb, which was not named for the color or vegetable, but rather the word used at the time to describe a noisy altercation on the baseball field between the players and umpires. They participated in five Newport Bermuda Races, winning their class in one. During the 1959 Southern Series, they won the Nassau Cup Ocean Race from Miami to Nassau. They were frequently seen at CCA Essex Station events, and every summer they sailed to Maine and back, enjoying the many delightful coves along the way. Dot continued to sail to Maine with friends on Rhubarb after Ben’s death. Dot loved Rhubarb and sailed her for 50 years. Dot and Ben also liked to ski, and in 1965 they built a house in Stowe, Vermont, which they enjoyed for many years. They also travelled extensively, with memorable trips to New Guinea, Antarctica, the Galapagos, and Machu Picchu. Dot was an associate volunteer at Yale University Peabody Museum in the entomology department, and also gave her time to the Visiting Nurse and Red Cross organizations in Branford. Besides the CCA, Dot was a member of the New York Yacht Club, Pine Orchard Yacht Club, Off Soundings, the North American Station of the Scandinavian Yacht Clubs, and North Cove Yacht Club in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. 98

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ete du Pont grew up sailing Bullseyes on Fishers Island Sound in the early 1940s and spent his last years sailing them in the Fox Island Throughfare near North Haven, Maine. In the interim years, he raced a 1956 Olympic campaign on 5.5 meters and won numerous championships in J/44s, J/30s, J/121s, Mumm 30s, and ID35s, including finishing first at Key West Race Week. He won a series of trophies from the Royal Swedish Yacht Club Regatta in Sandhamn, Sweden, culminating in the King Oscar II Jubilee Cup in 1957. This was the first time the Jubilee Cup had gone to anyone outside Scandinavia. He competed in two America’s Cup trial races, as a grinder on Weatherly in 1958 and as navigator on Nefertiti in 1962. He made one transatlantic crossing and participated in five Newport Bermuda races. When the Laser came out, he quickly bought two. He simply loved boats. He cruised and raced all along the New England Coast, from Annapolis to the Bay Fundy, and even the Great Lakes with his kids and grandkids. He was a longtime member of the New York Yacht Club, the Cruising Club of America, and the North Haven Casino. When asked how he wanted to be remembered, he said, “When you tack into the freshening lift off the shore, smell the pines, feel the sun on your shoulders, the wind on your face, and the surge of the hull beneath your feet, and know at that moment I am with you, just like all those times before when we smiled back at God as we sailed together.” Governor du Pont was born in Wilmington, Delaware. He graduated from Philips Exeter Academy,

Pierre S. du Pont

earned a bachelor’s of science degree in mechanical engineering from Princeton University in 1956, and graduated from Harvard Law School in 1963. At Harvard, he won the Ames Moot Court Competition. In May of 1957, he married Elise Wood, and they moved to Brunswick, Maine, where he joined the U.S. Naval Reserve, the Seabees, from 1957 to 1960. In 1963 he moved to Wilmington, Delaware, and worked as an engineer for the DuPont Company until 1969 when he ran unopposed and was elected to the Delaware State House of Representatives. During his three terms in the U.S. Congress from 1971 to 1977, du Pont served on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee. Beginning with his second campaign for Congress, he refused to accept any campaign contributions larger than $200 from any one person or organization. As a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, he was a co-author and sponsor of the War Powers Act of 1973, which was passed into law and limits the authority of the president to commit U.S. Armed Forces abroad without the consent of the Congress. He served as Delaware’s 68th governor from 1977 to 1985. As governor of the state of Delaware from 1977 to 1985, du Pont led eight

consecutive balanced budgets, two separate income tax reductions totaling 9 percent, and a constitutional amendment to limit future excess spending and tax increases. The income tax cuts were the first in Delaware’s 200-year history. He brought the state back from the worst bond rating in the country to one of the best. Under his tenure, Delaware’s unemployment dropped from above average to one of the lowest in the nation, 14 percent lower than the U.S. average. In 1987, Governor du Pont launched a campaign for president of the United States, competing for the Republican nomination with then Vice President George H.W. Bush, Senator Bob Dole, and Congressman Jack Kemp. After a modest showing in the New Hampshire primary in February 1988, Governor du Pont withdrew and supported the eventual nominee, George H. W. Bush. Thereafter he withdrew from the political arena to become a partner of the Wilmington, Delaware, law firm, Richards, Layton & Finger. He enjoyed sailing far into his old age, sailing with his children and grandchildren in Penobscot Bay and beyond. He frequently sailed and raced in the annual New York Yacht Club Cruise, bringing friends and family along, with a goal to have fun, win races, and instill a love of sailing. Woe be to any who challenged him on the waters of the Fox Island Thoroughfare, where he dominated the local sailing circuit late into his life. But competition was only part of his love of the sport. He volunteered his time at the North Haven Casino to teach new sailors the art of racing. He took his family on weekly sailing cruises during the summer, including overnight trips for special occasions like birthdays. And every day on the water was spent with a smile. In his own words, “I have sailed boats all my life, and found calm and fulfillment and real pleasure on the water.” Ben DuPont

John Paul Ekberg III 1947–2021

ohn Paul Ekberg III was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1947. A longtime resident of Greenwich, Connecticut, and more recently Setauket, New York, he was the beloved spouse of Barbara McKenzie; loving father of Tess Bremer and her husband, Mark; cherished “Papou” of Clara Bremer; and devoted son of Peggy Ekberg and the late John Paul Ekberg Jr. John is also survived by his dear sisters, Marla Barbin (Ry), Susan Stiritz (Bill), Jill Ryan (Ken), and many nieces and nephews. John was a distinguished and accomplished lawyer in Greenwich, practicing family law for many years. He also had the prestigious honor of being admitted to the Bar of the Supreme Court of the U.S. John took great pride in being a member of the Indian Harbor Yacht Club in Greenwich for more than 40 years. He was an avid sailor with a passion for competitive sailing. John captained his devoted crew of Foolish Pleasure to many racing victories throughout the years. John will be greatly missed by all who had the privilege to be a part of his life. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to St. Jude Children’s Hospital and the American Heart Association. Newspaper obituary

Andrew A. Burnett-Herkes 1952–2021

n Saturday, September 18, 2021, Andy Burnett-Herkes hugged and kissed his wife, Sara, good night, went to bed, and quietly slipped his mooring line and sailed over the horizon during the night. A resident of Somerset, Bermuda, he had been fighting cancer for well over 20 years. Andy purchased his first sailboat, a Firefly dinghy, at age 12, using money he’d earned from collecting empty soda

and rum bottles from the side of the road and in bushes and selling them back to the shops. When he was still a preteen, Andy made his first ocean voyage in his Firefly some 10 miles to the southwest of the island one Saturday after his father had refused to take him fishing with his friends on Challenger Bank. When Andy sailed around the fishing boat, Pop instructed him to go back to the boat club because his mother would be worried. This Andy did, having enjoyed a day’s outing sailing on the ocean. Andy completed his early education in Bermuda before attending high school at Kent’s Hill in Maine. He completed a postgraduate year at the Academic Sixth Form Centre in Bermuda, then went off to the London School of Economics but transferred with his major professor to Luton College, where he completed his master’s in market research. He worked in advertising before joining the Bank of Butterfield’s marketing division. He later worked on several development and fundraising schemes for private schools and the Bermuda Age Concern charity. For much of his adult life, Andy was involved with the development and administration of sailing in Bermuda. He was commodore of the Sandy’s Boat Club, where his father had been a founding member, and was a former president of the Bermuda Sailing Association, where he initiated a youth sailing program. Andy was a member of the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club for more than 40 years and served on a number of committees before being elected honorary secretary. He was elected a member of the CCA in 2007 and has served on the Newport Bermuda Race Organizing Committee and was responsible for post-race inspections. As RBYC secretary and CCA Bermuda Station secretary, he worked closely with Bob Darbee, organizing the final prize lists for the Newport Bermuda races. He served with grace and humor as master of ceremonies for several of these award events — no easy task with over 100 trophies and awards to present. issue 64  2022

Andrew A. Burnett-Herkes

Over the past decade, Andy became increasingly involved with sail training and working with the Bermuda Sloop Foundation to foster maritime education and sailing in Bermuda. In 2016 he was invited to join the foundation’s board, on which he worked closely with the captain and crew of the Spirit of Bermuda on marine operations. Although one of the foundation’s directors remarked that “Andy never lost his cool and managed complex subjects confidently and clearly,” it is obvious he had not had the experience of being Andy’s foredeck man when gybing around the windward mark in 20 knots and setting the reaching spinnaker on his beloved J24 White Rabbit. Andy enjoyed campaigning his J24 and usually lead the fleet at year’s end. He qualified for four J24 Worlds. Under his watchful eye and tutelage, a member of his crew generally won the “bilge boys (or girls)” race. He was a natural teacher and enjoyed going to sea with neophytes and helping them cope with the wonders and challenges of ocean voyaging, whether on a delivery from or to Bermuda or in an ocean race. Andy made numerous trips on Duchess of Devonshire, both on deliveries and racing with Sir Bayard Dill in Newport to Bermuda Races. In spite of some “hairy” Gulf Stream experiences, he preferred sailing on the ocean to racing around the buoys in harbors. 100

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It was no surprise that when his cancer began to inhibit his ability to be agile on deck, Andy gravitated to larger, more stable sail-training vessels. He became more involved in administration but still was able to enjoy time at sea with Sara on the Europa while the vessel was in Canada and in the Baltic and North Seas. Andy will be greatly missed by his family and by the Bermuda Sloop Foundation, the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club, the CCA Bermuda Station, and others in the Bermuda sailing community. James Burnett-Herkes

Duane M. Hines 1937–2021

he morning of October 16, 2021, dawned calm, clear, and bright over San Francisco Bay as a parade of some 20 yachts formed in front of St. Francis Yacht Club to celebrate the life of Duane “Dewey” Hines. More than 200 of Dewey’s friends and family were aboard the vessels, which ranged from Knarr class yachts, which Dewey owned and raced nearly all his lifetime, to large and crowded powerboats, They paraded under the Golden Gate Bridge to scatter Dewey’s ashes on the outgoing tide. Flowers floated in the bay’s waters, and white doves filled the air. Dewey Hines was an engaged and engaging yachtsman. He was a member of the CCA San Francisco Station for 27 years and a member of the St. Francis Yacht Club for 67 years, serving as commodore in 1997. Dewey had many beautiful yachts, and it’s hard to remember him ashore. It seems he was always on the water, much of the time making passages. In 1994, Dewey and some friends sailed his 68-foot motor yacht Rewa down to Mexico. When they arrived in Puerto Vallarta, Dewey sent his crew home and invited his then-girlfriend, Darlene, to come down and join him. Dewey and

