Editor's Note: Those studying my recent account of Lunacy's passage from Puerto Rico to Bermuda may have noticed that we did NOT find that abandoned Swan 48, Wolfhound, ex-Bella Luna , that I blogged about earlier. Ah, well... You can't always find that needle in the haystack, but I can deliver on my promise to tell you about the time I delivered a Swan 48 down to the islands.

I HAD OFTEN delivered boats from the northeastern U.S. to the West Indies in early November. I had also done northbound trips from the Indies to New England in the spring. But I had never before been asked to take a boat south to the Caribbean in early April. Why, pray tell, would anyone want to do this? The answer, not surprisingly, involved a racing schedule.

The boat in question, Avocation, a Swan 48 that had recently changed hands, was now being managed by Hank Schmitt, of Offshore Passage Opportunities, and he planned to campaign the boat at Antigua Race Week. He needed to have it in St. Maarten by Thursday, April 21 (this was in 2005), so he could fly in and take it to Antigua in time for the start of Race Week on Sunday, April 24.

I met Hank and the boat at his home base in Huntington, Long Island, early on the morning of Wednesday, April 6. Hank had already assembled a pay-to-play crew, the members of which slowly trickled on to the scene as we attended to a few last-minute chores that afternoon. They were an excellent mix. We had two young deck-apes, Jordan and Nathan; two middle-aged sailors, John (a member of the U.S. Army Special Forces) and Keith (a small-business owner from Florida); plus one seasoned offshore veteran, Jim.

The weather charts I downloaded that evening were pretty bleak. The forecast was for a deep low generating gale-force winds to appear in the waters between Bermuda and the eastern U.S. on Saturday, April 9, right about the time I expected we'd be crossing the Gulf Stream. If I were in cruising mode, of course, I would have waited patiently for this low to pass, but since we were in delivery mode, and a no-go decision now meant that Hank could not possibly race at Antigua, I felt we had no choice but to set out as planned early on the morning of Thursday, April 7.

We screamed down Long Island Sound. Though conditions were initially light, by 1400 hours a moderate southwesterly had filled in. Flying full sail on a broad reach, we maintained speeds of over 9 knots all through the afternoon into the early evening. By 1640 hours we had cleared Plum Gut; by 1800 hours we had cleared Montauk and were reefed down in open water, close-reaching into what had become a quite brisk 25-knot breeze. The sea was very lively, and by sunset most of the crew was seasick.

The wind stayed strong until about noon the following day, moderated as it shifted south, then shifted southwest and became very light late in the day. Through all of this, we motorsailed aggressively, as I wanted to keep our speed at 7 knots or better in hopes of crossing the Stream before the arrival of the forecast gale.

The Proverbial Fan and What Hit It

The crew member who suffered the most from seasickness was John (or "Johnny Army," as Nathan called him), our Special Forces man. A veteran of tours in both Afghanistan and Iraq, he later paid me what I considered to be an immense compliment when he described our voyage together as one of the most miserable experiences of his life. In spite of his malaise, however, he did everything I asked of him. He also anointed himself weather-data specialist and made repeated attempts to download charts en route via his government-issue Iridium satellite phone. He had practiced doing this on shore before joining the boat, but for some reason was unable to download data while offshore.

As a result, we didn't know what to expect when Saturday, April 9, arrived. Would the gale materialize, or not? We had rain and a light southerly all through the day and, again, motored to keep our speed up. After midnight, however, the wind shifted southeast, dead against us, and started building. Soon it was blowing 30 knots, and again we reefed the boat down. It wasn't quite a gale, but it was bad enough. There was still a lot of Gulf Stream current flowing under us, and the seas were very lumpy. Sailing closehauled on port tack under a double-reefed main and staysail, we had the starboard rail well buried and nobody aboard felt very happy.

In the midst of all this, not long after we shortened sail, I was awakened from a fitful sleep by a cry from the cockpit: "The instruments are out!"

I shouted up to the watch on deck to cope as best they could, then rushed to the nav desk, on the lee side of the boat, to check the electrical panel. My heart sank when my right foot landed in a large puddle of water as I slid in behind the desk. Then came the telltale scent of smoldering wiring. After lifting several floorboards, I soon figured out what was going on. We were taking on quite a bit of water, which was pooling up all along the lee side of the boat. Under the nav seat, low down on the starboard side, there was a collection of small step-down voltage converters, several of which were now submerged.

After checking the through-hulls, the prop shaft, and the rudder post, I concluded the water must be from some deck leak that was active only when the boat was well heeled. How to get rid of the water was another problem. Shallow bilges may help a boat sail fast, but they are nothing but trouble if you are taking on water under sail. With the boat well heeled, the intakes for both our electric and manual bilge pumps, located on the centerline in a shallow sump, were barely awash and could not pick up the bulk of the water on our lee side. The pumps could be used to keep more water from coming aboard, but they could not pump the boat dry.

As the sun rose Sunday morning, I was debating what to do about this. One option was to heave to and stand the boat up straight enough for the pumps to work. To keep the boat dry, however, I would have to do this repeatedly, which would slow us down. Another option was to re-route the manual bilge-pump's intake line to the lee side of the boat where it could do some good. By 0900 hours, however, the question was moot, as conditions moderated and the boat's heeling eased enough for the pumps to be useful again. Taking stock of our situation, I found we had lost all of our navigation instruments (but not the GPS, which fortunately was on a separate circuit), our autopilot, our VHF radio, and our 12-volt outlet, which we had been using to charge our two handheld satellite phones. We also found that the genoa leech was thoroughly shredded. This, presumably, happened while we were furling the sail in high winds the night before.

Jim enjoys some quality time on deck during our rough passage to Bermuda

Sunday night the sky was clear enough that we saw some stars, the first of our passage. All through Monday, we had a moderate northerly (at last!) pushing us along on a nice broad reach, really our first pleasant day of offshore sailing so far, and by 2200 hours Bermuda was in sight. During our final approach, I had a long debate with Bermuda Radio on our spare handheld VHF. Their ironclad policy was that boats entering St. Georges at night could not lie at the customs dock, but must instead anchor out in relatively deep water on the south side of the harbor and wait for customs to open in the morning. I was nervous about anchoring, however, because we were now pretty tired, we had no depthsounder, and I had a hunch our anchor windlass wasn't working. (Hank had warned me it had not been inspected or tested since the boat was purchased.) In the end, I elected to heave to and wait outside for daylight, and Bermuda Radio apologized profusely for their intransigence.

As soon as the sun rose Tuesday morning, we eagerly got ready to enter the harbor. Almost instantly, however, one small problem presented itself. We unexpectedly ran out of fuel and had to switch tanks before motoring through Town Cut.

Damage Control in Bermuda

My hunch, it turned out, was correct. On testing the windlass in St. Georges, I found it exhibited unique symptoms. That is, it could drop chain, but could not pick it up. As soon as the windlass received power, it started merrily spooling chain overboard, and the only way to stop it, I soon learned on sprinting to the bow to seize the handheld control, was to keep a thumb firmly planted on the UP button. No matter how hard I pressed UP, however, the device refused to reel chain back in. Unfortunately, I was alone on the boat when I discovered this and so found myself trapped at the bow, unable to shut off the power, with the windlass control clutched in my hand.

Just then a tourist appeared on the wall where we had tied up the boat. "Where have you come from?" she asked in a congenial tone.

"Here, lady," I answered eagerly, proffering the control unit. "Can you hold this for a minute???"

I also discovered the windlass could not be operated manually, which meant, in effect, we had no windlass at all. I had better luck, however, dealing with our other problems. Steve Hollis of Ocean Sails, truly a prince among sailmakers, agreed to repair our genoa leech on a very expedited basis. I also discovered the headsail furling line was very badly chafed in one spot, so I replaced it. Some minor damage to the mainsail leech was repaired with tape. Some sections of the overhead down below, which were continually falling down due to tired Velcro fasteners, were permanently screwed back into place.

St. Georges, Bermuda. We spent our visit here tied up on the bit of wall behind the red skiff

But the big issue, of course, was the electronics. At first I assumed we'd have to proceed without these, but after poking around I found the voltage converters under the nav seat could be easily interchanged. The converters were necessary, because Swans, like many contemporary European boats, have 24-volt house power systems. This facilitates the feeding of hungry devices like bow-thrusters, electric winches, and our useless windlass, but means that power for common electronics--such as depthsounders, wind instruments, stereo systems, autopilots, radios, etc.--must be stepped down to 12 volts to be useful. By engaging in some triage, I was able to reactivate useful systems, such as the instruments and the autopilot, at the expense of less useful systems, such as the stereo and courtesy lights. I also remounted the active converters higher up in the space under the nav seat in hopes they might better survive another bout of serious windward sailing.

Avocation lashed to the wall. Its concave shape presented a problem with the wind on our beam

Nathan (left) and Jordan (right) refueled the boat by jerry jug

By the morning of Thursday, April 14, we were ready to depart Bermuda--without John, unfortunately, as he had to fly home to the Army. What was also unfortunate was that we were trapped in place by a stronger than expected south wind that sprang up during the night and pinned us firmly to the concrete wall where we had tied up. Because the wall was concave, I was afraid to spring off it, for fear of damaging our flawless topsides. So that morning we watered and refueled the boat via jerry cans (we were, ironically, just a few yards from the fuel dock), and by 1400 hours, fortunately, the wind moderated and shifted southwest, so at last we were able to set off again.

Adventures in Fuel Management

On leaving Bermuda, I regaled the crew with tales of the easterly tradewinds. "Just a couple of days of motoring through light stuff," I promised them, "then we'll be screaming along on some kind of reach."

But reality, as so often happens, made a liar of me. We did initially sail on a close reach out of St. Georges, on a moderate southwesterly wind, but this soon shifted dead on our nose. The following morning the breeze built briefly to over 30 knots, and again we took on water courtesy of our mysterious deck leak, but fortunately this time the converters were high and dry to windward. From that point forward, with rare exceptions, we had incessant rain and either light headwinds or no wind. As a result, we again motored aggressively, hoping not to beat a gale this time, but simply to get quickly to the trades.

Late on Saturday, April 16, we again unexpectedly ran out of fuel. In all we had about 70 gallons of diesel aboard, divided between two integral tanks, plus an extra six gallons in a jerry can. The first time we ran a tank dry, going into St. Georges, I had simply been negligent, as the fuel gauge read very close to zero. But this time I was taken aback, as according to the gauge we still had a quarter of a tank left. The gauge, it seemed, read very differently depending on which tank was engaged.

