Tabla de contenidos para January/February 2022 en PassageMaker

Eggs Benedict is one of those brunch staples that’s always ordered at a restaurant and yet seems to intimidate a lot of cooks at home. I promise you, this recipe using toasted English muffins, Dungeness crab cakes, poached eggs and a simple hollandaise sauce is easier than you think, and makes for an extra-special breakfast on the hook. The following four tips will help you cook this dish to perfection. First: I love all kinds of crab in a crab cake, but if you can get your hands on Dungeness crab, it’s a real treat. If you’re using the frozen stuff, be sure to pat the defrosted crabmeat dry with a paper towel to remove extra moisture. Second: To make the hollandaise, heat up the butter (it needs to be…

I’m in the process of replacing the refrigerator and freezer on my 2005 Grand Banks Europa. With respect to battery drain, is it usually more energy efficient to go with AC/DC units or AC-only units and run them through an inverter? —Frank Brown, Grand Banks Europa 46 Broadly speaking, AC/DC refrigerator/freezers intended for the marine market are maximized for efficiency, since there may be periods of time when they run solely on DC and possibly at lower voltages. All AC home fridges have an unlimited supply of AC power, so while they have become much more efficient, they will often have automatic defrost circuits that use heat strips and can really run up the amperage use. Newer units can also have computer monitors and Wi-Fi connectivity, at additional amperage cost.…

The story of Avocette III began in 1931 when she was displayed at the New York boat show at Grand Central Palace. New York yachtsman Fred Voges, age 30, set his eyes on her. Frank Huckins had set her price at $27,000, but the savvy Voges bought her at the show for $17,000, in the middle of the Great Depression. The colorful history of American yachting is peppered with significant and innovative boats, from the presidential yacht Sequoia to Ernest Hemingway’s Pilar and Richard Bertram’s first Moppie. One yachtbuilder at the forefront of innovation was Frank Pembroke Huckins, creator of the PT boat design that John F. Kennedy famously piloted in World War II. The precursor to the PT boat was a Huckins named Avocette III. She’s the oldest Huckins…

BEGINNINGS My family moved often when I was growing up. I have lived near the water in Florida on the Gulf of Mexico; in Missouri near rivers, lakes and Lake of the Ozarks; in Texas; in the Pacific Northwest and most recently in Michigan, where one is never more than 6 miles from a body of water or 85 miles from a Great Lake. There, I spent the past 30 years raising my children and spending time “up north” at the family cottage on a lake. And although I am very active in, on and around the water, it is relatively surprising that this is my first boat. Even more shocking is that this is also the first time I have ever been at the helm of a boat. My…

I should have recognized that the First Caswellian Law of Boating applied. It is: Anything that seems simple, isn’t. I just wanted to buy my friend Leo a Christmas gift. He’s had a number of boats and is married to a woman who used to do the varnish on the legendary Ticonderoga. Nuff said. My wife suggested a nice cologne, something she thought might remind him of the sea and wonderful days on the water. I must have missed the doomsday bell tolling, so we set out to find just such a nautical cologne, shunning the Houses of Dior and Versace and even English Leather (my fave from the ’60s). First stop, a big box store, where we found Azul, which (says the box) evokes “ocean winds over old wooden…

When I was a teen, driver’s education involved a significant amount of time driving on the range before we were allowed to drive on public streets. The range was a miniature artificial driving world replete with traffic lights, crosswalks and left-hand turn lanes. My classmates and I would spend hours driving around the range, practicing things like who had the right-of-way if we approached the four-way-stop intersection at the same time. Even before the driving range, dads would frequently take their teens to the empty Sears store parking lot on a Sunday, when you had a large area with no other cars around you. In these settings, you couldn’t get into too much trouble. You could safely learn how much pressure to apply to the gas pedal, and possibly even…

There are objects floating at sea other than us and our beloved boats. Some are interesting, some are just plain garbage, and some are potentially dangerous. In the Pacific Northwest, thousands of miles of shoreline and rivers feed into Puget Sound, as well as the waters around the San Juan Islands and the southern Canadian Gulf Islands. Those rivers disperse a wide array of objects into the cruising waters, and the miles of shoreline provide another source of foreign floating items. If you spend enough time on the water, eventually you see it all out there. The lone basketball shoe, which causes me to ponder how someone loses just one shoe. I have yet to find a matching pair. There are boat cushions, apparently not properly secured, that blow overboard.…

I’d highly recommend spending two (or more) years cruising French Polynesia. If that kind of time is just not feasible, then the lovely Leewards offer a perfect bite-size taste of the best of the larger island group. They have clear, calm lagoons like in the Tuamotus, but with lush green mountains rising from the center, reminiscent of the Marquesas. After 18,000 miles of coastal gunkholing and passagemaking, we recently found the sweet spot of cruising life in a little square of tropical ocean. It covers an area smaller than Denver, but has the perfect balance of endless blue seas and vibrant green mountains, of calm coral-protected anchorages and sporty navigational challenges, of totally secluded bays and fancy cheeses at the grocery store. Affectionately called “the Leewards” in this part of…

In my college years, I worked summers for a tugboat company in Southeast Alaska. I loved the work and loved Alaska even more. My memories of those times are cherished. Several months ago, I was on the phone with a prospective design customer. His last name was familiar, and he described deep Alaskan roots to his younger life. It was the spelling of the last name that triggered my memory bank; I tried hard to focus, instead of thinking he might be a son or grandson of my old tug boss. But the truth was revealed when he mentioned that he wanted a shorter version of his dad’s boat, the Air Snipe. I was very familiar with the Air Snipe. It’s a sleek sub-chaser of Sparkman & Stephens design, built…

The general rule when anchoring is that with chain, the length of the rode (its scope) should be five times the distance from the bow of the boat to the seabed at the highest anticipated tide level. With nylon, the ratio is 7:1. In extreme conditions, these ratios may be increased to 7:1 and 10:1, respectively. In calm conditions they can be reduced, especially if lying to an all-chain rode in relatively deep water. There are two key pieces of information here that are commonly ignored: the height above the water of the bow, and the effect of the tide. Let’s assume that the depthsounder is reading the actual depth and not the depth under the keel. We have 15 feet of water. The bow is 6 feet above the…

Doing my last walk-through inspection before heading south for the winter, I found myself with an interesting dilemma. The forward head tripped its breaker instead of pumping water to clear the bowl. Although the boat had two heads, I also had guests scheduled to make the trip to Florida. I needed both heads operating. During the summer, the forward head had seen little activity. I could not recall the last time it had been used. I removed the faceplate from the front of the pump motor at the base of the bowl and used a plastic hammer to try and revive the motor. After resetting the breaker at the electrical panel and replacing the front plate, I pressed the button on the front of the vanity and the motor came…