Duane M. Hines

Darlene then double-handed from Mexico to Hawaii and from Hawaii to British Columbia and Southeast Alaska. It was an eight-month voyage of some 5,400 nautical miles, and when it was over, Dewey said to Darlene, “You have just passed an eight-month interview.” He then proposed. After that 1994 voyage, Dewey and Darlene enjoyed cruising in the Pacific Northwest so much that they kept a yacht in British Columbia for 14 years and spent their summers cruising the unspoiled waters of British Columbia and Alaska. Dewey was a successful small-boat racer, first racing his Star Boat Ah-Me-Go on San Francisco Bay as a teenager. After graduating from Willamette University in Oregon and completing active duty in the Air Force, Dewey resumed racing small boats with Snipes and won a San Francisco Bay Snipe Championship in 1964. He actively participated in leadership, becoming the Snipe commodore for the greater San Francisco Bay Area. He also raced in the 505 class until he moved up to the Knarr class, which is highly competitive on San Francisco Bay and in Europe. Racing his Knarr, Dewey won podium finishes nearly every year from 1973 to 1980, including the Knarr International Class Championships in 1974, 1997, and 1980. When he was not racing small boats or his Knarr, Dewey was a soughtafter crewmember aboard ocean-racing

yachts. Dewey made 12 Transpacific Yacht Races from Los Angeles to Honolulu (2,225 nautical miles) on various yachts, mostly belonging to members of St. Francis Yacht Club. His first Transpac Race was in 1955, aboard James Michael’s mighty S&S yawl Baruna, coming in third in Division A. Michael, coincidentally, would become the first West Coast commodore of the CCA in 1972. In 1957, Dewey raced the Transpac aboard Orient, then owned by Dennis Jordan, coming in second in Division A. Michael and Jordan would later found the company Barient (a blend of Baruna and Orient) to build premium yacht winches. Dewey raced on both yachts to Hawaii and on San Francisco Bay, and one could often find him powering those Barient winches. While Dewey owned a number of yachts over the years, the queen of his fleet was his 54-foot, Rhodes-designed yawl, Ocean Queen V. Dewey lavished attention on Ocean Queen, and in 2019 he raced her to a third-place finish in the classic yacht division of the St. Francis Yacht Club’s Rolex Big Boat Series Classic Yacht Division. This was the last regatta for Dewey as the Covid pandemic shut down yacht racing in 2020. It was too bad as Dewey had at least one more regatta left in him before he set sail for Fiddlers’ Green, the sailors’ heaven. Bob Hanelt

F. Harvey Howalt 1926–2021

. Harvey Howalt died peacefully at home in Dalton, Georgia, on July 6, 2021. He spent his early years in the Boston area, where he attended Boston English High School and Boston University for both undergraduate studies and law. He served in the United States Army Air Corps towards the end of WWII, flying Mitchell A-26s that were to support the Marines in Japan. It was his brief time

in the Army and a particularly annoying sergeant that convinced Harvey he would someday be in business for himself as his own boss. Harvey worked at the Tillotson Rubber Company in Massachusetts in the late 1940s. The owner, Neil Tillotson, would become the most influential person in Harvey’s life: his mentor, lifelong friend, father-in-law, and business partner for 45 years. With financial backing from Mr. Tillotson, Harvey and his first wife (carrying their soon-to-be first child) moved to northwest Georgia in 1952 and started Textile Rubber and Chemical Company to provide backing to tufted textile carpets. It became a thriving global business, now with facilities in ten countries. Though flooring remains an integral part of its business, TRCC expanded into making products for water treatment, mining, cosmetics, shampoo, medical devices, the paper industry, grease, lubricants, and paint. Harvey’s real passion was the sea and sailing. In fact, Harvey would tell you his desire to get from the Georgia mountains to the sea as often as possible made him a more successful businessman. To ensure TRCC ran smoothly while he was away sailing, Harvey always sought out the very best partners, managers, and team members and truly delegated responsibility to them. Harvey helped expand another business of Mr. Tillotson’s, Alden Yachts, in Portsmouth, R.I. In 1985 Harvey worked with yacht designer Ted Hood to acquire and develop a strip of surplus land from the Navy. Today, much of that land is home to Hinckley Yachts, Hunt Yachts, L.M.I., and McMillen Yachts. He was a proud member of the New York Yacht Club since 1978 and the Cruising Club of America since 2008. He was active for many years in coastal racing aboard his J-33 and J-105, both named If Only. He participated in Block Island Race Weeks, NYYC regattas, Sail Newport events, and even a Bermuda 1-2 at the age of 70, aboard his J-33.

F. Harvey Howalt

After many years of owning several yachts ranging from 54 to 89 feet, Harvey commissioned Jongert Shipyard to build a 140-foot ketch, Islandia, which was launched in 2000. After sailing her across the Atlantic, he began the seasonal routine of sailing south each winter, sometimes as far south as Grenada or as far west as Central America. Islandia was based in Newport most summers and cruised north into Penobscot Bay, Maine, where he enjoyed CCA Gams in Billings Cove. Harvey always enjoyed the journey more than the destination. He never missed a delivery or a watch and sailed his last trip up from the Caribbean at the age of 94. Apart from business and sailing, Harvey devoted time to reading, painting, sea shanties and calypso, playing any kind of thinking game, reciting poetry, and collecting memories. He also enjoyed snow skiing, SCUBA diving, tennis, and fly-fishing. In addition to helping many family members and friends with college expenses, Harvey started a scholarship program at TRCC in the 1980s to help children of employees pay for college. Today that program supports eight fulltime college students annually. TRCC also recently endowed two scholarships at Dalton State College. Harvey supported many school programs and Little League teams issue 64  2022

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in the Dalton area. In every parade, you could always count on seeing a beautiful orange and blue truck from TRCC. Though often done anonymously, Harvey and TRCC still proudly support over 100 local organizations or programs each year. After a long and loving courtship, Harvey married his wife Dee in 1987. They spent many wonderful years exploring the world together and sailing its seas. From a sunrise over Mount Everest to a sunset looking west towards Montego Bay, Harvey’s time with Dee created a treasure trove of beautiful memories which he valued above all else. Ed Sisk

James Aiken Hurst Jr. 1930–2021

im Hurst, a 51-year member of the CCA, passed away on May 26, 2021. He was a native of San Francisco, a Korean War veteran, a successful commercial real estate agent in San Francisco and a passionate blue-water sailor with significant offshore experiences. He made multiple transatlantic crossings and sailed from California to Hawaii several times, but his 1,430mile ocean race from San Diego to Acapulco in February 1958 had to be Jim’s most memorable voyage. Jim, then 28, was one of 12 crewmembers aboard the beautiful 69-foot ketch Celebes, which was a favorite to win and, in fact, took the lead midway through the race. Not far behind Celebes, but just over the horizon, was the yawl Escapade, also a favorite in the race. Eighty-six miles offshore of Cabo San Lucas in the early afternoon, with both yachts sailing well in force 5 northeast trade winds, Celebes was suddenly engulfed in flames! The fire apparently started in Celebes’ auxiliary generator compartment and soon overwhelmed the crew’s futile attempt to put it out. The crew below 102

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deck scrambled to escape via the forward hatch. The time between the discovery of the fire and the order to abandon ship was less than five minutes, and because the fire blocked access to the navigation station, there was no time or way to radio a distress call. Celebes was sinking and the crew was in the water. As thick black smoke rose upward, they were able to launch and inflate the life raft. As the crew crowded onto the raft, they wondered if anyone knew that they had abandoned ship. Aboard Escapade, the crew spotted the smoke and realized there could be a serious situation aboard Celebes. They immediately started their engine, and sped toward the smoke. At first, they headed toward the burning Celebes, but she was drifting away from the life raft at three knots. Fortunately, they saw the life raft and rescued the crew. The Celebes crew elected to stay aboard Escapade for the rest of the race. When Escapade crossed the finish line at Acapulco, the Celebes crew was ordered to the bow so that they could be first to finish because they had been leading at the time of the fire. An outdoorsman who loved fishing and game-bird hunting throughout the lakes, rivers, marshes, and fields of northern California, Jim loved the camaraderie he shared with his fellow hunters and fishermen, but sailing was his greatest passion. Besides crewing

on friends’ yachts, Jim commissioned a wooden racing yacht, custom built to his own specifications in Denmark, which he skippered in numerous regattas and to numerous victories on San Francisco Bay. Jim was a member of two prominent yacht clubs on San Francisco Bay, the Corinthian Yacht Club and St. Francis Yacht Club. Like so many San Francisco Bay sailors, Jim loved to cruise the miles of waterways in the San Joaquin Delta and would often cruise to Tinsley Island with his wife, Lynne, and their son, James. Bob Hanelt

Henry R. Keene 1925–2021

t the age of 96, Henry unfurled his sail on July 11, 2021 and headed Down East one last time. Born in April 1925, he lived his entire life in Dedham, Massachusetts, and spent summers in Catuamet on Cape Cod. When he was 12 years old and spending time in Maine, he would ride his bicycle on a dirt road from Thomaston to Camden to go sailing. He was as familiar with the coast of Maine as a true Mainer, and knowing where to cut through the islands was a true gift. Years later, he would take his family to cruise the coast in the 25-foot Amphibi-con, New Era, built in his garage in 1958. She was the prettiest, most well built of her class. Henry made certain the family would be sailors first. With his daughter Susan, Henry raced their H-12, Surprise, with varying degrees of success! He later moved up to a Pearson 35, followed be a Bristol 38.8, both named Alida. He rigged his final Alida so he could sail it well into his 80s, going Down East every summer from Buzzard’s Bay. He ended his boating life with a Zimmerman 36 and finally a Cape Dory 28-foot powerboat. All this while Henry built the worldrenowned Edson Corporation, leaders

with the collection and display of the Edward O’Brien legacy. His seven grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren called him “Gogo.” He kept moving for fear of stopping and rusting! His mantra was “learn to swim, then row, then sail, and if you must, powerboat!” He will be missed by friends, family, and employees. We only wish we could hear him yell “Buoy room!” one more time. Hank Keene, Jr.