Motoring through the light stuff. Jordan enjoys a book while the autopilot steers

After switching tanks, we motored aggressively for another 24 hours, but as we got further and further south without finding the trades, I became more and more circumspect and ran the engine at lower RPMs for shorter periods of time. I also dug out the owner's manual and spent some time consulting the boat's fuel-consumption tables. Finally, as we flogged along through weak rain squalls very early on the morning of Wednesday, April 20--with some 90 miles still to go before we reached St. Maarten--I concluded, based on my study of the tables, that we had only about five gallons of fuel left. Thus, when the wind (again) died completely at about 0430 hours, I felt we had no choice but to keep the engine off and sit motionless awaiting its return. It now seemed very unlikely that we would reach St. Maarten by Thursday.

Fortunately, we didn't wait long, as a moderate southeasterly soon filled in. Though this wind grew much weaker and more variable during the day, we were able to sail the boat closehauled more or less toward St. Maarten at an average speed of less than 2 knots. To do so, however, required very careful steering. The crew by now, after nearly a week of quarrelsome, rainy weather, was too bored to pay much attention to the helm, so I steered the boat through most of the day. By 2000 hours we were still, however, 65 miles from St. Maarten, and I was convinced we would never arrive on time.

But then, suddenly, we got lucky. The wind grew stronger, shifted in our favor, and all through the rest of the night we sailed straight at St. Maarten at 5 knots or better. Around sunrise Thursday morning we cleared the east end of Anguilla. By 0900 hours we had turned on the engine again and were rounding Pointe Basse Terre, at the western tip of St. Maarten. We figured we would, unfortunately, be just a few minutes late for the 0930 bridge opening into Simpson Bay Lagoon. But then, while monitoring the bridge's radio traffic, we made an amazing discovery--it wasn't 0900 after all! It was 0800, as St. Maarten, despite being well east of Bermuda, is an hour behind Bermuda time.

I felt like Phineas Fogg in Around the World in 80 Days, pulling victory from the clutches of defeat, thanks to the unexpected gift of an extra hour. We arrived at Simpson Bay with more than half an hour to spare and, after idling around a bit, started to queue up to enter the lagoon. But then, just as suddenly, our luck ran out. Just five minutes before the bridge was to open, the engine again faltered and died. Once again--literally just a few hundred yards from our final destination--we'd run out of fuel.

The drawbridge at Simpson Bay Lagoon. We got stuck (temporarily) on the wrong side

It all came right in the end, however. We anchored in the bay (with no help from the windlass, of course) and a tow boat came out to pull us into the lagoon when the bridge opened again at 1130 hours. Just an hour after we finally got the boat secure in a marina berth, Hank arrived from the airport. He was delighted to learn that the fuel tanks were empty. This meant he could take on the very minimum amount needed to reach Antigua and so would be carrying as little extra weight as possible when the racing began.

What The @#!*& Happened To The Trades???

After finishing my wrong-way delivery (it obviously would have been better to do this beforehand) I did some research on weather patterns in the Caribbean during the month of April. I found the following on page 206 of Don Street's Transatlantic Crossing Guide (W.W. Norton, 1989):

One thing I can predict, after thirty years of sailing in the Caribbean, is what I call the April Calm. It doesn't show up on the weather charts, but every year for the past twenty-five I have noted that sometime between the last days of March and early May there is a spell of four to eight days where the wind goes flat. April is thought of as a windy month, and so it is; but sometime in that period---during the [spring racing] regattas---will come that stretch of calm weather, which means either a few light-air races or trouble in getting from one regatta to the next on time. Don't ask me why, but it's true.

Need I say more? In retrospect, of course, I wished I'd carried a little more fuel on our passage south, and I now believe I should motored at lower engine speeds to conserve what fuel I had. I also wished--both because of the forecast gale on the Bermuda leg, and because of all the light air we found en route to St. Maarten--that we had started our trip a couple of days earlier. In any event, even if you are traveling north (as most sane people do) at this time of year, you'd do well to remember the April Calm when planning your passage.

PS: Avocation is still for sale as I pull the trigger on this post and is aggressively priced!

We have previously discussed both form stability and ballast stability as concepts, and these certainly are useful when thinking about sailboat design in the abstract. They are less useful, however, when you are trying to evaluate individual boats that you might be interested in actually buying. Certainly you can look at any given boat, ponder its shape, beam, draft, and ballast, and make an intuitive guess as to how stable it is, but what's really wanted is a simple reductive factor--similar to the displacement/length ratio, sail-area/displacement ratio, or Brewer comfort ratio--that allows you to effectively compare one boat to another.

Unfortunately, it is impossible to thoroughly analyze the stability of any particular sailboat using commonly published specifications. Indeed, stability is so complex and is influenced by so many factors that even professional yacht designers find it hard to quantify. Until the advent of computers, the calculations involved were so overwhelming that certain aspects of stability were only estimated rather than precisely determined. Even today, with computers doing all the heavy number crunching, stability calculations remain the most tedious part of a naval architect's job.

There are, however, some tools available that you can use to make a sophisticated appraisal of a boat's stability characteristics. If you dig and scratch a bit--on the Internet, or by pestering a builder or designer--you should be able to unearth one or more of them.

Stability Curves and Ratios

The most common tool used to assess a boat's form and ballast stability is a stability curve. This is a graphic representation of a boat's self-righting ability as it is rotated from right side up to upside down. Stability curves are sometimes published or otherwise made available by designers and builders, but to interpret them correctly, you first need to understand the physics of a heeling sailboat.

When perfectly upright, a boat's center of gravity (CG)--which is a function of its total weight distribution (i.e., its ballast stability)--and its center of buoyancy (CB)--which is a function of its hull shape (i.e., its form stability)--are vertically aligned on the boat's centerline. CG presses downward on the boat's hull while CB presses upward with equal force. The two are in perfect equilibrium, and the boat is motionless. If some force heels the boat, however, CB shifts outboard of CG and the equilibrium is disturbed. The horizontal distance created between CG and CB as the boat heels is called the righting arm (GZ). This is a lever arm, with CG pushing down on one end and CB pushing up on the other, and their combined force, known as the righting moment (RM), works to rotate the hull back to an upright position. The point around which the hull rotates is known as the metacenter (M) and is always directly above CB.

The longer the righting arm (i.e., the larger the value for GZ), the greater the righting moment and the harder the hull tries to swing upright again. Up to a point, as a hull heels more, its righting arm just gets longer. The righting moment, consequently, gets larger and larger. This is initial stability. A wider hull has greater initial stability simply because its greater beam allows CB to move farther away from CG as it heels. Shifting ballast to windward also moves CG farther away from CB, and this too lengthens the righting arm and increases initial stability. The angle of maximum stability (AMS) is the angle at which the righting arm for any given hull is as long as it can be. This is where a hull is trying its hardest to turn upright again and is most resistant to further heeling.

Once a hull is pushed past its AMS, its righting arm gets progressively shorter and its ability to resist further heeling decreases. Now we are moving into the realm of ultimate, or reserve, stability. Eventually, if the hull is pushed over far enough, the righting arm disappears and CG and CB are again vertically aligned. Now, however, the metacenter and CG are in the same place, and the hull is metastable, meanings it is in a state of anti-equilibrium. Its fate hangs in the balance, and the least disturbance will cause it to turn one way or the other. This point of no return is the angle of vanishing stability (AVS). If the hull fails to right itself at this point, it must capsize. Any greater angle of heel will cause CG and CB to separate again, except now the horizontal distance between them will be a capsizing arm, not a righting arm. Gravity and buoyancy will be working together to invert the hull.

Stability at work. The righting arm (GZ) gets longer as the center of gravity (CG) and the center of buoyancy (CB) get farther apart, and the boat works harder to right itself. Past the angle of vanishing stability, however, the righting arm is negative and CG and CB are working to capsize the boat

A stability curve is simply a plot of GZ--including both the positive righting arm and the negative capsizing arm--as it relates to angle of heel from 0 to 180 degrees. Alternatively, RM (that is, both the positive righting moment and the negative capsizing moment) can be the basis of the plot, as it derives directly from GZ. (To find RM in foot-pounds, simply multiply GZ in feet by the boat's displacement in pounds.) In either case, an S-curve plot is typical, with one hump in positive territory and another hopefully smaller hump (assuming the boat in question is a monohull) in negative territory.

The AMS is the highest point on the positive side of the curve; the AVS is the point at which the curve moves from positive to negative territory. The area under the positive hump represents all the energy that must be expended by wind and waves to capsize the boat; the area under the negative hump is the energy (usually only waves come into play here) required to right the boat again. To put it another way: the larger the positive hump, the more likely a boat is to remain right side up; the smaller the negative hump, the less likely it is to remain upside down.

Righting arm (GZ) stability curve for a typical 35-foot cruising boat. The angle of maximum stability (AMS) in this case is 55 degrees with a maximum GZ of 2.6 feet; the angle of vanishing stability (AVS) is 120 degrees; the minimum GZ is -0.8 feet

The relationship between the sizes of the two humps is known as the stability ratio. If you have a stability curve to work from, there are some simple calculations developed by designer Dave Gerr that allow you to estimate the area under each portion of the curve. To calculate the positive energy area (PEA), simply multiply the AVS by the maximum righting arm and then by 0.63: PEA = AVS x max. GZ x 0.63. To calculate the negative energy area (NEA), first subtract the AVS from 180, then multiply the result by the maximum capsizing arm (i.e., the minimum GZ) and then by 0.66: NEA = (180 – AVS) x min. GZ x 0.66. To find the stability ratio divide the positive area by the negative area.

Working from the curve shown in the graph above for a typical 35-foot cruising boat, we get the following values to plug into our equations: AVS = 120 degrees; max. GZ = 2.6 feet; min. GZ = -0.8 feet. The boat's PEA therefore is 196.56 degree-feet: 120 x 2.6 x 0.63 = 196.56. Its NE is 31.68 degree-feet: (180 – 120) x -0.8 x 0.66 = 31.68. Its stability ratio is thus 6.2: 196.56 ÷ 31.68 = 6.2. As a general rule, a stability ratio of at least 3 is considered adequate for coastal cruising boats; 4 or greater is considered adequate for a bluewater boat. The boat in our example has a very healthy ratio, though some boats exhibit ratios as high as 10 or greater.

You can run these same equations regardless of whether you are working from a curve keyed to the righting arm or the righting moment. The curve in our example is a GZ curve, but if it were an RM curve, we only have to substitute the values for maximum and minimum RM for maximum and minimum GZ. Otherwise the equations run exactly the same way. The results for positive and negative area, assuming RM is expressed in foot-pounds, will be in degree-foot-pounds rather than degree-feet, but the final ratio will be unaffected.

