Cruising Life

Highfield Launches New 360 GT Console RIB

By Peter Janssen on March 9, 2022 Boat Reviews, Cruising Life

The new sturdy and lightweight Highfield Classic 360 RIB with a GT Console would make a great companion on the Great Loop, your next cruising vacation, or just for running around your favorite harbor or anchorage. The new Highfield has an aluminum hull, with a 15-degree deadrise and a full-length keelguard for protection if you’re running up on a beach or sandbar. The boat itself is just 11’ 10” long, and weighs 285 pounds. Highfield recommends that you use a 25-hp outboard on the 360GT (although you can go up to a 30-hp model). A 25-hp Yamaha weighs 126 pounds,…

Shackleton’s Endurance Found in Antarctic

By Peter Janssen on March 9, 2022 Cruising Life

Here’s a terrific and extremely thorough story from the BBC about how a team of British researchers found the wreck of Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance, a 144-foot, three-masted wooden ship that was trapped in the ice in Antarctica and sank in 1915, stranding Shackleton and his 27-man crew. Here’s the complete story, with pictures, video and a map: Scientists have found and filmed one of the greatest ever undiscovered shipwrecks 107 years after it sank. The Endurance, the lost vessel of Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, was found at the weekend at the bottom of the Weddell Sea. The ship was…

Winners of Underwater Photographer of Year Awards

By Peter Janssen on March 8, 2022 Cruising Life

The Underwater Photographer of the Year organization just announced the winners of its annual worldwide competition. The British organization started the awards seven years ago. In 2020, before the pandemic, the competition drew 5,500 pictures from 500 photographers around the world. This year, because of travel restrictions, the entries were down a bit, with 4,200 images from photographers in 71 countries. Here’s a look at some of the winners: The picture at top, Sunset Ray, was taken by Andy Schmid, a Swiss photographer. It won second place in the wide-angle category. The overall winner was Rafael Fernandez Caballero’s shot, Dancing…

Lazzarini’s Latest: 65-Foot Royal Alpha One

By Peter Janssen on March 8, 2022 Cruising Life

You can’t say that Pierpaolo Lazzarini, 40, the head of the Lazzarini Design Studio in Rome, doesn’t have an active imagination. Indeed, in the past few years he’s designed yachts that like Ferraris, like airplanes, and one unlike anything else because it had a hole in the middle. The one thing these projects had in common is that none of them ever got off the ground. The only Lazzarini yacht design that has been built is the egg-shaped Jet Capsule. Now, Lazzarini has taken that basic concept to its logical conclusion (for him): A futuristic 65-foot, $4 million Royal Alpha…

Helmsman 37 Sedan: An Affordable Cruiser

By Peter Janssen on March 7, 2022 Boat Reviews, Cruising Life

The Helmsman 37 Sedan is an affordable single-diesel, comfortable trawler with everything you need for a liveaboard or coastal cruiser. It comes with one or two cabins, and you also can use the second cabin as an onboard office. The Helmsman fleet ranges from 31 to 54 feet. The 37 is a slightly simpler version of the popular 38 Pilothouse model. Standard power is one 250-hp Cummins diesel; the boat comes with both bow and stern thrusters to make maneuvering easy around a dock. Helmsmen are built in Fuzhou, China, and are designed for owners who want a quality cruising…

Grand Banks 85 To Debut at Palm Beach Show

By Peter Janssen on March 7, 2022 Boat Reviews, Cruising Life

Grand Banks will introduce its new 85 flagship at the Palm Beach show, starting March 24. The 85, with three times the volume of the popular Grand Banks 60, will be available for private viewing. Like the Grand Banks 60 and the 54, the new 85 has the company’s patented V-Warp, semi-displacement hull that results in a highly efficient performance that leaves only minimal wake behind. Powered by twin 1,000-hp Volvo IPS1350 pod drives and carrying 2,650 gallons of fuel, the 85 has a range of 1,000 nm at 21 knots. Hull number one of the 85 has three large…

Faulty Assumption Caused Collision: NTSB

By Peter Janssen on March 6, 2022 Cruising Life

A faulty assumption and poor communication resulted in a collision between an offshore supply vessel and a Coast Guard cutter on October, 2020, in the Sabine Pass between Texas and Louisiana, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. Actually, the supply vessel managed to hit the cutter twice. The NTSB just issued its report after investigating the accident, basically saying the captain of the supply vessel made an incorrect assumption about the location of the cutter and the buoy it was working on that caused the first collision, and then both captains were involved in a lack of communication that…

Oligarchs Saying Do Svidaniya to Yachts

By Peter Janssen on March 6, 2022 Cruising Life

The U.S. and many European nations are seizing Russian oligarchs’ megayachts as part of the sanctions imposed after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. So far, authorities have seized (or tried to seize) oligarchs’ yachts in France, Italy and Germany, among other places. They are acting under both European Union and American sanctions. Addressing the oligarchs in his State of the Union speech, President Biden said “We are joining our European allies to find and seize your yachts, your luxury apartments, your private jets. We are coming for your ill-gotten gains.” The French Customs Service made one of the first seizures,…

Sergio Davi Reaches Colombia on 36-foot RIB

By Peter Janssen on March 2, 2022 Cruising Life

Sergio Davi, the 65-year-old Italian adventurer, just arrived in Cartagena, Colombia, the ninth stop on his 10,000 nm voyage from Palermo, Sicily, to Los Angeles on his 36-foot RIB. Davi tied up at the Club Nautico Marina in Cartagena (see picture at top), after a 26-hour, 443-nm trip from Curacao, the Dutch island in the Caribbean. He has been skirting the coast of South America ever since he arrived in French Guyana on Feb. 10. That was after the longest leg of his entire expedition – 1,770 nm from Cape Verde – and took six hours and eight days. It…

Lyman-Morse Completing Hood 35 Hardtop Express

By Peter Janssen on March 2, 2022 Boat Reviews, Cruising Life

Hull number one of the instant-classic Hood 35 Lyman-Morse Hardtop Express is nearing completion in Thomaston, Maine, and will be launched this summer. And Lyman-Morse is already working on hull number two, a flybridge version, that will be ready next year. (The boat is also offered in a soft top version as a day boat.) In any configuration, the new 35 has the elegant, Down East lines that never go out of style. And it has superior performance from twin 440-hp Yanmar diesels with Hamilton water jets. The water jets, of course, offer a safety factor and low draft of…

Browsing: Cruising Life