Henry R. Keene

in steering mechanisms for sailboats from 20 to over 210 feet. His friends included Henry Hinckley of Hinckley Yachts and Bill Shaw of Pearson Yachts, among many others throughout the marine industry. As fiberglass boats proliferated, with wheel steering not far behind, Edson manufactured steering devices and pumps, which were known worldwide for high quality at a favorable price. Edson’s “Sudden Service” and “now is the time” expedited orders were ahead of their time. He sold Edson International to sons Hank and Will in 1989 so he could devote more time to build awardwinning ship models. Henry became a proud member of the Cruising Club of America in 1993. He sailed in Buzzards Bay with yearly trips Down East for four to six weeks at a time. He always brought along friends and family; his wife, Jane, was a true first mate! He sailed extensively with Sandy Weld on Windigo in Europe, the Northwest, and on charters in the Caribbean. Henry would not turn down an offer to go on a sailing adventure. He believed in giving back when it came to more people sailing. He supported sailing programs at the Camden Yacht Club and the Buzzards Yacht Club, both of which he was the oldest member at the time of his passing. He was an active director for the Maine Maritime Museum, helping

Bruce Kirby 1929–2021

ailing legend Bruce Kirby passed away July 19, 2021, at 92 years of age. He grew up in a sailing family in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, and was on a sailboat by the time he was 6 months old. He crewed on his father’s racing boat at the age of 6 and learned to sail on the widening of the Ottawa River. He carved model boats, was a keen observer of the way a boat moves through the water, and was a competitive sailor in International 14 dinghies from the age of 15. He left college after one year due to a lung infection and became a reporter for the Ottawa Journal. He met Margo Dancey at the Britannia Yacht Club, and they were married in 1956. When Bruce became one of the editors of the Montreal Star, he and Margo moved to Montreal where their two daughters were born. In 1956, he represented Canada in the Finn class in the Olympics in Australia. He raced a Finn in the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo and a Star in the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. Because of his sailing knowledge, he covered the America’s Cup for the Montreal Star front page. By the mid1960s, he had become editor of One Design Yachtsman (now Sailing World) in Chicago. The Kirbys wanted to move to the East Coast, and Bruce convinced the publisher to move the editorial office

Bruce Kirby

from Chicago to Connecticut in 1969. In an International 14 regatta at Cowes, England, in 1958, Bruce saw that the New Zealanders were faster upwind. He came home and designed an International 14 to make it faster when sailing to weather. He was selftaught in boat design. “I had a copy of Skene’s Elements of Yacht Design. If you can understand 50 percent of what’s in that book, you can design a boat. Yacht design isn’t brain surgery. We should always pretend that it is, but it’s really not.” Having made that modest disclaimer, he allowed that “designing a vessel that is compatible with two disparate elements, air and water, is actually a challenge.” Seven versions of the Kirby International 14 were built, 739 boats total. “It was done seat of the pants,” he explained. “No testing. It was all empirical. Each new boat was a take-off on the old one.” In 1969 he was asked to build a fiberglass sailboat that one person could race. At the 1971 New York Boat Show, 144 Lasers were sold for $595. The Laser was fun to sail, could be transported on the roof of a car, but also could be raced. Over 250,000 have been built. The Laser became an Olympic class in 1996 and the Laser Radial became an Olympic class for lighter people in 2008. Bruce came to call his original legal pad drawing the “million-dollar doodle.” He retired from Sailing World issue 64  2022

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and became a full-time boat designer. He was commissioned by a friend to build Runaway to IOR standards. He always skippered that boat and represented Canada’s entry in the Admiral’s Cup in 1981. In 1983, he designed Canada I for the America’s Cup races, and it made the semi-finals in Newport. In 1987 he designed Canada II for the America’s Cup races in Australia. Bruce’s design career includes a multitude of successful classes such as the Pixel, Kirby 25, and Ideal 18, and production racer/ cruisers like the San Juan 24 and 30. He designed a variety of Sharpie hulls for home construction. He designed the 23-foot keelboat Sonar for Noroton Yacht Club in Darien, Connecticut. The Sonar has been raced all over the world and is used in the Paralympic Games. He became a member of the Cruising Club of America in 2000 and was also a member of the New York Yacht Club and Noroton Yacht Club. Bruce was inducted into the National Sailing Hall of Fame, the Canadian International 14 Hall of Fame, and the City of Ottawa Sports Hall of Fame. He was awarded the Order of Canada. Margo and Bruce were married 65 years. He worked on his autobiography over a period of seven years. They enjoyed cruising on Long Island Sound on several boats that Bruce designed. They had two daughters and two granddaughters. Margo said that he was a “super-grandfather,” towing the granddaughters’ Optimist prams and Pixels (designed by Bruce himself ) to various regattas. Imagine being coached in dinghy racing by Bruce Kirby! Maggie Salter, edited from Scuttlebutt and New York Times obituaries

Andrew S.D. Lindsay 1956–2020

ndy Lindsay died on October 24, 2020, at his home in Ipswich, Massachusetts, after six years of stage 104

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IV nonsmoker’s lung cancer. After his diagnosis, his life was prolonged by a series of experimental treatments developed at Massachusetts General Hospital. In 2018, Andy climbed 21,247-foot Mera Peak in Nepal with his doctors’ blessing and was pictured at the summit holding his MGH flag. It was his last expedition in a life spent adventuring. Andy was the son of Peter Lindsay (BOS), a Navy man and longtime CCA member, and the nephew of Andy Lindsay (BOS), also a longtime member. Uncle Andy was known as Big Andy in Biddeford Pool, Maine, where he taught a whole generation of summer kids how to sail in Turnabouts. They included many CCA members, who are grateful for learning knots, navigation, and cruising skills. Andy absorbed his uncle’s lessons well. In 1977, Andy sailed transatlantic with his father, Forbes Perkins (BOS), and Forbes’ sons, Tom (BOS) and Rob (BOS), on the Concordia Goldeneye. This trip put Andy in the Cruising Club of America and was his introduction to sailing offshore. Tom Perkins reports this was a “classic Cruising Club family cruise.” Andy sailed offshore extensively, including to Antarctica in 2013 and across the Indian Ocean with Greg Carroll in 2009. He did several Bermuda races, including 1990 onboard a Concordia yawl with an entire crew of CCA members. A college graduate and experienced offshore sailor, Andy worked at the Hurricane Island Outward Bound School in the summer of 1978. Charlie Willauer remembers first meeting Andy, who was hired as an assistant watch officer on board Jemel, a 44-foot ketch donated to the school. Jemel was a custom race boat and much more complicated than a pulling boat, making it a great vessel for training Outward Bound staff. “Right away, I realized Andy’s competence as a sailor as he quietly fine-tuned leads and trimmed sails while teaching others,” Charlie says. In the 1990s, Andy and I discovered

Andrew S.D. Lindsay

cruising multihulls, particularly Ian Farrier’s small folding versions. Together with Peter McPheeters, we owned Ion and Sorn for more than 25 years. We cruised New England and the Maritimes and had adventures to the St. Lawrence River, the Bras d’Or Lakes, and Cape Breton. We dreamed of Newfoundland, but Andy’s illness prevented that. While the accommodations were only a little better than Hurricane Island pulling boats, the sailing speed far surpassed a Concordia, and Andy became an accomplished driver and trimmer. “Andy was an exemplary shipmate,” Peter writes. “There was never a more steady and even-keeled member of a crew, whether enduring stormy seas in the north Atlantic or on the rare occasion when a stormy temper might manifest itself belowdecks. He was a true seaman, a prudent and good-humored mariner, whose focus remained on keeping the ship safe and heading in the right direction, no matter what the source of the commotion around him. He was a lover of good food and wine, and loved nothing more than to prepare and enjoy a fine meal, whether hundreds of miles offshore or hanging on a hook in in one of the more remote corners of the Maine coast. Andy was an environmentally green sailor before ‘green’ was the norm for responsible sailors, always saving his paper towels for a second or third use. The only unforgivable error I

D. Scott McCullough

ever remember Andy committing was to forget the coffee when provisioning for a partners’ cruise. Of course, we never let him forget it, and in spite of such an egregious sin, we will always miss him.” Andy leaves his beloved wife, Jan; his son, Jackson; daughter, Barrie; and two grandchildren. Fair winds and godspeed, Andy. Jesse Deupree

1949–2020

Donald F. MacKenzie 1924–2020

ruising was our life. Don taught me to sail, and I loved every minute of it. We were married 54 years. Don was born in London, Ontario, Canada, and learned to sail on small boats at Port Stanley on Lake Erie. At the beginning of World War II in 1939, he joined the Royal Canadian Navy and served on Corvettes crossing the North Atlantic from Halifax, Nova Scotia, and St. John, Newfoundland, until the end of the war. After the war, he came to the United States and became a citizen. He enjoyed sailing and racing Lightnings on Kentucky Lake. He represented Garcia sporting goods and Beretta and Sake sporting arms in the Southeast until retirement. During these years, he owned and sailed a Pearson 26, Troon, and a Hinckley Pilot 35, Quandry, along the Florida east coast from Pensacola to Key West. Quandry was the last wooden Hinckley Pilot built before Hinckley converted to fiberglass. Although he enjoyed racing with CCA friends from Clearwater, Florida, cruising was his main interest. In 1975 he bought Meteor, a Morgan 41, renamed her Mistick and began planning a life of cruising. In 1976 we sailed to Newport, Rhode Island, and New York City to be a part of the Bicentennial sailing celebrations. While in the East River on the run from Newport to New York, surrounded by hundreds of yachts large and small

Donald F. MacKenzie

and the current at full flood, his friend Courtney Ross (FLA) went down below and shouted that he could hear pinging from the engine, indicating it should be shut down. Thankfully, it was all in fun, and they continued on to an anchorage in the harbor with thousands of yachts. Courtney recalled that Don had a “great dry sense of humor.” In 1983 we began sailing full time, crossing the North Atlantic several times in the wake of his war convoys to visit favorite ports in Europe. Having enjoyed the canals of Europe on Mistick, we spent several summers on a 100-yearold Dutch sailing barge, Vertrouwen, before selling her and continued to cruise on Mistick. His favorite cruising ground was Scotland, especially the Outer Hebrides. In his 80s, he had the opportunity to cruise the Pacific Islands with friends. Don was always willing to lend a hand to fellow sailors, both new and experienced. He loved the sea and sailing and was grateful for the many years he had living and cruising on it. Sandy MacKenzie

cott McCullough passed away after a courageous battle at UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester, Massachusetts. He was born in Greenwich, Connecticut, attended the Brunswick School there and the Hun School of Princeton, New Jersey, and graduated from Brown University. For many years, he worked for Rolex USA, where he was a top salesperson. Scott sailed on his father’s yacht, Inverness, on many ocean races and was a crew member on two America›s Cup boats.