GZ and RM curves are not, however, interchangeable in all respects. When evaluating just one boat it makes little difference which you use, but when comparing different boats you should always use an RM curve. Because righting moment is a function of both a boat's displacement and the length of its righting arm, RM is the appropriate standard for comparing boats of different displacements. It is possible for different boats to have the same righting arm at any angle of heel, but they are unlikely to have the same stability characteristics. It always takes more energy to capsize a larger, heavier boat, which is why bigger boats are inherently more stable than smaller ones.

Righting moment (RM) stability curves for a 19,200-pound boat and a 28,900-pound boat with identical GZ values. Because heavier boats are inherently more stable, RM is the standard to use when comparing different boats (Data courtesy of Dave Gerr)

Another thing to bear in mind when comparing boats is that not all stability curves are created equal. There are various methods for constructing the curves, each based on different assumptions. The two most commonly used methodologies are based on standards promulgated by the International Measurement System (IMS), a once popular rating rule used in international yacht racing, and by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Many yacht designers have developed their own methods. When comparing different boats, you must therefore be sure their curves were constructed according to the same method.

Perfect Curves and Vanishing Angles

To get a better idea of how form and ballast relate to each another, it is useful to compare curves for hypothetical ideal vessels that depend exclusively on one type of stability or the other. A vessel with perfect form stability, for example, would be shaped very much like a wide flat board, and its stability curve would be perfectly symmetrical. Its AVS would be 90 degrees, and it would be just as stable upside down as right side up. A vessel with perfect ballast stability, on the other hand, would be much like a ballasted buoy--that is, a round, nearly weightless flotation ball with a long stick on one side to which a heavy weight is attached, like a pick-up buoy for a mooring or a man-overboard pole. The curve for this vessel would have no AVS at all; there would be just one perfectly symmetric hump with an angle of maximum stability of 90 degrees. The vessel will not become metastable until it reaches the ultimate heeling angle of 180 degrees, and no matter which way it turns at this point, it must right itself.

Ideal righting arm (GZ) stability curves: vessel A, a flat board, is as stable upside down as it is right side up; vessel B, a ballasted buoy, must right itself if turned upside down (Data courtesy of Danny Greene)

Beyond the fact that one curve has no AVS at all and the other has a very poor one, the most obvious difference between the two is that the board (vessel A) reaches its point of no return at precisely the point that the buoy (vessel B) achieves maximum stability. A subtler but critical difference is seen in the shape of the two curves between 0 and 30 degrees of heel, which is the range within which sailboats routinely operate. Vessel A achieves its maximum stability precisely at 30 degrees, and the climb of its curve to that point is extremely steep, indicating high initial stability. Vessel B, on the other hand, exhibits poor initial stability, as the trajectory of its curve to 30 degrees is gentle. Indeed, heeling A to just 30 degrees requires as much energy as is needed to knock B down flat to 90 degrees.

Righting arm (GZ) stability curves for a typical catamaran and a typical narrow, deep-draft, heavily ballasted monohull. Note similarities to the ideal curves in the last figure

To translate this into real-world terms, we need only compare the curves for two real-life vessels at opposite extremes of the stability spectrum. The curve for a typical catamaran, for example, looks similar to that of our board since its two humps are symmetrical. If anything, however, it is even more exaggerated. The initial portion of the curve is extremely steep, and maximum stability is achieved at just 10 degrees of heel. The AVS is actually less than 90 degrees, meaning that the cat, due to the weight of its superstructure and rig, will reach its point of no return even before it is knocked down to a horizontal position. The curve for a narrow, deep-draft, heavily ballasted monohull, by comparison, is similar to that of the ballasted buoy. The only significant difference is that the monohull has an AVS, though it is quite high (about 150 degrees), and its range of instability (that is, the angles at which it is trying to capsize rather than right itself) is very small, especially when compared to that of the catamaran.

The catamaran, due to its light displacement and great initial stability, will likely perform well in moderate conditions and will heel very little, but it has essentially no reserve stability to rely on when conditions get extreme. The monohull because of its heavy displacement (much of it ballast) and great reserve stability, will perform less well in moderate conditions but will be nearly impossible to overturn in severe weather.

What Is An Adequate AVS?

In the real world you will rarely come across stability curves for catamarans. If you do find one, you should probably be most interested in the AMS and the steepness of the curve leading up to it. Monohull sailors, on the other hand, should be most interested in the AVS, and as a general rule the bigger this is the better.

Coastal cruisers sailing in protected waters should theoretically be perfectly safe in a boat with an AVS of just 90 degrees. Assuming you never encounter huge waves, the worst that could happen is you will be knocked flat by the wind, and so as long as you can recover from a 90-degree knockdown, you should be fine. It's nice to have a safety margin, however, so most experts advise that average-size coastal cruising boats should have an AVS of at least 110 degrees. Some believe the minimum should 115 degrees.

For offshore sailing you want a larger margin of safety. Recovering from a knockdown in high winds is one thing, but in a survival storm, with both high winds and large breaking waves, there will be large amounts of extra energy available to help roll your boat past horizontal. There is near-universal consensus that bluewater boats less than 75 feet long should have an AVS of at least 120 degrees. Because larger boats are inherently more stable, the standard for boats longer than 75 feet is 110 degrees.

The reason 120 degrees is considered the minimum AVS standard for most bluewater boats is quite simple. Naval architects figure that any sea state rough enough to roll a boat past 120 degrees and totally invert it will also be rough enough to right it again in no more than 2 minutes. This, it is assumed, is the longest time most people can hold their breaths while waiting for their boats to right themselves. If you don't ever want to hold your breath that long, you want to sail offshore in a boat with a higher AVS.

Estimated times of inversion for different AVS values (Data courtesy of Dave Gerr)

As this graph illustrates, an AVS of 150 degrees is pretty much the Holy Grail. A boat with this much reserve stability can expect to meet a wave large enough to turn it right side up again almost the instant it's turned over.

Other Factors To Consider

Stability curves may look dynamic and sophisticated, but in fact they are based on relatively simple formulas that can't account for everything that might make a particular boat more or less stable in the real world. For one thing, as with regular performance ratios, the displacement values used in calculating stability curves are normally light-ship figures and do not include the weight that is inevitably added when a boat is equipped and loaded for cruising. Even worse, much of this extra weight--in the form of roller-furling units, mast-mounted radomes, and other heavy gear--will be well above the waterline and thus will erode a boat's inherent stability. The effect can be quite large. For example, installing an in-mast furling system may reduce your boat's AVS by as much as 20 degrees. In most cases, you should assume that a loaded cruising boat will have an AVS at least 10 degrees lower than that indicated on a stability curve calculated with a light-ship displacement number.

Another important factor to consider is downflooding. Stability curves normally assume that a boat will take on no water when knocked down past 90 degrees, but this is unlikely in the real world. The companionway hatch will probably be at least partway open, and if the knockdown is unexpected, other hatches may be open as well. Water entering a boat that is heeled to an extreme angle will further destabilize the boat by shifting weight to its low side. If the water sloshes about, as is likely, this free-surface effect will make it even harder for the boat to come upright again.

This may seem irrelevant if you are a coastal cruiser, but if you are a bluewater cruiser you should be aware of the location of your companionway. A centerline companionway will rarely start downflooding until a boat is heeled to 110 degrees or more. An offset companionway, however, if it is on the low side of the boat as it heels, may yield downflood angles of 100 degrees or lower. A super AVS of 150 degrees won't do much good if your boat starts flooding well before that. To my knowledge, no commonly published stability curve accounts for this factor.

Another issue is the cockpit. An open-transom cockpit, or a relatively small one with large effective drains, will drain quickly if flooded in a knockdown. A large cockpit that drains poorly, however, may retain water for several minutes, and this, too, can destabilize a boat that is struggling to right itself.

This boat has features that can both degrade and improve its stability. The severely offset companionway makes downflooding a big risk during a port tack knockdown or capsize, but the high rounded cabintop and small cockpit footwell will help the boat to right itself

Fortunately, not all unaccounted for stability factors are negative. IMS-based stability curves, for example, assume that all boats have flush decks and ignore the potentially positive effect of a cabin house. This is important, as a raised house, particularly one with a rounded top, provides a lot of extra buoyancy as it is submerged and can significantly increase a boat's stability at severe heel angles. Lifeboats and other self-righting vessels have high round cabintops for precisely this reason.

ISO-based stability curves do account for a raised cabin house, but not all designers believe this is a good thing. A cabin house only increases reserve stability if it is impervious to flooding when submerged. If it has open hatches or has large windows and apertures that may break under pressure, it will only help a boat capsize and sink that much faster. The ISO formulas fail to take this into account and instead may award high stability ratings to motorsailers and deck-saloon boats with large houses and windows that may be vulnerable in extreme conditions.

Simplified Measures of Stability

In addition to developing stability curves, which obviously are fairly complex, designers and rating and regulatory authorities have also worked to quantify a boat's stability with a single number. The simplest of these, the capsize screening value (CSV), was developed in the aftermath of the 1979 Fastnet Race. Over a third of the more than 300 boats entered in that race, most of them beamy, lightweight IOR designs, were capsized (rolled to 180 degrees) by large breaking waves, and this prompted a great deal of research on yacht stability. The capsize screening value, which relies only on published specifications and was intended to be accessible to laypeople, indicates whether a given boat might be too wide and light to readily right itself after being overturned in extreme conditions.

To figure out a boat's CSV divide the cube root of its displacement in cubic feet into its maximum beam in feet: CSV = beam ÷ ³√DCF. You'll recall that a boat's weight and the volume of water it displaces are directly related, and that displacement in cubic feet is simply displacement in pounds divided by 64 (which is the weight in pounds of a cubic foot of salt water). To run an example of the equation, let's assume we have a hypothetical 35-foot boat that displaces 12,000 pounds and has 11 feet of beam. To find its CSV, first calculate DCF--12,000 ÷ 64 = 187.5--then find the cube root of that result: ³√187.5 = 5.72; note that if your calculator cannot do cube roots, you can instead take 187.5 to the 1/3 power and get the same result. Divide that result into 11, and you get a CSV of 1.92: 11 ÷ 5.72 = 1.92.

Interpreting the number is also simple. Any result of 2 or less indicates a boat that is sufficiently self-righting to go offshore. The further below 2 you go, the more self-righting the boat is; extremely stable boats have values on the order of 1.7. Results above 2 indicate a boat may be prone to remain inverted when capsized and that a more detailed analysis is needed to determine its suitability for offshore sailing.

As handy as it is, the CSV has limited utility. It accounts for only two factors--displacement and beam--and fails to consider how weight is distributed aboard a boat. For example, if we load our hypothetical 12,000-pound boat with an extra 2,250 pounds for light coastal cruising, its CSV declines to 1.8. Load it with an extra 3,750 pounds for heavy coastal or moderate bluewater use, and the CSV declines still further, to 1.71. This suggests that the boat is becoming more stable, when in fact it may become less stable if much of the extra weight is distributed high in the boat.

