This year has seen ocean temperature in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans set record levels with select areas reaching 100 degrees Fahrenheit. This increase is causing flora and fauna in both oceans to change traditional patterns and none more so that the great bloom of  Sargassum in the Atlantic. Up until 2011, the Atlantic Sargassum bloom was mainly confined to the Sargasso Sea in the middle of the North Atlantic. Small patches of the weed would break off and float into the trade winds that blew them west. But these were occasional patches and few and far between Starting…

As we have reported over the last month, West Marine, America’s largest marine chandlery, filed a Chapter 11 Bankruptcy that will allow it to work with its creditors to reduce debt and to reorganize the company’s finances. How did the company get into this dire situation. Craig Lewisk, editor and publisher of Scuttlebutt Sailing News, is a sailboat owner and a long-time customer at his local West Marine. Here’s his amusing and revealing take on issues that are driving the company toward failure.  I insert a thru-hull plug into my Alerion 28 hull when removing the speed/depth transducer, which is…

On July 20, seven days into his second Great Loop speed record attempt, Robert Youens and his co-skipper Steven Hernden called it quits. They departed from Chickasaw, Alabama on July 13 and were making record time, often covering 400 miles a day in their single engine aluminum Jon boat In the first three days, they covered 1,300 miles of the 6,000 they would have to tick off to complete America’s Great Loop. By the fourth, they had outrun the RV that was trailing them with beds for the night and spare fuel. Youens is no stranger to the Great Loop.…

Last Saturday night at about 10:25 pm, a 22-foot Bayliner bow rider with 14 people aboard capsized near Liberty Island in New York Harbor. All passengers were tossed into the water and two tragically lost their lives. The boat operator, Manuel Hernandez, 46, has been arrested and charged with 13 counts of reckless endangerment.  The Coast Guard is working with the NYPD to “determine whether the boat in question was engaged in an illegal charter operation.” When the capsize happened, a nearby boater called 911 and rescue teams from New Jersey and New York were quickly on the scene and…

Italian builder Invictus recently launched their new ST550 which is now the builder’s flagship. Designed by Christian Grande, the new Invictus has the brand’s unique “half-reverse” bow and the styling and aggressive lines that are unmistakably Invictus. The ST550 emphasizes living space –the S in ST stands for “space”– and being close to nature with a huge sunning lounge and sitting area forward and a large cockpit with sun beds and sofas on the aft deck that can be expanded with the fold down platforms on both sides. The side decks from cockpit to bow have high bulwarks that will…

In 1918, the USS Cyclops enroute across the Atlantic disappeared in the region south of Bermuda now known as the Bermuda Triangle without a trace. Her crew were all lost with no survivors and no bodies to recover. In 1921, the sailing ship the Carroll A. Deeriing, a five-masted trading schooner, made a voyage through the triangle from Barbados to Bermuda.  Reported missing, the ship was later found on a reef with all crew missing. All that remained aboard were three cats. In 1945, a flight of Navy  bombers known as Flight 19 took off from Ft. Lauderdale for Europe,…