D. Scott McCullough

His love of the water was apparent, and he would spend as much time as he could aboard his beloved Black Watch motor yacht. Scott enjoyed hosting social hour aboard the boat for his wife, Kathy, and their friends. He loved his yearly trip to Florida on Black Watch and was probably the only sailor who could turn a one-week trip into a four-week trip. He was generous, selfless, and extremely patient. He became a member of the Cruising Club of America in 1989 and was also a member of the New York Yacht Club, Storm Trysail, and the Lincoln County Rifle Club. Newspaper obituary

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Brian A. O’Neill 1941–2021

rian A. O’Neill of Bainbridge Island, Washington, passed away unexpectedly on April 16, 2021. Born in Pearl Harbor, Honolulu, on July 30, 1941, at the beginning of World War II in the Pacific, Brian carried on the family tradition of service to country and to others throughout his life. With a seafaring grandfather and a WWII Navy pilot father, Brian was a natural for the CCA. Having been raised in Seattle, he spent his formative years on boats. His family founded two marinas, one in Anacortes and one in Seattle. Brian and his wife, Mary Alice, met their CCA sponsor, Maury Rattray, in 1996 in Greece while on a five-year circumnavigation on their Norseman 447 Shibui; having already made a voyage in prior years throughout the South Pacific to New Zealand. Brian was the consummate career Marine, serving as a helicopter medevac pilot in Vietnam, and with great competence in various fighter jets thereafter. Among his many challenging but interesting postings were as a Top Gun instructor, executive officer of the Blacksheep Squadron 214 of WWII fame, and as attaché for the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait. After retirement and between sailing adventures, Brian worked as a consultant to McDonnell Douglas, living in Kuwait, where he provided technical expertise on the F-18 Super Hornet. Upon his retirement from the Marine Corps in 1987, Brian and Mary Alice quenched their thirst for the sea with many sailing adventures, including the aforementioned circumnavigation, which concluded in 1997. Many of the following summers were spent sailing the waters of British Columbia and Alaska. Brian’s boats were always prepared with extreme care, meticulously maintained, and his military training showed up in his sailing. Competitive? You bet! Brian assisted many sailors, including NROTC students at the University of

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Washington, in their boat preparations and route planning, always willing to lend a hand and develop a program training them on sailing skills, boat preparations, and racing. Transpacific voyagers called on him regularly for weather routing. Those in the know, instead of asking him how he was doing, would ask, “Is the Pacific High strengthening or weakening?” An avalanche of details would follow, during which he would acknowledge his fascination with this feature of the north Pacific. He was competent in all things maritime, especially in the areas of equipment, navigation, and meteorology. His wellfounded advice on those matters, and enthusiastic zest for life were infectious and will be sorely missed. Brian was not an equivocator, but firm in his opinions, all of which you could take to the bank. The PNW station owes a lot to Brian for his contributions as rear commodore and his service on several committees, including the Two Nations Cruise in 2005 and the Awards Committee, and as cruise chair for the 2014 Club Cruise, Voyage of Discovery in Desolation Sound, Canada. He was a PNW mainstay and always made himself available to lend help and advice and to support station events and logistics. In 2008, years after their circumnavigation, Brian and Mary Alice created a three-year voyage of the North Pacific circuit via Micronesia, combining their passions for military history, education, and sailing by visiting many of the WWII sites where his father served and helping outer island schools along the

way. For this voyage. they were presented CCA’s 2011 Far Horizons Award. Brian attended Sullivan Preparatory School, Washington, D.C., was a 1959 graduate of Shoreline High School, Seattle, and a 1967 graduate of University of Puget Sound. He is survived by his wife of 43 years, Mary Alice, three children, seven grandchildren, six sisters, one brother, and many nieces and nephews. Brian was a remarkable man who lived life to his fullest and who was always available to others who needed assistance. Throughout all their voyaging, Brian and Mary Alice sailed an impressive 100,000 nautical miles. He will be greatly missed by his family and friends. John Kennell and Tad Lhamon

Walter R. Paul 1933–2020

he club lost a 14-year chair of its Offshore Communications & Technology Committee on December 11, 2020, when Walt Paul, of Weston, Connecticut, sailed his final voyage at the age of 87 in the unyielding hands of the Covid epidemic. Walt was no doubt one of the early proponents of continuing fellow members’ knowledge of celestial navigation tools and methods, along with how to communicate offshore via single side band, and later satellite systems. Thank you, Walt, for your numerous articles guiding us all. The list of members of this committee over the past two decades reads much like the navigators’ hall of fame, something for which we should all be proud. Walt leaves his charming and everso-competent first mate, Evelyn, with whom he shared 62 years of wedded bliss and tens of thousands of miles of ocean passages aboard Nefertari, their Stevens 47. After serving as a radar technician in the Korean War, Walt earned a degree

Yacht Club since 1974, Walt won the Round Long Island Race, numerous Denmark Races in Stamford, as well as a solid showing in the Marion Bermuda Race. The CCA extends its sympathy to Evelyn and their three grown sons, Walter, Erik, and Stephen, with whom Walt shared so many miles. Jim Binch Past Commodore Walter R. Paul

in mechanical engineering from the University of Toledo. After building computer controls for NASA and the USAF at IBM in Oswego, New York, Walt shifted into procurement, eventually heading all IBM procurement in 47 countries and some 17½ time zones. He was also lucky enough to be posted in Australia for three years, including 1987 when the Stars & Stripes recaptured the America’s Cup in Perth. In 1994, Walt and Evie began their 14-year sojourn aboard Nefertari, first racing to St. Thomas in the Caribbean 1500, where they spent five wonderful years, thence to the British Isles, via Bermuda and the Azores, for the Millenium celebrations in London. They went on to Scotland, Norway, Denmark, Germany for Keil Week, Amsterdam, and Belgium, before dropping the spar and heading to Paris. Next, they went to the Med, where they joined the Mediterranean Rally, going as far east as Egypt. After joining the CCA Croatia Cruise in 2006, they sailed back through the Med, across the ocean to the Caribbean, and finally back to Saugatuck Harbor in 2007. Walt was a recipient of the Parkinson Medal for their 1999 and 2007 transoceanic passages. A musician, raconteur extraordinaire, racer, and cruiser, Walt was one of a kind, and will be remembered by many of us as the life of the party, a skilled racer, master “tinkerer” on board, and a very special friend. He was full of advice for whoever would listen! A side note: As a member of Saugatuck Harbor

Richard W. Pendleton, Jr. 1933–2020

Richard W. Pendleton, Jr.

ick was an avid sailor, who made many voyages to Nova Scotia and the Swedish Archipelago. He joined the Cruising Club of America in 1999 and was also active in the New York Yacht Club, North American Station of the Royal Scandinavian Yacht Clubs, and Nylandska Jaktklubben. A graduate of Rutgers University and Yale Law School, Dick made New York City his home for most of his adult life. He had a successful and distinguished career as chief counsel with Phelps Dodge Corporation. He was a significant supporter of the American Boy Choir School, Avon-Old Farms School, and Mystic Seaport Museum, all of which he served for decades as a trustee. Dick moored his yachts, all named Excelsior, in Old Lyme, Connecticut, his weekend home. He had many friends on the waterfront there. Dick enjoyed teaching and mentoring young people. He sailed many summers locally and in Maine with crews under the age of 18, mostly the sons of his friends. He remained lifelong friends to all of them. Nothing says more about Dick than the reminisces of Doug Ward, son of our longtime member Peter Ward (NYS): “Sailing with Pendleton was like going to camp. It was loads of fun. You got to see old friends and meet new

shipmates. Some of us were there year after year. “On board there were lots of traditions to be kept and records to be broken. We would have lobster when someone left the cruise (there were usually a number of guys switching out the same day), picking mussels and digging clams in Bunker Cove near Roque Island. Visits to certain harbors like Winter Harbor, Roque Island, and Small Point were also a tradition. In these locations, there were all kinds of ‘records,’ from eating the most pancakes to being youngest to jump off the spreaders. You could generally make up a record if you thought you just broke it. “Although we didn’t realize it at the time, we were also learning responsibility and life lessons. Chores such as dishes, making lunch, etc. were done in rotation. We were responsible for keeping our bunks, clothes, and gear clean and stowed. Every day after anchoring there would be a quick clean up, and we would do a ‘major clean up’ every couple of weeks (usually at a crew turnover) in Northeast or Camden or other major harbor. “Pendleton taught us piloting/navigation and all aspects of sailing. We learned a lot about general maintenance. A kid learns a lot when he is put in charge of the day’s navigation, setting the anchor when everyone is relying on him.

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“We also learned to grow up. One reason everybody loved sailing with Dick is that he kept us on a very loose leash, unlike the ones our parents kept us on at home. We were generally allowed to do things that we wouldn’t get permission to do for another few years at home. Older guys were allowed a beer at cocktail hour, and we thought that was cool. We could row off to adventure in most harbors with no real rules, except don’t bother other people and be back by dinner. “We are now part of a somewhat exclusive club/fraternity. If I meet someone who has cruised with Dick, we have a lot to talk about and a lot in common. It doesn’t matter if I never sailed with them or even met them. Common jokes and memories include tonight’s “major salad,” the dreaded “major cleanup,” his three-martini limit (two if we made them too big) and ‘well past my bedtime!’ “Pendleton was one of the most unique and fantastic people I have ever known. He could spend the day sailing with a group of 4-5 15/16-year-old hooligans and then row over to a friend’s boat and discuss Mozart over cocktails. He fit in anywhere and did it with style and class.” I know all of us will miss seeing and being party to Dick’s calm and dignified presence, his graciousness and quiet generosity, and his wry humor. The Cruising Club — and the world — has lost a true gentleman. May his example live long. J C Hoopes, Jr.