Note too that a boat with unusually high ballast--including, most obviously, a boat with ballast in its bilges rather than its keel--will also earn a deceptively low screening value. Two empty boats of identical displacement and beam will have identical screening values even though the boat with deeper ballast will necessarily be more resistant to capsize.

Another single-value stability rating still frequently encountered is the IMS stability index number. This was developed under the IMS rating system to compare stability characteristics of race boats of various sizes. The formula essentially restates a boat's AVS so as to account for its overall size, awarding higher values to longer boats, which are inherently more stable. IMS index numbers normally range from a little below 100 to over 140. For what are termed Category 0 races, which are transoceanic events, 120 is usually the required minimum. In Category 1 events, which are long-distances races sailed "well offshore," 115 is the common minimum standard, and for Category 2 events, races of extended duration not far from shore, 110 is normally the minimum standard. Conservative designers and pundits often posit 120 as the acceptable minimum for an offshore cruising boat.

Since many popular cruising boats were never measured or rated under the IMS rule, you shouldn't be surprised if you cannot find an IMS-based stability curve or stability index number for a cruising boat you are interested in. You may find one if the boat in question is a cruiser-racer, as IMS was once a prevalent rating system. Bear in mind, though, that the IMS index number does not take into account cabin structures (or cockpits, for that matter), and assumes a flush deck from gunwale to gunwale. Neither does it account for downflooding.

Another single-value stability rating that casts itself as an "index" is promulgated by the ISO. This is known as STIX, which is simply a trendy acronym for stability index. Because STIX values must be calculated for any new boat sold inside the European Union (EU), and because STIX is, in fact, the only government-imposed stability standard in use anywhere in the world, it is likely to become the predominant standard in years to come.

A STIX number is the result of many complex calculations accounting for a boat's length, displacement, beam, ability to shed water after a knockdown, angle of vanishing stability, downflooding, cabin superstructure, and freeboard in breaking seas, among others. STIX values range from the low single digits to about 50. A minimum of 38 is required by the European Union for Category A boats, which are certified for use on extended passages more than 500 miles offshore where waves with a maximum height of 46 feet may be encountered. A value of at least 23 is required for Category B boats, which are certified for coastal use within 500 miles of shore where maximum wave heights of 26 feet may be encountered, and the minimum values for categories C and D (inshore and sheltered waters, respectively) are 14 and 5. These standards do not restrict an owner's use of his boat, but merely dictate how boats may be marketed to the public.

The STIX standard has many critics, including many yacht designers who do not enjoy having to make the many calculations involved, but the STIX number is the most comprehensive single measure of stability now available. As such, it can hardly be ignored. Many critics assert that the standards are too low and that a number of 40 or greater is more appropriate for Category A boats and 30 or more is best for Category B boats. Others believe that in trying to account for and quantify so many factors in a single value, the STIX number oversimplifies a complex subject. To properly evaluate stability, they suggest, it is necessary to evaluate the various factors independently and make an informed judgment leavened by a good dose of common sense.

As useful as they may or may not be, STIX numbers are generally unavailable for boats that predate the EU's adoption of the STIX standard in 1998. Even if you can find a number for a boat you are interested in, bear in mind that STIX numbers do not account for large, potentially vulnerable windows and ports in cabin superstructures, nor do they take into account a boat's negative stability. In other words, boats that are nearly as stable upside down as right side up may still receive high STIX numbers.

The bottom line when evaluating stability is that no single factor or rating should be considered to the exclusion of all others. It is probably best, as the STIX critics suggest, to gather as much information from as many sources as you can, and to bear in mind all we have discussed here when pondering it.

This was a fast passage with very little motoring. My mate Mr. Lassen and I covered the 830 some miles between Fajardo and St. Georges in less than six days and burned only about five gallons of fuel in the process. Not my fastest passage ever between the Onion Patch and the W'Indies, but I think it's the fastest northbound trip I've ever made at this time of year.

The normal pattern is to have moderate to strong easterly tradewinds for the first two or three days, followed by variable junk the rest of the way to Bermuda. If you're unlucky you may see more junk than wind and end up motoring most of way. What we saw was almost the opposite of normal--a good dose of light air during the first few days, then moderate to strong wind through the latter part of the passage.

Fortunately, we had some nice light-air sails aboard--my old asymmetric spinnaker and the new screecher--to keep us moving at a decent rate of speed through the soft stuff.

The transition started on day 3 of the voyage (May 3), and it's interesting to compare the actual surface chart for that day (which I just pulled from NOAA's archive) to the 96-hour forecast chart valid for that day that I downloaded just prior to leaving Fajardo.

The surface chart shows an occluded front forming right over our position (in red). The front, as you can see, trails between a double low to our west over Florida and a stationary double low to our east. We experienced this as light easterly wind that veered very briefly to a moderate southerly breeze as a line of rain squalls moved over us from south to north. Then the wind backed to the east and went light again. This breeze within a few hours died altogether, stayed dead for an hour, then suddenly blew briskly but very briefly straight out of the north, then veered east again and moderated.

The 96-hour forecast chart valid for just about the same time also shows an occluded front in exactly the same position, but trailing only off the well-developed low to our east. This had existed and was hanging out in about the same location starting a day or two prior to our departure. Instead of getting deeper, however, it spread out and became more amorphous.

The following day, May 4, was our most rugged day, with rain and moderate to strong northeasterlies (17-22 knots) that had us closehauled and not quite laying Bermuda for nearly 12 hours. The cause, it would seem, was a weak low that formed in the stationary front behind us, south and a little east of our position (again indicated in red).

Our hero stands watch in the rain

A flying fish in our scuppers. Again, as on the southbound passage last fall, we saw many fewer flying fish than in the past

On May 5 the wind moderated a bit, but stayed northeast, then veered a little bit the following day, which put us on a hot close reach that we carried most the way into St. Georges.

I would tell you this was a perfect passage, except we did have one big technical problem. This manifested itself on May 5, when I noticed water slurping out the siphon break on the engine's exhaust line (which is plumbed into a fitting on one of the galley sinks, which are directly over the engine). I knew immediately what this meant and instantly remembered that which I had conveniently but only temporarily forgotten--that we'd had trouble with the exhaust line filling up with water in rough conditions during the southbound passage in the fall. I had deluded myself into believing this had been a one-off problem, but now it seemed clear that it is chronic.

That the water had backed all the way up to the siphon break was definitely bad news, and for a while the mate and I fretted over whether any had gotten into the engine proper. After we drained the line, fortunately, we did manage to get the engine going again, and it seems no harm was done.

But now using the engine at sea involves a most tiresome procedure, as, to be safe, it is necessary to both shut off the raw-water intake and open the fiddly inaccessible drain plug at the bottom of the muffler (see photo above) when the engine isn't running so as to make sure no water is creeping in either its front or back end. The drain must also be closed before the engine is started, and inevitably some amount of exhaust water ends up in the bilge after it is shut down and must eventually be pumped out.

What's truly mysterious is that I've never had this problem before on Lunacy and sailed many, many miles offshore prior to last fall, often in rough conditions, without flooding the exhaust. I'm racking my brain trying to figure out what's different now... and hopefully will somehow succeed in permanently solving this conundrum.

After reaching Bermuda, we scored an excellent mooring courtesy of Bermuda Yacht Services right behind the old wreck of the bark Taifun, which lies at the east end of St. Georges harbor. Taifun, a 236-foot cargo vessel originally built in Scotland in 1894, was towed into St. Georges in 1920 after being partially dismasted in a gale and was sunk as a breakwater a year later. She has been a prominent feature in the harbor ever since.

After settling in and attending to chores, Mr. Lassen and I took some time to dinghy over to nearby Paget Island for a ramble, a reprise of a jaunt I made 21 years ago while crewing aboard the schooner Constellation. I have very fond memories of exploring the ruins of Fort Cunningham, including a vast network of underground tunnels, but alas, we found the old fort is now off limits to visitors.

Mr. Lassen is nothing if not determined. He wanted badly to break in, but fortunately I was able to restrain him.

I'll be returning to Bermuda late next week for a short cruise around the neighborhood (something I've never actually done before) and will then finish the delivery home to New England.

So stand by for all of that.

I was planning next to bore you with some details of Lunacy's recent passage from Puerto Rico to Bermuda, but the breaking news is far more compelling. And not just to sailors it seems. In my recent post on the America's Cup I noted that the general public only seems to follow the Cup when there are intriguing characters involved, but now, unfortunately, we've found something else guaranteed to pique their interest. No one seemed terribly interested in AC72s when they were just sailing fast, but now that someone's been killed on one, all the major media have perked up their ears.

Case in point: the most detailed description I can find right now of the tragic AC72 capsize that led to the death in San Francisco yesterday of Olympic medalist Andrew "Bart" Simpson is on Wired's website. According to them Artemis's big cat "simply broke apart under sail, folded, then flipped." Other reports note that conditions during the practice sail were moderate at the time, 20 knots or less, and that Simpson was trapped under the boat for several minutes.

Andrew Simpson aboard a Star, his weapon of choice in Olympic competition

What I immediately thought of when I heard the news (on NPR radio, no less) was all the other people who have died on sailboats out there on the Left Coast over the past year. Last April we first suffered the staggering loss of five crew off Low Speed Chase in the Farallones Race, followed immediately by the deaths of all four crew aboard Aegean in the Newport Ensenada Race. More recently, this past March, there was another incident I did not remark upon, where one crew was lost off a Columbia 32, Uncontrollable Urge, when it got caught in surf during the Islands Race between Newport Harbor and San Diego. That's now 11 fatalities over the past 13 months of West Coast racing.

And as a reminder that you needn't be a racer to lose your life aboard a sailboat, there was another sad news item, which didn't get played very widely, that caught my eye after I reached Bermuda aboard Lunacy. Luke Stimson, a 38-year-old Brit, was sailing doublehanded in the Pacific aboard a 38-foot boat with his pregnant fiancee, Laura Vernon, when he fell overboard last Saturday some 2,000 miles from Hawaii. She didn't know enough about managing the boat to even try and get back to him and could only watch the strobe on his lifejacket slowly disappear. She did know how to use the sat phone and prompted the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard to launch a 50-hour search that turned up nothing. She herself was airlifted off the boat by helicopter.

Luke Stimson with his boat, Jonetsu, which he was sailing from Osaka, Japan, to Southampton, Great Britain, when he was lost overboard

It's a scenario I worry about all the time, as I often go sailing with people who are relying solely on me to handle the boat.

What does all this mean? Safety, people! Sailing often seems very safe when you are doing it, and it usually is, but there is always an element of danger. Disaster can strike out of nowhere. You can't get complacent!