James D. Phyfe 1942–2020

ames D. (“Jim”) Phyfe died peacefully on December 21, 2020, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, just before his 79th birthday. Jim was born in 1942 in New York and grew up in Englewood, New Jersey. His family summered in

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South Dartmouth, Massachusetts, where he learned to sail at the New Bedford Yacht Club. By the age of 10, he owned a red Beetle Cat, which his mother named Ak Sar Ben (Nebraska backward) and raced in and around Padanaram harbor. He traded up to a 110 with the same name and set about winning most of the local summer events in 1958 and 1959. Jim graduated from the Kent School in 1960 and Harvard University in 1964. He received a master’s of public administration from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University and graduated from Harvard Law School in 1971. He spent his entire career practicing corporate law at Davis, Polk and Wardwell in New York City. Before his retirement to South Dartmouth in 2006, he worked in the firm’s Hong Kong office. Jim’s sailing career covered six decades, including 18 passages between New England and Bermuda, three transatlantic passages, and one transpacific passage. He began his offshore career as the captain on a series of Auks, owned by Charles Francis Adams, cruising and racing from Padanaram along the east coast to as far north as the Bay of Fundy and as far south as Chesapeake Bay. He taught himself celestial navigation on his first Bermuda passage at age 20 aboard Xanadu. From 1972 to 1984, he sailed Bonheur II to or from Bermuda 10 times and spent many summers cruising from Long Island Sound to Maine and back. Jim bought a Swan 47, Aristea, in 1987, to expand his love of offshore sailing and shared that love with his children, James and Gaelen, his wife, Winnie, and her children, Robin and Trevor. In 1988, Jim, James, and Gaelen sailed Aristea to Bermuda for the first time, and in 1989, Aristea competed in the Marion Bermuda Race before visiting the St. John River for the CCA summer cruise. After her 1991 voyage from Connecticut to Bermuda, Aristea headed for Halifax. In June 1992, Jim departed

James D. Phyfe

Padanaram on his first Atlantic Circle voyage. Eighteen days later, the crew arrived at Crosshaven, Ireland. They cruised the southwest corner of Ireland before heading to the Isle of Man, England, Spain, Madeira, and Puerto de Mogan, Gran Canaria. In January 1993, Jim and Winnie sailed from Gran Canaria to Barbados and cruised the Caribbean before returning to Connecticut in April. In 1996, when work commitments threatened to scuttle the voyage, he encouraged James, then 22, and Gaelen, 24, to sail Aristea from New York to Kinsale, Ireland, with a group of their peers. They joined the CCA cruise, sailing up the west coast of Ireland as far as Westport before turning south to Vigo, Spain, and back to Puerto de Mogan. They re-crossed the Atlantic to join the CCA winter cruise in St. Martin. That spring, they returned to Rhode Island via Bermuda. In 1999, Jim again turned the boat over to son James for the passage from Rhode Island to New Zealand, “checking in” in Panama, the Tuamotos, and Tahiti. While based in New Zealand, Jim and Aristea visited Norfolk Island (AUS) in 2002 and 2003 and Fiji in 2004. In 2006 and 2007, he and Winnie circumnavigated New Zealand’s North and South Islands, stopping in the subarctic Auckland Islands during the latter voyage.

Jim’s final and longest voyage on Aristea took place in 2010 and 2011, when he departed New Zealand for a nonstop passage to Puerto Arenas, Chile, in the Straits of Magellan. He then sailed the east coast of South America, to Bermuda, and ultimately back to Padanaram. On every boat he owned, Jim had a watercolor of the famous Wind in the Willows quote: “There is nothing — absolutely nothing — half so much worth doing as messing about in boats.” Back in the U.S. for good in 2012, Jim set about living up to that quote, messing about in several smaller vessels, including Dame of Sark (Concordia yawl), Silhouette (Herreshoff S-boat), Wisp (Beetle Cat), Piccolo (Herreshoff 12 ½), and Kiwi (Palmer Scott motor launch). The CCA was important to Jim, who loved every part of being a member, from the cruises nearby to far-flung destinations to the newsletter, which he read avidly. James and Gaelen Phyfe

John R. Pingree 1933–2021

ohn Pingree’s love of boats and yachting was passed down through generations of his family. His great-greatgrandfather started the Weld Shipping Company to service the China trade. His grandfather owned a steamship and built the coal wharf on North Haven island, Maine, to bring goods from the mainland to the island. A lifelong resident of Hamilton, Massachusetts, John R. Pingree, 87, passed away on January 19, 2021, at home. Born in Boston, he grew up on his parents’ Flying Horse Farm. He learned to sail at their summer home on North Haven. He graduated from Brooks School before joining the Air Force, where he served as a meteorologist from 1952 to 1956. He sold Hatteras Yachts out of Gloucester and Beverly in the

Christian Trawler, Bufflehead, and a 46-foot Grand Banks trawler, Kernisan. He became a member of the Cruising Club of America in 1990. In addition to his wife, Dianne, with whom he shared 51 years of marriage, he is survived by his daughter, Mary Fisher, and sons, Alex Pingree and John Pingree Jr. He also had a stepdaughter, two stepsons, 13 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. His descendants all have the “yachting bug” that has been passed down through the Weld and Pingree families. Mary Pingree Fisher and Alex Pingree John R. Pingree

1960s and 1970s, after which he took over running Flying Horse Farm. He embraced his family and wife’s passion for horses and organized and hosted multiple three-day events at Flying Horse Farm, which included Flying Horse Trials and three Young Riders Competitions. An avid yachtsman, John was always happiest at sea. He did the Atlantic Circle first in the mid-1980s on Meridian, a 61-foot trawler that was built for him. His second Atlantic Circle was done in 1992 was on Great Admiral, a 55-foot custom trawler. Their 41-foot Hatteras, Majidy, provided wonderful experiences and fond memories for the family. “John was very involved helping to start the Hurricane Island Outward Bound School in Penobscot Bay,” Peter O. Willauer (BOS/GMP) writes. “He was the business manager for the first two years, and volunteered yearround as a logistics manager, making things happen. He was very helpful and enthusiastic.” John taught firefighting on Hurricane Island for two summers, having been a dedicated volunteer firefighter for South Hamilton. The Pingrees lived on Hurricane Island one of those summers and on Majidy, tied to the pier in Carvers Harbor, Vinalhaven, the other. John later owned a 45-foot Hans

Jon Alan Rolien 1935–2021

on Rolien was a sailor and an aviator, who made friends on the sea and in the air. A blue-water sailor and a good shipmate, Jon crewed on ocean races on eight races of over 2,000 nautical miles from California to Hawaii. During their 57-year marriage, Jon and his wife, Jean, owned various yachts, the last of which was Phoenix, a Catalina 32.5. During the five years that Jon and Jean owned Phoenix, they cruised San Francisco Bay and its main tributary, the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta. Jon grew up on the Great Plains in the small town of Kerkhoven, Minnesota. Ocean voyaging was probably not something that he thought about much in his early years, but he did give a lot of thought to flying. After two years at a small college in Nebraska, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy to become a naval aviator. Recognized as an excellent pilot during flight school at Pensacola, Jon became a flight instructor upon graduation. Eventually, he was posted to U.S. Naval Air Station Barbers Point in Oahu, Hawaii, where, in addition to flying and other naval duties, he attended the University of Hawaii and completed his university education. Jon met Jean, and they began their sailing adventures. issue 64  2022

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Station and was elected to membership in 2007. The station was happy to have Jon and Jean aboard. Jon was happiest when he was behind the wheel of his yacht, and his love of sailing kept him there until well into his 80s. We wish Jon fair winds and following seas. Bob Hanelt

Peter C. Ross 1923-2021

Jon Alan Rolien

Jon and Jean moved from Hawaii to Marin County in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Jon continued flying as a Navy reservist and rose to the rank of commander before retiring. In addition to flying, Jon was engaged in entrepreneurial business activities, as a restaurateur and manufacturer, while he and Jean raised two children, daughter Karri and son Scott. Many happy days were spent sailing as a family on San Francisco Bay. Jon was a 50-year member of the Presidio Yacht Club, in Sausalito, California, and a staff commodore. He became involved with the Pacific Cup Yacht Club that holds the Pacific Cup Ocean Race (Pac Cup) from San Francisco to Kaneohe, Oahu, on evennumbered years. The Transpacific Yacht Club holds its ocean race from Los Angeles to Honolulu on odd-numbered years. The Pac Cup bills itself as the “Fun Ocean Race to Hawaii,” and Jon had the fun of racing the Pac Cup eight times on several different yachts. The first ended in Hanalei Bay, when Jon raced aboard Swiftsure, owned by Sy Kleinman. He raced Pac Cup twice on Ghost, owned by Kim and Lou Eckler, and twice on White Caps, a Santa Cruz 50 owned by Dr. Bob Nance. He sailed one Pacific Cup Race with Steve Hunt (SAF) and Jim Antrim (SAF) on Steve’s yacht Triumph. Steve sponsored Jon for membership in the CCA San Francisco 110

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r. Peter Charles Ross, 98, died peacefully at his Vero Beach, Florida, home Thursday, Oct. 14, surrounded by family. No obituary can convey the breadth and depth of his long life: show-jumping horses, flying airplanes, racing and winning on his 38-foot sloop, Tynaje, remediating dental flaws and damage in his practice, and being the greatest dad ever at home — demanding, but fair and caring. Peter was born in Long Branch, New Jersey. He was studying at the University Heights Division of New York University when the U.S. entered World War II in 1941. He was accepted into the Army Specialized Training Program, which enabled him to complete college and enter dental school. As a result, he received a bachelor of arts degree in 1943 and began studies at the New York University College of Dentistry. After being discharged from the Army in 1945 and awarded a doctor of dental surgery degree in 1946, he established a dental office in Manhattan and was a member of the teaching staff of the College of Dentistry and, subsequently, the New York Polyclinic Postgraduate Medical School. In 1953, he joined the U.S. Naval Reserve as a lieutenant commander due to the urgent need for medical officers during the Korean War. He was assigned to the Naval Submarine Base New London in Groton, Connecticut. Discharged in 1956, he opened a dental practice in Groton, which is still in

Peter C. Ross

business today, and moved to Mason’s Island in Mystic with his wife, Janet. He loved horses, horseback riding, especially show jumping. When he lived in New York City, he tested “raw recruit” horses as potential mounts for the New York Police Department. One of his favorite stories was about crossing Fifth Avenue atop a horse on its hind legs because it had reared up when a bus backfired. He also said that the benches in Central Park made for good jumps. He would go on to be a prizewinning show jumper on his beloved horse, Sheik. In the 1960s and 1970s, he owned a 16-horse stable in Mystic. Nevertheless, ocean sailing, both recreational and competitive, subsequently absorbed him almost totally. He sailed up and down the East Coast (twice single-handedly from Florida to New England) and to Europe, the Caribbean, Bermuda, and Nova Scotia, surviving two tropical storms and a hurricane. He earned his pilot’s license so he could fly inter-island in the Caribbean and practice dentistry (and sail) there in the winter. He had a dental practice in Barbados for a few years in the 1960s. In 1975, he created ICE, the Institute of Continuing Education, which offered programs on the latest in dental care for practicing dentists. He was president until 1985. His passion for the sea and entrepreneurial spirit

spawned two charter businesses leasing comfortable cruising boats: Mystic Yacht Charters in Mystic and Miami Beach, and Divi-Divi Charters in Belize. His Ohlson 38, a Swedish sloop, was well known at yacht clubs in New England and elsewhere. Most race competitors only saw its name, Tynaje, after his wife Janet, on its stern, often with Peter Jr in the crew. He was an active member of the Cruising Club of America, Ram Island Yacht Club (past commodore), Mason’s Island Yacht Club, Corinthian Yacht Club, Off Soundings Club, Storm Trysail Club, Essex Yacht Club, Wadawanuck Club, Stonington Harbor Yacht Club, Watch Hill Yacht Club, and last but not least, the Mason’s Island ROMEOs. Peter’s wife, Janet, died in 1981. He married Joan Hagen in 1990. The Moorings Yacht and Country Club in Vero Beach became their winter home, with the remainder of the year spent on Mason’s Island or sailing. One of my favorite stories about Peter was one day on board when he was going forward, Joan called out to him, “Be careful Peter, remember you’re not 80 anymore.” He won his last race at age 92! Tommy Thompson