As for the America's Cup, Andrew Simpson and everyone who sails on those AC72s understands they are volatile and dangerous machines. That's why they all wear helmets and carry little pony air bottles, just in case. (Maybe now they'll be wearing full-on scuba gear instead.) Simpson's death, of course, does raise the question of whether AC72s are in fact too dangerous to race on. Sadly, if they are and we lose more lives, you can bet the public at large will keep paying attention to this summer's Cup competition.

(Photo up top is by Noah Berger)

ATTENTION EARTH PEOPLE! As I write this I am approaching Bermuda, blasting along but 70 miles out on what seems a perpetual close reach, due for a landing sometime in the wee hours tomorrow, of which more later. What I really want to spout off about right now are inflatable tenders. I was thinking about this as we were preparing to leave Puerto Rico, while regarding our neighbors on a 45-foot Bristol next door, who were about to depart for Annapolis. They had just stowed their RIB tender for the passage, and it took up all of their foredeck. I mean ALL of it! On Lunacy, meanwhile... well, you see that photo up there?

No, that is not a spare sail. That's is Lunacy's 9-foot inflatable tender, with a hard floor no less, rolled up and stuffed into the mainsail's empty bag.

See here. There's plenty of room for people to power-lounge and even handle sails on Lunacy's foredeck while underway. The stowed dinghy doesn't get in the way at all, and can even be used (as demonstrated by my stalwart mate Chas. "May I Cast Off Now?" Lassen) as a convenient backrest.

I realize, of course, that RIBs have all sorts of performance advantages, but ultimately I don't think their enormous popularity, at least as far as cruising sailors go, is quite rational. Their two humungous disadvantages--they are very heavy and take up a lot of space when stowed--outweigh their advantages by a long shot, IMHO, if you're cruising on any sort of small to mid-size sailboat.

The sail bag idea came to me over the winter. When I bought our new Apex inflatable last fall, the salesman swore to me that, unlike all other inflatables on the market, his could be easily stowed away in the fabric valise it was delivered in. But of course he was lying through his teeth. I realized as soon as I unpacked it that I'd need a hydraulic press to squish it down small enough to get it back in again. I was loathe to leave the new dinghy uncovered on deck, getting baked by the hot tropic sun while we were away from the boat, and was very pleased to find it fit inside the mainsail bag just perfectly.

In all other respects, by the by, I am totally digging the new dink. With the special long oars I made, it rows quite well. Also, because it's so much lighter than its predecessor, it planes much more easily with the outboard on.

Another America's Cup summer looms on the horizon, raising again that perennial insuperable question that so tortures racing sailors: how the heck do we get laypeople interested in our sport? These days the default answer is super-fast boats and TV-friendly race formats, which certainly are attractive to sailors, even slowpoke cruisers like myself. But this sort of excitement, I fear, flies over the heads of most people who are not inherently interested in sailing. A much more successful formula is to focus instead on personalities. Look back at those moments in America's Cup history that have truly bubbled up into the mass consciousness, and you'll note they have all revolved around interesting people--Dennis Conner fighting to redeem himself after losing the Cup in 1983; Ted Turner talking trash back in the 1970s; Sir Thomas Lipton playing the lovable loser throughout the early 20th century.

Sailors may have trouble comprehending this, but writers certainly don't. Which, I assume, is why Julian Guthrie, in her soon-to-be-released book on the most recent history of the Auld Mug, The Billionaire And The Mechanic, tries her darnedest to make a hero out of Larry Ellison. It says something of her ability as a writer that she almost succeeds in doing so.

 As the book's title suggests, Guthrie does try to hedge her bet. Co-starring as protagonist is Norbert Bajurin, who runs an auto radiator repair business and is commodore of the Golden Gate Yacht Club, which has served as Ellison's "front" club in his long campaign to win and retain the Cup.

According to the book's subtitle, Bajurin and Ellison in fact "teamed up" to win the Cup, but this is true only in a very literal sense. We're led to believe the two have developed some sort of meaningful bond, but by the end of the book we realize this is not the case. It is, as we suspected all along, merely an amicable marriage of convenience, and the only surprising fact I learned about Ellison's relationship with Bajurin and GGYC is that Ellison hasn't been as big a sugar-daddy for the club as I assumed. Evidently, the only financial largesse he has bestowed is to require all members of Oracle Racing to also become dues-paying members of GGYC.

Of course, the best America's Cup human-interest story we've seen in recent years was what went down last time. The titanic no-holds-barred battle between Ellison and Ernesto Bertarelli, played out in courtrooms, in yacht design offices, and--in the end, finally--on the water, should have piqued the general public's interest much more than it did. The problem was neither of the principal actors were sympathetic, nor very interesting. It would have helped if one, at least, was a bit bombastic and over-the-top, a la Ted Turner or even Donald Trump, but instead they play into more commonplace stereotypes. Bertarelli was born a spoiled rich guy; Ellison is a cold, ruthless self-made man. The general public knows who they are because they are very rich, but there are other rich people doing much more interesting, more scandalous things, as a quick perusal of any given issue of Vanity Fair will attest.

I was genuinely surprised, and disappointed, that Guthrie in her book doesn't do more with the Bertarelli-Ellison rivalry. I was looking forward to getting a lot more behind-the-scenes detail on the 33rd Cup campaign, which I personally always found fascinating. Instead I learned a lot more than I wanted to know about Ellison's personal development as a round-the-buoys sailor. The book starts in the right place, showing us how Ellison got interested in the America's Cup only after he got the pants scared off him in 1998 Sydney-Hobart Race. But by the time I got to what turns out to be the dramatic heart of the story--Ellison's victory (closely supervised by Russell Coutts) in the 2008 Cagliari Cup match-racing competition over the likes of Ben Ainslie and Jimmy Spithill--I was almost gagging.

At this point I had to ask myself: did Ellison actually commission the writing of this book? I googled the author and found this was unlikely. Guthrie is in fact a legitimate journalist and author, though she does seem to have a proclivity for sucking up to rich people. She is also very good at what she does. I genuinely got pulled into this book, in spite of my resistance, and read it to the end very willingly, not because I felt I had to. Guthrie does a good job of making Norbert Bajurin seem as interesting as he can be, and her portrait of Ellison, though laudatory in many places, is ultimately honest. You don't need to read too hard between the lines to see the man unvarnished--fundamentally insecure, lonely, competitive, extremely competent, and very determined.

I do sincerely hope this book does what it sets out to do, which is pique the public interest in Larry Ellison and the America's Cup well enough that people take more interest in this summer's competition than they normally would. Guthrie has a very good grasp of the mechanics of sailing and succeeds, I think, in making our sport both comprehensible and exciting to laypeople. Really the only technical error I found is that she repeatedly, and inaccurately, describes the 1998 Hobart storm as a "hurricane."

Sailors, in any event, especially those who follow the Cup, will undoubtedly find the book interesting. Larry Ellison may not be a hero exactly, but we are indebted to him. Not only did he save the America's Cup from Bertarelli's misguided attempt to monopolize it, but, as this book demonstrates, he has shown us a viable way forward, at least in one respect.

There's no getting around the fact that Cup competition is again, as it normally has been, dominated by very rich people. What's different now is that some players are no longer willing to sublimate themselves and their ambition to the governance of yacht clubs, as is required by the Deed of Gift that governs the Cup. Bertarelli showed us the dark side of this reality when he tried to hijack the Cup by controlling the clubs on both sides of the competition. Ellison's relationship with GGYC, by comparison, is much more wholesome. As the book makes clear, his adopting this blue-collar club saved it from the verge of collapse, and aside from borrowing some club stationary for certain bits of correspondence and hosting some bang-up parties, he has left it to its own devices. The sport of sailing would certainly benefit if more struggling clubs had such benefactors.

A larger question, of course, which Guthrie does not touch upon, is whether racing in these enormous hard-winged foiling catamarans that Ellison and Coutts have concocted is good for the Cup. I hope we will be treated this summer to a glorious spectacle of exciting one-of-a-kind racing. But I won't be surprised in the least if we are instead tortured with a litany of exotic boat failures and aborted competition. Either way, the America's Cup is sure to remain what it always has been--the world's weirdest and least predictable sporting event.

The Billionaire and the Mechanic: How Larry Ellison and a Car Mechanic Teamed Up to Win Sailing's Greatest Race, the America's Cup

Grove Press
304 pp.
Scheduled for release in June 2013

NOTE: I'm writing this in Fajardo, Puerto Rico, and will soon depart for Bermuda aboard my own slightly dented, non-foiling, rather boring, quite slow-by-comparison monohull. The blog will go dark for a while, but I'll fill you in on the passage as soon as I can.

Just figured something out. That Irish-owned Swan 48, Wolfhound, currently adrift twixt Bermuda and the W'Indies, is ex-Bella Luna, the same Swan 48 that my buddy, A.J. Smith, skippered through Tropical Storm Sean (see photo up top) during the ill-fated 2011 NARC Rally (the one in which Jan Anderson lost her life aboard the Island Packet 38 Triple Stars). Check out Bella Luna's brokerage listing, and you'll see she had a very comprehensive equipment list and some unique features, including a coffee-grinder in her midship cockpit, just like Wolfhound.

A.J., who has worked as a delivery skipper for some 25 years, had a hell of a trip on Bella Luna. He got within 80 miles of Bermuda, nearly lost the rig, fell off a wave so hard the speed log blew out of its through-hull fitting and flooded the boat, and in the end had to bail out and retreat to Charleston, South Carolina, to lick his wounds and put the boat back together.

 A.J. did ultimately succeed in delivering Bella Luna to Tortola, with another acquaintance of mine, Drake Roberts, along as crew. Drake has a very active YouTube channel, where he has posted several videos about Bella Luna, including this interview, where A.J. describes his battle with TS Sean.

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Here's another viddy, posted by A.J. on YouTube, that gives an idea of what it was like onboard.

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What's ironic here is that both A.J. and the boat's current owner got within spitting distance of Bermuda before making their decisions as to how to deal with their respective predicaments. I think it's fair to say that A.J.'s predicament was considerably more severe. Yet he managed to keep his shit together and not abandon ship. I shot him an e-mail about the boat being adrift, and he confirmed that it was in fact Bella Luna, adding, "That boat has bad karma imo."

Bad karma or not, I still say she is worth salvaging. I'm heading down to Puerto Rico next week to start sailing Lunacy back north for the season. I plan to keep my eyes peeled and am hoping maybe I'll get lucky.