Diana Russell 1943–2021

iana was an inspiration to me. I met her at Sparkman & Stephens when I was in college and had stopped by the naval architecture firm with a friend. She was the only woman in a technical position with the firm. Within a couple of years, I was a cook aboard a 47-foot yawl for the summer. The S&S “factory team,” including Rod Stephens, Bill Stiger and Diana, arrived for the Fastnet Race. She knew how to make a boat go and more importantly understood how to get along with everyone on board. She found humor in good times and bad,

Diana Russell

including a 12-hour stint becalmed at Bishops Light. I raced with Diana on Newbold Smith’s Reindeer in a Halifax race. She recently had been on Reindeer’s passage to Spitsbergen, in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, in 1976, when a 43-foot yacht above 80 degrees north was stunning news. She was the only person I’d known to have taken a midnight sun sight. She invited a few of our race crew to fly from Halifax to Sydney, Nova Scotia, to visit her parents at their house at Pony Point on Maskells Harbor. The Bras d’Or Lakes were an awakening to me, and I understood why Cruising Club sailors would make the lakes the center of their sailing and why Diana would spend most every summer in this nearly ideal setting. Diana owned a rambling old house on Center Island, Long Island, across the street from Seawanhaka Corinthian Yacht Club, where she could sail small boats between adventures. The space in and around that house allowed her to create custom sailboards, for which she held patents, and later highly refined small, efficient craft including, recently, an electric, wakeless judge’s boat for crew teams. A friend of hers told me that one day in winter he saw her driving her old four-wheeldrive vehicle with the windows down and wearing a full-face respirator. The explanation was that a bucket of resin

had spilled in the car, and she had not had time to clean it. Diana and I shared a rare privilege of being two of the first women admitted into the Cruising Club of America in June 1994. We were both honored to join the ranks of so many accomplished members who we had sailed with and learned from. Diana was an extraordinary individual of breadth and depth and of apparent contradictions. She was downto-earth, yet had aristocratic roots which she mostly ignored. She chose to excel in a sport that, in the early 1970s, was not welcoming to the participation of single women on their own merits. She had been a math major at a women’s college who was hired by S&S to optimize their designs to the International Offshore Rule for handicap races — work that required complex analysis through developing a prototype of a velocity prediction program. She could think like an engineer, create like an artist, and perform like an athlete, earning the respect of influential friends and leaders of the sport like Harry Anderson and Olin Stephens. She was perhaps the most empathic person I have ever known, giving strength to a changing cast of characters whose eccentricities put them out of step with the circumstances around them, and she happily indulged the canine chaos of rescued pets in her houses on Long Island and Cape Breton. She was happiest when faced by a challenge. She was defiantly self-reliant and gently extroverted. Any boat that anchored in Maskells Harbor flying a CCA burgee would get a visit from Diana, often by windsurfer, with an invitation to climb the quarter-mile rutted road up to her house for a visit and a wide-ranging chat. She enthusiastically attended most every CCA dinner in New York for 25 years — even for the seven years after being treated for brain cancer that was supposed to kill her in six months. Her friends were not surprised and rallied around her as she had rallied for them over the years. issue 64  2022

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In short, Diana personified many of the most desirable attributes of CCA members. Her good friend, Anne Glenn (NBP/BOS) shared Diana’s guiding creed, given to her by her prep school head mistress, Lucy Madeira: Make haste slowly Function in disaster Finish in style Sheila McCurdy

Charles P. Schutt

harles “Chip” Porter Schutt Jr., 78, of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, peacefully passed away at home on May 23, 2021. He was born in Wilmington, Delaware, attended Cardigan Mountain School and was a graduate of Tabor Academy and the University of Delaware. Chip served in the Air National Guard prior to embarking on a 32-year career in financial management. He was a consummate family man who, with his wife of 48 years, Katharine “Puss” Draper Schutt, raised three children, never missing a game or a concert. That streak continued with their six grandchildren. Chipper, as he was known to his closest friends, is remembered for his engaging smile and a keen interest in getting to know those with whom he shared watches. As a young man, he developed a blue-water sailor’s appreciation for voyaging offshore. Early in his sailing resume is a transatlantic voyage aboard his father Porter Schutt’s ketch, Egret. Porter was a longtime member of the Gibson Island Yacht Squadron, and Chip’s early years were a mixed legacy of star boat sailing and offshore racing, including Annapolis to Newport and Bermuda Races. In later years, summers spent sailing Safari to and from Maine and coastal cruising with the Northeast Harbor Fleet held great appeal. Past CCA Commodore Tad DuPont

(CHE) recalls a cruise that underscored Chip’s wide range of sailing interests. Tad had his Cal 33, Nichole, provisioned, fueled up, and ready to go. Chip arrived at the dock with an 11-foot 3-inch windsurfer, mast, boom, and a few bags of sails. Once the gear was stowed, there was some question about where Tad and Chip would sleep, but the adventure pressed on, and despite the tight quarters, all went well. Tad also knew Chip as a sailor with “good instincts,” whether it was a rough day on the bay, a fog-bound approach to Block Island or a Nor’easter off the Maine coast, Safari and crew prevailed. Frank Hopkinson recalls how well Safari was fitted out and maintained: “She was one of the very few boats I knew in which everything always worked!” He also remembers the generosity of her skipper, a person who enjoyed those he was sailing with as much as he did the voyage itself. “Chip was even willing to share the extraordinary chocolate chip cookies that were present, but short lived, on every passage,” Frank says. Chip played a role in the genesis of the CCA Suddenly Alone safety training program. It took root when Chip, Kaighn Smith, Ron Trossbach, Mindy Drew, Frank Hopkinson, and others began a dialog about engaging couples in sailing and the development of essential skills. Ron took the lead in curriculum development and program

1943–2021

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presentation. Chip remained a strong advocate of the program, and over the years it has developed into CCA’s Safety for Cruising Couples. He was also a member of the Northeast Harbor Fleet and the Vicmead Yacht Club. Nearly all who knew Chip commented on his ever-present harmonica, and the virtuoso he was with the little instrument. The lingering sound of his “Sentimental Journey” riffs, and as the night progressed, his lilting Irish music ad libs made many an overnight anchorage even more memorable. Winning races was important to Chip, but how you recalled the passage held equal sway. Ralph Naranjo

Kaighn Smith 1929–2021

r. Kaighn Smith, a former CCA commodore and a prominent Philadelphia obstetrician, died peacefully on September 18, 2021, at his home in Northeast Harbor, Maine. He was recently pre-deceased by Ann, his wife of 70 years. Kaighn chaired the obstetrics and gynecology department at Philadelphia’s Lankenau Hospital. As the director of the residency program for over 20 years, he encouraged the use of the latest technologies and, in an early initiative, he brought a nurse/midwife into his practice. He created a safe and accommodating birth experience for his patients. I can speak from personal experience as he delivered our first child in 1980. Kaighn grew up sailing out of Pocasset, Massachusetts, on his family’s yawl, Cherry Blossom. He cruised with his family extensively for many years on the Maine coast. His education included Chestnut Hill Academy, St. Paul’s School, and Harvard University. He studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and served as a physician in the Navy after graduation.

Kaighn Smith

He began racing Thistles while stationed in Florida, where the Navy encouraged him to enhance their sailing reputation locally. After winning a major Thistle regatta, the local press described him as “virtually unknown,” which became a humorous anecdote for him spanning his illustrious competitive sailing career. He owned a series of boats named Gaylark, formed from the first letters of his three children’s names: Gay, Laurie, and Kaighn Jr. He owned a Hinckley Pilot from 1969 to 1974, and then purchased a new Swan 38, which he sailed for nearly 40 years. Elected into the CCA in 1951, he became the commodore in 1994. He participated in many CCA events and cruises from the Bahamas to Nova Scotia, in addition to offshore racing. He earned the respect of CCA members and other competitors for his humble demeanor, sense of humor, and integrity on and off the water. His memberships included the Corinthian Yacht Club of Philadelphia and the Northeast Harbor Fleet on Mount Desert Island. As commodore, he became the driving force behind changing the culture to admit qualified women as members. Now women are taking an active role in all aspects of the CCA and its mission. Conscious of safety issues offshore, he was instrumental in ushering in CCA Suddenly Alone and

Safety at Sea seminars. Keenly aware of the need to recruit younger members into the CCA, he encouraged young Gaylark crew members to gain the necessary experience to become CCA members by allowing them to use his boat for deliveries or cruises. While commodore, he sailed Gaylark to a first-place finish overall in the 1994 Bermuda Race. He kept his lighthouse trophy prominently displayed in his house as a reminder of this achievement. Kaighn won the Monhegan Island Race (1975), the Annapolis to Newport Race (1985), and the Marblehead to Halifax Ocean Race (1993), and many shorter races. His attention to detail, preparation, and focus became key to his success in ocean racing. The crew ate well aboard Gaylark even during the worst Gulf Stream weather. Kaighn successfully completed more than 10 Bermuda Races. An example of the effort he put into the Gaylark program was his desire to increase the Swan 38’s speed and minimize her tendency to broach. He planted the boat in his front yard one winter, removed the keel, and recast it into a form he designed and built. He applied his surgeon’s skills using a chainsaw to remove the entire skeg and rudder! Then he patched up the hole and attached a more efficiently shaped skeg and rudder. Gaylark’s speed and handling vastly improved. He rounded out the refit with a carbon fiber mast to sail faster and more safely. Kaighn, unsure of his knees, asked me to skipper Gaylark in the 2000 Bermuda race and be part of the CCA Onion Patch team. His generosity allowed some of us old-time crew to bring our high school and college aged kids aboard for their first offshore race. We won the family participation prize, the Thomas Fleming Day trophy, and the Swan East American Challenge Trophy. Kaighn met us in Bermuda to finish off the Onion Patch series. We exchanged kids in Bermuda and gave the remaining family members their first offshore delivery back to Northeast