WHEN IT CAME TIME to leave Dakar, I found we were, almost literally, hanging by a thread. I had anchored Crazy Horse, my Alberg 35 yawl, on about 100 feet of three-strand nylon rope, plus there was a 30-foot chain leader. On hauling back all the rope, which I had to do by hand, as we had no windlass, I discovered the rode, just a few feet back from the chain, had almost chafed right through. Two strands were severed entirely; the third was cut in half.

On making this discovery I was, of course, both shocked and relieved. Something down there clearly liked to chew on rope, and I reckoned in only a few more hours it would have been done chewing on mine. At best we would have lost the anchor; at worst we might have lost the boat. I also couldn't help laughing: it seemed appropriate that we should escape the city by the skin of our teeth.

 The run down to Banjul, at the mouth of the Gambia River, was just 90 miles. Geographically this was a very short passage, but to me it seemed a quantum leap. In my mind, the distance between Dakar, where I felt incessantly anxious and ignorant, and Banjul, where I hoped I could again at least pretend I knew what I was doing, was very large.

We left late in the afternoon so as to arrive in daylight the next morning. We were sailing just 15 miles offshore, give or take, and through most of the night were surrounded by local fishing pirogues. Most, fortunately, were showing lights of some kind. These bobbed and weaved over the black ocean swells, scribbling short tendrils of yellow and white across the water. None of the pirogues were showing red and green side-lights, so it took some vigilance to avoid them. I was up all night monitoring their movements--which were erratic, to say the least--and by daybreak was fuzzy-headed from lack of sleep.

By 0900 hours we were just 10 miles from Banjul, heading up the fairway into the river through a maze of pirogues and unmarked drift nets. Perversely, I was determined to sail up to town, though both the wind and tide were against us, and it wasn't until mid-afternoon that we were finally in the river mouth proper with Banjul directly abeam of us. It was a drab low-lying town, a thin scrum of nondescript brown and grey buildings punctuated with an occasional minaret. At last I relented, started the engine, stowed the sails, and turned toward the harbor. Soon I noticed a group of men standing on a large wharf, waving and shouting at me to come land the boat there.

Thanks to our experience in Dakar, I was wise to this game. Rule No. 1 when cruising in West Africa: never ever come alongside anywhere. I cheerfully waved back at the men, then trotted up to the bow to get the anchor ready to launch.

Aha! I had forgotten about the anchor rode. I whipped my rigging knife from my pocket and at once started cutting out the damaged section. It was a very sharp knife, with a serrated edge, and in my haste I slashed open my thumb on my right hand. Cursing, I ignored the wound. I finished trimming the rode, then worked feverishly to re-splice the rope around its thimble while simultaneously waving some more at the men on shore. By the time I was done, the foredeck was covered with vivid red parabolas of blood.

Sunken wreck in the harbor at Banjul

We anchored amid a collection of half-submerged wrecks that jutted up out of the oily water at calamitous angles. Though I was by now thoroughly exhausted, I quickly taped up my thumb, inflated the dinghy, hoisted it overboard, mounted my trusty Yamaha outboard on its transom, and then motored to shore to confront the authorities, leaving Carie, my only crew member, to mind the mothership.

The men who had been waving at me now gathered at the small dock where I landed.

"No, thank you," I told them. "I do not need any guides."

"Fine fine," they insisted. "We will help you anyway."

With entourage in tow, I wandered a short distance inland and soon found a guard shack with a guard inside. He immediately phoned the immigration officer, who presently arrived wearing a small cap like a yarmulke and a long white robe.

"I have come from prayers," he announced. "I do not normally work on Fridays."

Of course, I could see where this was going.

The immigration man led me to his office, which was in a small trailer nearby, and handed me forms to fill out. He inspected our visas, stamped our two passports, and then proclaimed: "Come! We must inspect your yacht."

We stopped at another trailer to pick up the customs officer, who was wearing a trim blue uniform and looked rather pleased when he learned there was a yacht to inspect. As we clambered down into the dinghy and headed out to Crazy Horse, the two men explained it was customary to present gifts to government officials who worked on Fridays.

As soon as we arrived at the boat Carie offered to make our guests tea, but they declined and at once started roaming the deck. I could tell from their eyes that what they were looking for were things that might make good gifts.

"What has happened here?" asked the immigration officer, eyebrows raised as he pointed at the blood stains on the foredeck.

I held up my bandaged thumb and smiled sheepishly. "I had a little trouble anchoring," I explained.

The customs officer, who seemed to know a bit about boats, looked mildly disturbed. "Please," he said. "Can you give us a tour of the cabin?"

I led the men below and could tell they were immediately disheartened when they saw the boat's shabby interior. They poked into a few lockers and cabinets in a desultory manner, finding mostly rusty tools and unmarked cans of food. They did perk up briefly when they came upon my portable Sony tape player, which was lying in a pile of dirty laundry on the V-berth up forward.

"This is nice," said the immigration officer as he carefully extracted the tape player from a tangle of odiferous underwear. "Can you plug it into a wall?"

"Yes, of course," I answered and cheerfully produced the AC power cord. "It runs on batteries or on 110-volt power."

The officer carefully inspected the cord, saw that the tape player would not plug into his wall, and set it aside with a sigh of disappointment.

"You have passed inspection," announced the customs officer, who now seemed bored. "Can you please take us back now?"

We quickly climbed back into the dinghy and were headed back to shore when the outboard suddenly seized up and stopped running. I put the engine in neutral and at once restarted it, but it stalled again as soon as I popped it back into gear.

"It is the head-rope," said the customs officer, his voice dripping with disdain. "The head-rope is in the propeller."

Sure enough, I saw I had forgotten to pull the dinghy's painter all the way inboard before setting off from the boat. It had streamed aft under the dinghy and was now so firmly caught in the prop I could not raise the engine to free it.

"Not to worry," I announced. "I can row us in." I pulled out the oars, awkwardly rearranged my guests on the dinghy's sponsons, parked myself on the thwart seat, and started pulling hard for the dock. The river current was strong, however, and there wasn't room enough to row properly, so we made very little progress.

"Here, give those to us," said the customs officer. And the men took the oars from me and began paddling toward shore with grim looks on their faces. By now it was clear they were wondering how I ever managed to pilot my grubby little sailboat all the way from America to Africa.

My entourage, which still waited patiently on shore, murmured in wonder when they saw me sitting idle while two government officials labored to paddle my dinghy back to the dock. As soon as we landed, the men quickly clambered up the ladder and ran off for their trailers without saying a word to me. The crowd then watched expectantly as I spent several minutes fishing around the outboard's propeller with my uninjured hand.

Eventually, I managed to free the painter. I then restarted the engine and motored slowly back out to Crazy Horse. The sun by now was hanging low in the sky, and the water had turned the color of bronze. The dark silhouettes of the several wrecks in the harbor seemed much more ominous than before. I was bleary-eyed with fatigue, my thumb throbbed with pain, but still I felt triumphant and proud.

BANJUL, WHICH IS THE CAPITAL of Gambia, is not a very salubrious place. Situated on a low island, surrounded by a vast mangrove swamp, it seemed to me little more than an open sewer festooned with corrugated tin, palm fronds, and decayed colonial architecture. Historically, it has suffered unduly from flooding and pestilence. Case in point: the neighborhood off which we anchored on arrival, the most ramshackle part of the whole ramshackle town, was named Half Die, after a cholera epidemic that once wiped out half the city's population.

Banjul skyline

No one who visits Gambia by yacht stays here for very long. Instead they wend their way through the serpentine maze of pencil-thin mangrove creeks west of the city and arrive at a much larger creek, where there is a well-protected anchorage just below a low bridge over which runs the only road into town. The cruising sailors who come here call this place Oyster Creek; the locals call it Denton Bridge.

Unlike the anchorage off CVD, the yacht club in Dakar, where we had been warned never to leave anything on deck lest it be stolen, Oyster Creek was very secure. Whoever controlled Denton Bridge controlled the fate of the nation's capital, and it was therefore heavily guarded. Just a short distance from the anchorage on the far side of the road leading up to the bridge there was a large police station. On the road itself overlooking the anchorage was a military checkpoint, which was manned 24/7.

Just below the checkpoint, off the west end of the bridge, was a small beach covered with makeshift huts dressed with hand-lettered signs: Art Center, Warrior Sportfishing, Pleasure Boats For Hire. The huts were mostly empty and idle, but there was one very active business here, Baba's Harbour Cafe, which was deployed around a more substantial steel shipping container.

The beach at Oyster Creek

Local yacht moored at Oyster Creek. Owned by a British ex-pat, it was made over from an old fishing pirogue

Baba was a serious young man, a devout Muslim who nonetheless was happy to serve food and large quantities of beer to the visiting sailors, European ex-pats, and less devout locals who gathered here. He worked hard and kept his business neat and tidy. Out front there was a small verandah, diplomatically decorated with a large official portrait of Gambia's new president. Behind the container, which housed the cafe's crude kitchen, was a larger area with several more tables and chairs. Sprouting from the top was a wind generator, the cafe's sole course of electrical power, which Baba had salvaged from an abandoned sailboat.

Baba outside his place of business

Baba (in foreground, to the left) in his kitchen, hanging with the Denton Bridge crew

CVD might be the logistical focal point of West African cruising--the best place to haul out, order in parts, and get work done on your boat--but Oyster Creek was by far the best place to just plain hang out. Indeed, it was so comfortable, we soon learned that some of our fellow cruisers had been here for years. The reigning king and queen, Kase and Anika, a middle-aged Dutch couple living aboard a well-maintained steel boat, were now into their third winter. They occasionally wandered upriver, or down to the nearby Sine-Saloun in southern Senegal, and sometimes left the boat to fly back to Europe, but they considered the creek home and were not shy about singing its praises.

Most of the others were more transient. There was a French family, all of whom had malaria, who had roamed both the Gambia and the Sine-Saloun ever since the previous winter and planned soon to leave for Brazil. There was a dour German singlehander who stopped in briefly most years on his way to the Grenadines. There was an Englishman, a retired electrician with two young Swedes as crew, sailing an amazing miniature wooden barkentine, all finished bright, who had no idea what he was doing next.

There was also another younger couple--Marco, from Spain, and Nadine, from France--who lived on two separate boats and were entering their second winter on the creek. Carie and I had them for dinner one evening aboard Crazy Horse, and I was amazed to learn that Nadine, in spite of having been in Gambia for over 15 months, had never even left the anchorage to cruise upriver.

"I do not like to sail in places where the water is not clear," she explained.

"Why then did you ever come to West Africa?" I asked.

"This creek, just here," she said. "I had heard about it." She sipped at her wine and took a long, languid pull on a cigarette. She pointed toward a gorgeous purple heron that was creeping along the creek bank with its neck arched, hunting for fish. "It is convenient, but also very magical, don't you think?"

I did think so, but I was also determined to go upriver. Carie and I spent a week decompressing, recovering from the intensity of Dakar, drinking beer and chatting with our new friends at Baba's, and then we prepared to move on.

In terms of provisioning, Oyster Creek was reasonably well situated. On the east side of the anchorage, outside a mysterious facility called the Lyefish Factory, there was an open standpipe with a tap from which flowed clean fresh water. Nearby there was a gas station fronting the road just off the bridge, where it was easy to land a dinghy and load jerry jugs of fuel. Just down the road west of the bridge, in the sprawling suburbs of Bakau and Serekunda, there were surprisingly modern supermarkets. We took two separate trips by bush taxi, carrying maximum baggage each time, and managed to bring back enough food and drink to last six weeks or more.

Marketplace in Serekunda

On the third trip we played tourist and spent a morning on the beach at Fajara. As beaches go, it was quite fabulous, a broad strand studded with majestic palm trees and fancy hotels. For most tubabs who visited Gambia ("tubab" is what they called white people here) this was the only part of the country they ever saw. It was particularly popular with sun-worshipping Germans, Swedes, and the British, of course, all of whom came in droves each winter to lie on the flawless white sand wearing as little clothing as possible.

Such a large concentration of tubabs was, of course, highly attractive to touts, and this was the only place in Gambia we visited where their hard sell was nearly as ferocious as it had been in Dakar. They roamed the beach like locusts, pitching cold drinks, food, marijuana, souvenirs, package tours, and hard-luck stories to any and all persons with pale complexions. The most exalted members of this tribe were the ambitious Don Juans, known as bumpsters, who relentlessly romanced single females in hopes of forging a relationship that might somehow take them to Europe.

On the beaches west of Banjul, a prime destination for European sun-worshippers

A bumpster at work

We had heard about bumpsters at Baba's, from a young expatriate Dutchman, a friend of Kase and Anika's, who had recently lost his German girlfriend to one. He of course despised them, but the local Gambians who also hung out at Denton Bridge obviously admired them. Later, after we traveled inland, we learned how the lure of bumpsterism had ruined many rural families. Parents, we were told, would often sell their cattle to raise money to send a favored son to the beaches outside Banjul. Usually they returned empty-handed, with a larger wardrobe and perhaps a watch, but with no hope of otherwise improving their circumstances.

We had lunch on the beach, fending off touts all the while, and then went to Serekunda to see the Sacred Crocodile Pool. Baba and several of his friends had insisted we should go there. "You must see," they urged me. "There you will find your toma." I asked for, but did not receive, an intelligible explanation of what this meant. I gathered it was a Mandinka word and translated to something like "soulmate."

The pool itself certainly did not look sacred. "Murky pond" would be a more apt description. Next to it was a cinderblock hut, painted pale green, with a big sign and a man inside wearing sunglasses and a bright red Chicago Bulls t-shirt. Inside the pool was a group of about a dozen Nile crocodiles, a species indigenous to Gambia, that were so lethargic and inactive I thought at first they might be fiberglass statues.

A sacred crocodile catching some rays

"I have come to meet my toma," I announced after we paid the entrance fee.

The thin man took off his sunglasses and studied me carefully. "What is your name?" he asked. I told him, and he nodded gravely: "Yes, your toma is here."

He led us down to the far side of the pool, where he crouched next to a very large croc that lay motionless in the dried-out mud. "This is the oldest, biggest crocodile," he said. "He is very tame. You can pat his head, give him a big slap on the back, even shake his hand. He will not mind."

I did these things, and the crocodile did not flinch or in any way acknowledge my existence.

The thin man, now squinting in the sunlight, slipped his sunglasses on again and gave me a broad smile. "His name is Charlie," he told me. "Just like you."

AT THE U.S. EMBASSY in Dakar, where I had renewed my passport, they had urged me to check in at the embassy in Gambia before sailing up the river. I duly presented myself and was ushered into a small office inhabited by a bald man with a rather elegantly trimmed mustache who told me that, due to the current political situation, American citizens were being asked not to travel inland.

I was somewhat familiar with the political situation. I knew that Gambia, the smallest country in Africa, normally had a stable government, but that just two years earlier President Dawda Jawara, who had ruled for three decades, had been overthrown in a military coup led by Yahya Jammeh, commander of the presidential bodyguard. Jammeh, so I'd heard at Baba's, had launched his coup shortly after receiving special military training in the United States. He had also been confirmed as president in an election held a few months before our arrival; another parliamentary election was due to be held soon. What I didn't know was that very recently there had been another coup attempt upriver at a town called Farafenni. Evidently, eight rebels with pistols had stormed the police barracks there; five had been killed, and three others had escaped.

Having once lived in a bad neighborhood in Brooklyn, this didn't sound too serious to me. I asked the man with the mustache if I was in fact prohibited from sailing upriver, and he said no, he was just warning me not to go. I told him I thought I'd go anyway.

We left on a Saturday. After carefully picking our way through the narrow creeks southwest of the city, we emerged in the river proper and started beating our way west into a stiff 20-knot breeze. We had the tide behind us, and the thick brown water had been kicked up into a short, steep chop. The river here seemed almost as wide as the sky overhead, with only a hint of a thin grey shoreline in the distance. The sky itself was overcast, and there were no other vessels in sight.

By late afternoon the sun was out, the wind had died, and we had reached James Island, a lonely low-lying lump covered with ruined fortifications and baobab trees. For centuries, before Banjul (originally called Bathurst) was established in 1816, this had been a key focal point in the endless European conflicts that punctuated the West African slave trade. Since first being discovered by the Portuguese, this tiny islet had belonged variously to Polish Lithuanians, the Dutch, and primarily the French and British, who quarreled persistently over control of trade on the river. Though the island was quite indefensible, as it has no freshwater supply, it was the British who ultimately prevailed and eventually established the Gambia as a distinct political entity, a narrow sliver of English sovereignty jammed up the bunghole of French West Africa.

We anchored Crazy Horse off the island's west end (see photo up top) and went ashore shortly before sunset. It was the first time since we'd arrived in West Africa nearly a month earlier that we had been anchored out anywhere all on our own, and the feeling of serenity, of at last being self-contained again, was sublime. We silently wandered the empty islet for a while, then adjourned to the boat, where I sat alone in the cockpit for some time, feeling palpably relieved as I watched the derelict silhouette of this Gibraltar of the Gambia fade into the plush-pile night sky as the first stars pricked their way into existence.

18th century chart of James Island

Contemporary view from James Island

Moving east from James Island in the days that followed, we found sailing the river to be frustrating. Each morning we waited patiently for the incoming tide, then hoisted sail and tried hard to make progress inland. The wind, however, was maddeningly fickle, and usually by lunch we had given up and had switched the engine on. Here on the Gambia's lower reaches, the scenery was also fairly monotonous. The river was still quite wide, and all along its banks there was nothing but low-lying thickets of mangrove.

Day after day we ended up having to motor up the lower part of the river

Antique chart of the Gambia

At the end of the day, or as soon as the tide turned, we anchored off one of the villages on shore, or in one of the capillary creeks, called bolons, that sprouted off the main artery of the river. Visiting the villages was fascinating, but exhausting. As soon as we landed in the dinghy a cry of "Tubab! Tubab!" would split the air, and in an instant we were lost in a horde of children, all of them clinging to us like we were life-sized Sesame Street characters. Soon we were joined by adults, who were also egregiously hospitable. We'd be given a grand tour of the village, our crowd of hosts growing ever larger as the tour progressed, and were introduced to the village elders and other important persons, and invariably were asked if we'd like to drink china green tea.

Here I am trying to organize a group of children on shore

More children, come out to visit us in a pair of pirogues

Mother with child. Occasionally they'd ask if we would like to take one home with us

Carie negotiates a spindly village pier

This always proved to be rather time-consuming. First a child was sent to buy some tea (often we were asked to provide the money for this) and meanwhile a fire was built. The fuel was always raw charcoal, which, we had learned, was the main power source throughout rural West Africa. Once the fire was hot enough, a small tin kettle of water was boiled, the tea was steeped in it for many minutes, then was strained out, a great deal of sugar was added, and the resulting beverage was poured back and forth, back and forth, between kettle and cup, from a great height, for an amazingly long period of time. This, we were told, was the most important part of the process, as it brought out the full flavor of the tea.

Eventually, two small demitasses of tea were served. We were always served first, as we were the guests, and then the process was repeated, with much pouring back and forth, until everyone in attendance had been served, or until the tea leaves had entirely lost their potency. In most cases, we learned it was impossible to visit a village without spending at least two or three hours socializing and drinking tea on shore.

Anchoring in the bolons, on the other hand, was an exercise in intense isolation. The entrances were normally narrow, with a shoal at the creek mouth so that we had to fret about running aground. Once over the bar, however, it seemed we had entered an alternate reality. The soundings would suddenly increase again, so much so we sometimes had to hunt for spots shallow enough to anchor, and the absence of humans, the complete lack of any evidence of their existence, became a nearly tangible phantasm, a non-presence that haunted the dense walls of mangrove lining the creek bank.

Blue-breasted kingfisher. Gambia is a Mecca for serious bird-watchers. One of my biggest mistakes was not bringing a proper guide book

A goliath heron shows off its finery

Senegal green parrots

A flight of egrets

What there were, instead of people, were birds. So many, and of such variety and color, that it seemed we were watching tropical fish upside down in the air.

Picture this: the most intense dinghy ride of my life. We had anchored in a place called Mandori Creek, some distance west of a village called Tendaba. The sun was just beginning to set, the colors around us growing richer with each passing moment, and from the impenetrable growth on shore a finely blended medley of hoots, squawks, and trills rose up around us. As soon as the hook was set, I jumped in the dink, yanked on the outboard's starting cord, and was away up the creek in a mad rush of internal combustion. The engine carved a long, clean scar on the creek's shiny copper surface, its roar flushing great flights of birds as I passed. A fleet of white egrets, an exaltation of brilliant blue kingfishers, frenzied masses of emerald green parrots, screeching like a nation of cranky old ladies as they swirled in clouds around my head.

On and on for a mile or more, until I reached a spot where suddenly the tall mangrove forest was broken by an open glade of bright green turf. Startled by this unexpected variation in landscape, I at once throttled down and stopped the boat, my cloud of parrots skittering away across the creek like brilliant marbles dumped loose on a plate of glass. The glade was studded with naked dead trees and in their midst stood one burning dead tree with fingers of red flame flickering along its trunk and lower branches. I sat for several minutes, studying this apocalyptic scene, then turned back down the creek and puttered slowly back to Crazy Horse through the gathering darkness.

What, I wondered, had started this fire? Was it spontaneous combustion? A lightning strike? Some mysterious form of Eco-Voodooism?