Harbor. Dr. Smith nurtured a generation of CCA children — Hansels, Smiths, Ills, and Watsons to name a few. He permitted me to return Gaylark from Bermuda on four occasions with family, friends, even his grandchildren. He loved sailing in Maine waters, where Gaylark remained a summer fixture on her Gilpatrick’s Cove mooring in Northeast Harbor until 2012. Kaighn cruised every summer in Maine, to Roque Island and other iconic anchorages. His influence on all those sailors he inspired and mentored became his lasting legacy. James G. Watson

Gordon L. Thayer 1938–2021

ordon “Chip” Thayer Jr., 82, a longtime resident of Wilmington, Delaware, crossed the bar on July 6, 2021. Born on October 10, 1938, he was a graduate on Middlebury College and earned a doctorate in organic chemistry from Cornell University. His career as a research manager for the DuPont Company kept him in Wilmington. As sailboat racing grew more important to family life, the Thayers turned to the larger fleets and more competitive sailing on the mid part of the Chesapeake Bay. Chip, his wife, Joan, and their children cruised and raced a Columbia 30 and a C&C 34, both aptly named Rampage. As their children grew older and the family’s interest in racing sailboats increased, Annapolis became the epicenter of their sailing. Chip was both a skilled competitor on the water and a sailing rules guru ashore. He was chair of the Annapolis Yacht Club’s Race Committee for 20 years, transforming it from a good race committee into the best on the bay. By nature, he embraced technology, so it’s no surprise that he added GPS fixes and strategic use of mark and pin boats to improve racecourse management. And as Gary issue 64  2022

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Gordon L. Thayer

Jobson once said, “Chip was a really good sailor himself and brought that experience and knowledge to the AYC Race Committee.” AYC Commodore Jonathan Bartlett, notes that Chip was equally effective on and off the water. He was a mentor to many fledgling race officers, engaged juniors and racecourse veterans alike with racing rules training sessions, and, as Bartlett says, “He just knew how to get the best out of each sailor.” Chip’s contributions to the club, US Sailing, and to all racing sailors up and down the Chesapeake Bay, have not gone unnoticed. Chip was a member of the Chesapeake Station of CCA for 24 years and is recalled as a friendly sailing ombudsman who was always ready to share his racing rules expertise. But there was also an avid cruising side to his sailing that didn’t involve any mark placement or the starting gun signals. Chip was a regular crew aboard Newbold Smith’s Reindeer, and Ted Parish recalls one particularly challenging cruise to Hudson Bay. An ailing transmission had given up the ghost while Reindeer powered through an infrequent Labrador calm. Newbold altered course and sailed into a small port where he hoped to resolve a big problem. A couple of the crew decided to head home about the same time Chip and a new gear box arrived via bush plane. As Ted recalls, 114

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“It was perfect timing. Bill Starkey and I were left alone to wrestle with the transmission, while Chip and Newbold could fine-tune our passage plans.” Ted and Bill had just enough breathing room to get the job done. The installation required removal of the shaft and Ted’s plunges into the Labradorcurrent-chilled harbor left a lasting memory. Their engineering efforts went well: youth prevailed, and Chip kept the skipper fully engaged in the nonmechanical aspects of the voyage. This was just one example of how Chip seemed always ready to add what was needed to improve the dynamics on the racecourse or on whatever boat he was aboard. In later years, Chip enjoyed days spent aboard his Down East Wilbur powerboat, Quickstep. He and his wife, Joan, a very proficient DRO, knew the local waters. And when they were not engaged in race management, they would often follow the fleet as very wellinformed spectators. His love for the water and the many sailors in the bay area brought him great joy. When not on the water, he enjoyed building model boats and ships. He also enjoyed competing in ice dancing with Joan as a member of the Wilmington Skating Club, including in several Nationals. He earned his gold medal in ice dancing from the United States Figure Skating Association. He was a wonderful father, loving husband, and friend to many and will be sadly missed. His contributions throughout his life will long be remembered. Sailing was a major part of Chip’s adult life, and he certainly gave back as much as he derived. Ralph Naranjo

Frank H. Trane 1931–2021

rank Trane was born in La Crosse, Wisconsin in 1931. He attended Saint Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, and was admitted to

Stanford University after his junior year. He attended Stanford School of Engineering and graduated cum laude in 1953, receiving the honorary engineering distinction of Tau Beta Pi. He earned a master’s in business administration from Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1955. In 1985 he finally received his high school diploma from Saint Paul’s, ending his dropout status! Frank was on active duty in the Navy from 1955 through 1958, serving as a submarine repair officer in the Charleston Naval Shipyard. He was responsible for the alteration and repair work on submarines in the shipyard and on subsequent test dives. He earned the permanent rank of full lieutenant and was in the process of attaining the rank of lieutenant commander when he finished his service. Frank was a life member of the Naval Submarine League. Frank and his sweetheart, Allan Jean Farwell, were married in September 1951 while still at Stanford, and last year celebrated their 69th anniversary. Frank and Allan have three children, nine grandchildren, and 10 greatgrandchildren. Their granddaughter, Amy, was killed in a tragic car accident in 2007. In 1958, the Tranes moved to La Crosse, and Frank worked as a manufacturing engineer for the Trane Company, which was started by his father and grandfather. He eventually held the position of general superintendent of the La Crosse factories and became the U.S. manager of branch plants. Frank was on the board of directors for 24 years. The Trane Company was sold in 1984 to American Standard. In 1963, the Tranes moved to Newport Beach, California, where they continued to raise their family. Their children and grandchildren live in the area, and Frank and Allan’s home on Newport Bay has been the frequent family gathering place over the years. Frank had the pleasure of being “Bapa” to the grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He kept them all laughing.

Frank H. Trane

Frank loved surfing 80 days a year and kept at it until he was 85. He loved skiing and took the family to Snowmass 45 Februarys in a row. He and Allan played golf and hiked in Palm Desert, where they had a home. The first boat he and Allan bought together was a Cal 40 named Meleé. Next, they wanted a boat for all three children to enjoy and settled on a 41-foot catamaran with a stateroom in every corner. Once the boat was finished and outfitted at Sail Craft in England, Frank and a British crew sailed her across the Atlantic. Frank and Allan then enjoyed six weeks of cruising the Windward and Leeward Islands. They brought the catamaran home to Newport Beach and enjoyed her for 10 wonderful years. Their next boat was a 50-foot Hatteras Sportfisher that they named Hallelujah. They enjoyed taking family and friends frequently to Moonstone Cove on Catalina from 1980 to 1985. Frank then bought a 60-foot Ocean Alexander, also named Hallelujah. In 1991 Frank, along with naval architect William Crealock, designed a custom 58-foot pilot house yacht, also named Hallelujah. Family and friends enjoyed three decades aboard her, cruising in Mexico, around the Channel Islands, but mostly at her mooring in Moonstone Cove at Catalina Island. Frank and Allan enjoyed CCA cruises in New Zealand,

the Pacific Northwest, and Cabo San Lucas and two ski gams. They also enjoyed cruising in the Aegean Sea, the Ionian Sea, the Adriatic, the Caribbean, and parts of Alaska and Mexico. Frank became a member of the CCA in 1991 and also enjoyed friendships at the Newport Harbor Yacht Club, and the Santa Ana Country Club. Frank will be remembered for his love of God and family, his generosity, his wisdom, his many athletic abilities, his humor, and his limericks. He could fix anything — electrical, mechanical, and plumbing, be it in the house or on the boat, and his happy humming let us know where he was at all times. Frank always said that his true legacy was his beloved wife, Allan, and his family. All 29 members of the four generations of his family live within 10 miles of each other and enjoy spending time together. Their shared Christian faith continues to bond them together. Allan Trane (wife) and Byron, Cindy and Marty Trane (children)

Charles D. Whittier 1934–2021

harles “Charlie” Whittier died peacefully on June 19, 2021, in Falmouth, Maine, a few weeks short of his 87th birthday. Charlie was born in Portland, and apart from attending college at the University of Rochester and Michigan State University, he spent his entire life in his beloved home state. Charlie lived on or near the water in Ellsworth, Bath, Yarmouth, Falmouth, and Cape Elizabeth, making lifelong friends who shared his love for boats and the coast along the way. As a true Mainer, he could always be seen proudly wearing his Sea Dogs baseball hat, Royal River Boatyard jacket, and L.L. Bean boots. Charlie’s professional career was spent working at Hannaford Brothers, where he eventually ran their wholesale business. Outside of his family and

Charles D. Whittier

friends, Charlie most enjoyed messing around in boats and boatyards and good snow days at Sunday River (and the eventful dinners that followed). He was an avid reader of Maine nautical history. Charlie’s obsession with boating started early. Lobstering voyages off the Cape Elizabeth shoreline in his first runabout as a 12-year-old set the stage for a lifetime on the water. In 1947 he had his first sailing experience aboard a Lightning at Camp Hinds on Panther Pond. His first family boat was Lady Luck. His next boat as an adult was one that he shared with his Dad, the Blood Stone, a 45-foot doubleended pinky schooner that was lost in 1958 during Hurricane Helene. From the Blood Stone, he moved onto the first Sandpiper, which was a Hinckley Sou’wester, and in the late 60s he bought the second Sandpiper, which was a Hinckley Pilot. He sailed this boat every summer throughout the 1970s and 1980s, departing the last week of July from Harraseeket Yacht Club to Mount Desert Island, often with his wife and three sons. He was a longtime member of Gulf of Maine Ocean Racing Club (now Gulf of Maine Ocean Racing Association) and raced up and down the Maine coast over the years. In Camden Harbor, circa 1973, after the Camden to Castine race, he engaged in some extreme spinnaker flying with his middle son, then 10, issue 64  2022

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in the boatswain chair. The flying was aggressive enough to be recounted in Sail Magazine and immediately became part of Whittier family lore. In 1990 he transitioned to the third Sandpiper, an Alden 44. This boat took him on some terrific journeys: from the Marion to Bermuda race to sailing along the Maine coast into the St. John River in New Brunswick. His signature cruise was an Atlantic crossing between the Portland Yacht Club and Portugal in 1994. Once there, he thought it made sense to stay a while, so he set up shop in Mallorca and enjoyed all things