Crazy Horse at anchor in a creek

That night, as on any night when we anchored in a creek, insects descended en masse and we had to shroud every aperture with netting to keep them out. After dinner, as we lay in our berths, we could hear bats banging off the standing rigging as they wheeled about trying to eat them.

Hours later Carie shook me awake from a deep sleep. "There is a light," she said. "Someone is coming." This simple statement, affirming that we were now suddenly not alone in what seemed the loneliest of places, in the middle of the night no less, instantly set my spine a-tingling.

I quickly pulled on a pair of shorts and pushed my way through the companionway netting into the cockpit. Downstream in the inky darkness I could see a thick yellow beam of light poking at the mangroves on either side of the creek. I jumped below, turned on the masthead light and all the cabin lights, then came back out into the cockpit with a flashlight, which I waved back and forth through the black void surrounding the boat. Whoever was down there, I wanted them to know that I knew they were there.

The light downstream suddenly went out, then after many minutes suddenly came on again. A man in a small pirogue with a lantern strapped to his head calmly paddled past Crazy Horse without a word, resolutely ignoring our presence. I stood watching for a while until the light disappeared around the next turn in the creek. Then I went below, shut off everything but the masthead light, and lay in my berth unable to sleep.

Who was this guy? What was he doing here in the middle of the nowhere in the middle of the night? Was he a threat?

Then finally it dawned on me: he was going to the burning tree, to collect charcoal. He was the one who set the fire.

NOTE: This is part 2 of a series. Be sure to check out part 1: South To Senegal.

MY LAST POST about that abandoned Swan 48 floating around south of Bermuda has created some buzz it seems and numerous people are now making noises about retrieving it. To help inform and inspire would-be salvagers, I thought I should share some of what I know about these boats. I've sailed them back and forth between New England and Caribbean several times and have also raced a bit on them—around the cans and in one Bermuda Race.

You know, of course, that Nautor Swan of Finland, founded originally by Pekka Koskenkyla, has an excellent reputation. They've been building high-end production fiberglass sailboats for over 40 years, most of them what I'd call cruiser-racers. Most older Swans have sleek, modern hull forms, according to the era in which they were built, but they are also a bit heavy, as they are very solidly constructed with teak decks and lots of heavy solid-teak interior joinery.

The traditional Swan zeitgeist ended in 1998 when Nautor was acquired by the Italian fashion magnate Leonardo Ferragamo. Since then new Swans have been either luxury performance cruisers 70 feet and longer or smaller (45 feet or less) flat-out racing yachts. The German Frers-designed Swan 48, which was first introduced in 1995 and was discontinued in 2004 after a production run of 57 hulls, is one of the last of the old breed.

Unlike most (but not all) of the pre-Ferragamo Swans, the 48 was available either as a "regatta" racer or as a straight "cruiser-racer." The regatta version features a deeper high-aspect keel (9'6" as opposed to 7'11") and a taller 7/8 rig (1,241 sq. ft.) and is almost 6,000 pounds lighter, thanks mostly to a simplified interior that is still, by modern race-boat standards, a bit heavy on the teak. The cruiser-racer was offered with two optional sail plans--a mildly fractional (15/16) rig (1,168 sq. ft.) and a straight masthead rig (1,142 sq. ft.). It also features a fold-down transom with built-in steps. Both boats have the same basic construction. The hull is solid laminate composed mostly of unidirectional hybrid glass/aramid fibers set in polyester resin. The deck is also a glass/aramid laminate set in polyester over a Divinycell foam core with high-density core inserted under deck fittings. The teak deak overlay is glued and vacuum-bagged in place with no penetrating fasteners.

As with many pre-Ferragamo Swans, the 48's deck layout is somewhat idiosyncratic. The cockpit is split with two separate companionways and two separate working areas. The midship cockpit, little more than a shallow footwell, has all halyards, reefing lines, spinnaker–pole controls, etc.--a total of 11 lines--led through organizers and clutches to a single pair of winches on either side of the main companionway, making this a busy area. All sheets (as well as a pair of running backstays) are led to the aft cockpit. The mainsheet is double-ended and can be controlled either from the aft companionway or from the helm, which is a handy feature. Ultimately, however, because the controls are so spread out, this is not an easy boat for one or even two people to sail. Things work best when there are at least three people on deck.

The aft stateroom on the whole is very functional. The companionway ladder can be removed when you want more space and some privacy

The most salient feature of the interior layout--aside from the superb joinery work--is the aft stateroom. The centerline aft double berth is one of the best I've seen, for it is fully enclosed by furniture on both sides and can be easily divided into two comfortable sea berths. The aft companionway stairs, which land just forward of the double berth, consist of a light ladder with stainless steel rails and small teak treads. This can easily be removed and stowed away, thus isolating the stateroom from the deck when privacy is wanted. In rough weather, however, as I learned during fall deliveries aboard different Swan 48s, the aft ladder becomes the primary route to the deck, as the main companionway must be kept shut to keep out spray and boarding waves. In such conditions the aft ladder can be hard to negotiate, especially when the boat is well heeled. And, of course, any pretense of privacy for aft-cabin occupants must be abandoned.

The saloon looking forward. The chairs at the dinette table can be pinned in place when sailing

 The saloon looking aft. The nav station is to starboard, the galley to port in the corridor running to the aft stateroom

Further forward there are two optional layouts--one featuring a single forward stateroom with a V-berth, the other featuring smaller twin staterooms, each with two single bunk berths. The latter arrangement is perfect for families with large clumps of kids or for people who like to cruise with lots of friends. Given the deck layout, either sort of crew would be an asset on a boat like this.

Twin bunk berths in one of twin forward staterooms. You can sleep four comfortably up here

The electrical system has parallel 12- and 24-volt systems in the European style, each fed by its own alternator. The 12-volt bank is dedicated solely to engine cranking and small converters are used to step down the 24-volt current for other devices requiring a 12-volt feed. Several of these converters are located outboard down low under the nav seat. Thanks to the boat's shallow bilges, they can be quickly drowned if the boat takes on water while heeled, as I discovered on one of my deliveries. The converters can be easily moved, however, and in most other respects the systems installations are impeccable.

The best thing about any Swan 48 is sailing it. The high-aspect balanced spade rudder is extremely responsive, but not at all twitchy, and the boat balances well given its rakish underwater foils. Though not terribly light, the hull is fast, with a long waterline, a narrow waterline beam, and minimal wetted surface area. Light-air performance is quite respectable, so you need not turn on the engine every time the wind speed drops below 10 knots. In moderate to strong winds the boat is just plain exciting to sail. The first 200-mile days I ever sailed were on a Swan 48 (we had three in a row between Bermuda and the British Virgin Islands), during which we maintained a steady 9 knots of boat speed with long spikes to 13 and 14 knots when surfing.

The other best thing about owning any Swan is that they hold their value extremely well. They are not cheap to buy, but used Swans in very good condition can often be sold for nearly as much as they cost new.

Specifications (Cruiser-racer version)

LOA 48'8"

LWL 41'0"

Beam 14'2"

Draft 7"11"

Ballast 12,125 lbs.

Displacement 30,900 lbs.

Sail area (100% foretriangle)

-Masthead rig 1,142 sq.ft.

-Fractional rig 1,168 sq.ft.

Fuel 79 gal.

Water 114 gal.

D/L ratio 200

SA/D ratio

-Masthead rig 18.52

-Fractional rig 18.94

Comfort ratio 32

Capsize screening 1.80

Nominal hull speed 10.2 knots

Typical asking prices $400K -$600K

NOTE: If you're not up for the salvage job and want to buy a Swan 48 instead, I recommend you check out my old friend Avocation (see photo up top). She's for sale right now, at a very nice asking price (lowest on Yachtworld as I write this), and is very well sorted. Well maintained with lots of upgrades. Purchase price includes delivery to anywhere on the East Coast, the Caribbean, or Western Europe.

There she is folks... yours for the taking. This empty Frers-designed Swan 48 of mid-90s vintage, worth I'd guess $500K or more, was adrift approx. 800 southeast of Bermuda as of this past weekend. She was abandoned just north of Bermuda by her Irish owner, Alan McGettigan, and three crew back in February. At the time it was believed she may have sunk soon afterwards, but one Martin Butler recently snapped this image and sent it to the Irish sailing comic Afloat, which is running an account of the boat's abandonment in its current issue.

 What the heck were those guys doing out there in February? Twas a race delivery... believe it or not. McGettigan bought the boat in Connecticut last fall, didn't get it put together as fast as he hoped, thanks to Hurricane Sandy, but was intent on racing it in the Caribbean 600. So he and three buddies from Ireland jumped aboard and departed Westbrook bound for Bermuda on February 2.

McGettigan's passage chart. He and his crew initially had strong easterlies, forcing them south and a little west, then caught westerlies out to the Onion Patch

What went wrong was predictable enough. It was exactly the sort of stuff that usually happens when you're shaking down a boat you've just bought. A newly installed inverter/charger didn't work properly and the engine got gunked up with dirty fuel. So there they were 70 miles or so north of Bermie with no house power and no engine and a handheld VHF with a rundown battery. Their only working nav equipment was an iPad that was down to 15 percent of its battery life. Then the weather got rough again, and they suffered two knockdowns.

What would YOU do in these circumstances???

McGettigan and crew ignited their EPIRB, which was not registered, at 1530 hours on February 8. Fortunately for them, they were located that night by a US Coast Guard C130 out of Norfolk, the crew of which took this photo of the boat through a FLIR camera

The crew evacuated the boat on February 9 and boarded M/V Tetien Trader, which had diverted 80 miles to their position. This photo was snapped by McGettigan from the freighter's deck as his boat lay alongside. You'll note some cockpit fixtures got banged up a bit

McGettigan snapped this last photo of his boat as Tetien Trader steamed away from her

I could launch into my routine tirade about unnecessary rescue calls, but I'll spare you that. (You'll find many such opinions in this forum discussion, if you do care to moralize.) Fact is, I can't promise I wouldn't have done the same thing in this situation, though I do like to think I would somehow have gotten into Bermuda unassisted.

The one object lesson learned I will offer is this: always carry basic back-up electronics that can run off simple double-A batteries. (Also, carry lots of double-A batts!) Top two items in my ditch bag are a handheld GPS and VHF, both of which can run on double-As.

In case you are interested in the yacht, I am very familiar with Swan 48s. Great boats! Well worth salvaging. Looks like this one snapped its headstay (presumably it was compromised somehow while lying alongside the freighter), but otherwise it seems to be in pretty good shape.

Also, remind me to tell you sometime about the just-purchased Swan 48 I delivered down to the W'Indies several years ago for Antigua Race Week. We had all sorts of problems on that passage!