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Mediterranean for the next two years. He became a member of the Cruising Club of America in 1999, and also belonged to Harraseeket, Kollegewidgwok, and Portland Yacht clubs. Charlie was an active supporter of the Maine Historical Society and the Maine Maritime Museum. He served on the board of directors for both organizations, relishing the opportunity to savor, promote, and celebrate Maine’s unique history. While he loved his time on the water, at the mountain, and in his books, nothing trumped Charlie’s love

for family. Particularly in his later years, his seven grandchildren were a tremendous source of pride and joy. He headed into his last summer as member number 1 at PYC with high hopes of getting on the water. Toward the end of his boating days, he traded in his sails for some horsepower with the Sandowl, a Hinckley Picnic Boat. On August 4, 2021, his family, led by his seven grandchildren, took him on his closing sail aboard the Sandpiper, where his ashes were fittingly spread on Hussey Sound. Mike Whittier

Guidelines for Final Voyages PROCEDURE • When a member dies, please notify your station historian or rear commodore, who will notify the club secretary, webmaster, and the editor of Final Voyages. • The station historian will ask a member to write an obituary and obtain a photo, and the historian will send the material to the editor of Final Voyages. LENGTH • Write-ups should be a minimum of 250 and a maximum of 700 words. ESSENTIALS • The obituary should primarily honor the member’s involvement in the CCA. It should describe the member’s life and achievements in sailing, and his or her contributions to the sport and to the CCA. • Please include the year of birth and date of death. • Include BRIEF professional, military, and educational credentials, if desired. Obituaries written for newspapers or general-interest media are usually not appropriate for Final Voyages, but may be posted on the CCA website in the interim. • Sailing-related anecdotes are most welcome. FORMAT • Type single-spaced text in a Word file and italicize yacht names and book titles. Use only one space between sentences, provide full names rather than abbreviations, and do not use prolonged capitalization. • All text should be in one font style and free of formatting (other than italics for boat names and book titles). • Photos should be sent separately from the text file. Please do not embed photos in the Word file. • Please email the Word file and photos as email attachments. Alternatively, send the Word file and photos via Dropbox or WeTransfer (see Guidelines for Photos - Photo Submission for further information). PHOTOS • High-resolution, uncropped, digital images are best, sent in JPEG, or TIFF, format. • We can fix photos that are under- or over-exposed and do some color-correcting. Out-of-focus shots are a problem, and rarely can we salvage low-resolution digital images. • For additional details about photos, see Guidelines for Photos. DEADLINE - November 1, 2022 • Obituaries received after that date will be held for the next annual issue of Voyages.

Send Final Voyages Material to David Curtin, Editor: finalvoyages@cruisingclub.org or: dcurtin626@aol.com

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Guidelines for Photos OWNERSHIP • Photos submitted must be your own or you must obtain the photographer’s permission and provide appropriate author credit. We are happy to give credit for photos published. FORMAT • High-resolution digital images (ideally set at 300 DPI or PPI, dots or pixels per inch) are essential. • TIFF and JPEG are the best digital formats. Please do not send other types of files without asking us first. • We can fix photos that are a little under- or over-exposed; do some color-correcting; and, rarely, improve low-resolution digital photos, but we cannot salvage out-of-focus images. • If you have only prints, slides, or negatives (for historical articles or obituaries), please have good digital copies made locally, then send us copies of the digital files. IMAGE QUALITY and PHOTO SIZE • When shooting digital photos, set your camera’s “Image Quality” and “Picture Size” to “High” or “Best.” Anything less, and the photos will likely be too small to use in print. • Please DO NOT send laser, inkjet, or desktop photo-printing software printouts; photocopies; newspaper or magazine pages; or any low-resolution digital images. Photos become unusable when scanned or digitally resampled. • To be sure your photo will print clearly, check the pixels by running your mouse over the image file in your browser, or right-click on the file itself and select “Properties” to see pixel counts. The relationship between digital image pixels and maximum print size is as follows: 600 x 900 pixels = 2 x 3 inches; 1200 x 1800 pixels = 4 x 6 inches; 2400 x 3000 pixels = 8 x 10 inches. The more pixels a photo has, the better the clarity will be when printed. • Please note that some online photo storage services automatically compress photos to a smaller file size. Read the fine print before using these services. Ideally you should save your best photo files on a drive that keeps them at their full, original resolution. PHOTO EDITING • We prefer photos NOT to have been edited, cropped, or color-corrected beforehand. • If you have edited the image at all, you should save it at the highest quality. Better still, save it as a TIFF, a lossless file setting. • If you decide you must edit the shot, please go easy, particularly on saturation and contrast. What looks good on screen can often look terrible in print. PHOTO SUBMISSION • Please limit the number of photos submitted to your 10 or 12 best images per article—easy to say, hard to do. • Please include a separate CAPTION LIST as a Word file, with BRIEF information for each image (location, people’s names, and boat names). Label each caption and image with a number or title that we can tie back to your article. Captions can easily be edited and refined once the article layout and design have been prepared, and it is difficult to know which photos fit your story most effectively without having a caption list upfront. • Send photo files as email attachments, or use a reputable web-based service such as Dropbox (dropbox.com) or WeTransfer (wetransfer.com). These are currently among the best electronic methods for sending many digital photos and other files at once. • If you submit photos by email, send a message describing how many emails with attachments will follow, then forward the image files in small batches. We will confirm all images received. • If an Apple user, please be certain files are JPEGs or TIFFs that are Windows- and PC-compatible.

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Guidelines for Articles LENGTH • From 1,000 to 3,500 words. Any article in excess of 3,500 words will be returned to the author to be edited. FORMAT • Word document with no embedded formatting or photos. Please send photos separately. • Type single-spaced text, italicize yacht names and book titles, and use only one space between sentences. • If you use word-processing software other than Word, please “Save As” or “Export” to convert your file into Word. • Include dates and miles covered on your trip. • Send files as email attachments, or upload via Dropbox or WeTransfer along with your photos (see Guidelines for Photos - Photo Submission for further information). STYLE GUIDE • For authors new to Voyages, we can supply a comprehensive Voyages Style Guide. It will help us immeasurably if you look at this prior to submitting your article. AUTHOR BIO and BOAT INFORMATION • Please include a short sailing-oriented biographical sketch and good digital photo of the author, the boat’s home port, and the author’s CCA station. • Please note the station for each CCA member named in your article in the following format: Name (BOS/GMP). • Include a brief description of your boat and, if possible, any other boat(s) mentioned in your article, including home port, designer, builder, model, and year launched. MAPS and CHARTS • Please include a digital image or photocopy of a map or nautical chart showing the places you visited, with your route clearly marked. DEADLINE FOR 2023 ISSUE - November 1, 2022 • Manuscripts submitted after the deadline will be held for the following year.

Send Articles and Photos to: Voyages Editors - Ami and Bob Green voyages@cruisingclub.org or: amigreen17@icloud.com

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Last Words from the Editors

Amelia and Robert Green

s the new co-editors of Voyages, we began our tenure just as COVID-19 restrictions were re-instated and Omicron introduced itself. A level of uncertainty left many sailors with difficult decisions. The sense of wanderlust, dampened by PCR tests, proof of vaccinations, and entry into foreign ports questionable, forced many to remain in local waters. Our expectations to explore the inner workings of Voyages with the outgoing editors, Zdenka and Jack Griswold, were dampened as COVID-19 took away our ability to have inperson meetings. Instead, we used the virtual door of Zoom to exchange information and begin to settle into the job. Like the Griswolds, neither of us had been involved in magazine publishing, but we soon discovered the excitement associated with turning words and images into a published article. The experience was magical. We discovered COVID-19 didn’t limit the imagination. Our inbox began to fill. Stories of adventure in distant and local waters, as well as yarns from the past, were worthy of retelling. Jack Griswold’s “An Unexpected Maine Cruise” and John Bullard’s “In Praise of The Familiar” reminded us that there’s beauty to be found close to home. There were travel narratives from Ellen Massey Leonard, Ginger and Peter Niemann, Baird Tewksbury, and first-time contributor Brendan Huffman, who took us to Hawaii on board Siren for the singlehanded Transpac Race. Bill Strassberg sent an important article about the “Culture of Safety,” and Mindy Gunther interviewed boat designer Mark Ellis. The range of submissions was capped with a unique article, a watercolor essay by Gretchen Dieck Biemesderfer. Her paintings of an ocean sunrise or a Maine lighthouse suggest a “pleasant symmetry” between sailing and watercolor painting. 120

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Her stunning work will stay with you. Turning the written word turn into a published piece happens with a team, and CCA is fortunate to have four professionals who excel at their job. Virginia M. Wright of Camden, Maine, a tireless proofreader and editor, was often the first person we turned to. Her sharp eyes, command of the written word, and humor put our relationship on good footing. Claire MacMaster of Barefoot Art Graphic Design is our head designer, who not only designs articles but is responsible for making the magazine print-ready. Her attentiveness to detail and vast experience gives Voyages its reputation as the National Geographic of sailing. Hillary Steinau of Camden Design Group 2 and artist Tara Law ✧ bring their unique styles to the articles. Each designer uses a specific symbol that allows the reader to know who was responsible for the design. Professional, creative, confident. What a combination! Often, a second pair of eyes helped identify something we may have missed. Many thanks to club members Amy Jordan, Lynnie Bruce, Max Fletcher, and David Pratt who stepped in when asked to help. The responsibility for Final Voyages took on a personal meaning when Maggie Salter offered to stay during our first year. Now it is time to say thank you to Maggie, thank you for tracking down the obituaries of station mates, which provide closure for friends. You know how much this job means to our members. Voyages is all about you, CCA members who take the time to write and share stunning stories. We invite you to contribute to the 2023 edition of Voyages. You will enjoy being part of the magic!

Second Shots Bonus images from the issue ...

Niagara 35 line drawings.

King Penguins at Ships Cove.

Sharks at Fakarava Atoll.

Kite in the fog.

Trading for fish and rock lobsters from the Edinburgh crew.

Voyages 2022

Articles inside

LAST WORDS from the Editors

FINAL VOYAGES

GUIDELINES for Final Voyages, Photos, and Articles

Book Review - Addicted to More Adventure Risk Is Good, Enjoy It

Book Review - In Slocum’s Wake

Book Review - Wooden Boats for Blue Water Sailors Philosophy on Sailing, Design, and Construction

Trans-Atlantic with Jonah

Cape Horn 2004

Marion and Gough Finale The Last Voyages of Pelagic Australis

In Praise of the Familiar

The Coffee Bean Story

Sailing Solo to Hawaii

Mark Ellis Yacht Designer A Man at the Right Place and Time

A Night Approach to Cape Horn

Sailing and Diving the Many Motu A Long-awaited Return to the Tuamotu Archipelago

An Unexpected Maine Cruise

Why Japan?