Posts Tagged “Nordhavn”
We haven’t had steering issues in the past. Given they can happen anywhere, why the heck would it occur within hours of dead-center on our 2,800 nm trip through the North Atlantic? We have covered a lot of miles over the years and generally have seen pretty good conditions. The weather we’ve encountered has been…
I bolted awake at 1:15am to a shrieking alarm. We were 50 miles south of the Grand Banks, in large seas, on passage from Newport, RI to Kinsale, Ireland. I ran upstairs to the pilot house and Jennifer, at the helm, just said “high bilge water.” Yuck. Better than fire but far from good news….
For quite some time now we have been watching a very large low in the weather models coming down from Greenland. The storm is currently predicted to bring 20′ waves on 10 second period, with 25 to 30 kt winds. With 20′ waves nominal, there will be some that approach or exceed our 30′ mast…
Boat range in ocean conditions is remarkably hard to predict but it’s just about guaranteed that your real range is far shorter than estimates or even careful measurement if it wasn’t done in real ocean conditions. Ocean swell slows boats remarkably. We had no idea how much impact this would have when we first got…
PassageMaker Magazine April, 2017: Non-Stop Adventure: 56,000 Miles at Sea…And Counting
Earlier this week our dryer stopped producing heat en route to Rencounter Bay, Newfoundland. The drum would tumble, but there was no heat. Once we’d anchored, we rigged a clothesline in the engine room to take advantage of the heat to dry the large load of clothes while we investigated the failure. We opened up…
Boats are full of compromises, and advances in one dimension can bring problems in another. Nailing the full equation of longevity, strength, and serviceability often is truly challenging. A perfect example of this challenge is the Nordhavn 47 and 52 rudder upper bearings. The early members of the Nordhavn 47/52 line used fixed race ball…
When we hauled out in Whangarie, New Zealand near the end of 2013, we didn’t expect to go more than 2.5 years before the next haulout. We finally lifted Dirona again at Cracker Boy Boat Works in West Palm Beach. In the nine days that followed, we cleaned and painted the bottom; re-applied Propspeed to…
PassageMaker Magazine Jan/Feb, 2016: A globetrotting Nordhavn 52, Dirona, offers a case study in range & consumption planning for long-range cruising.
As we describe in Dirona fuel manifold, we choose to explicitly pump fuel from the appropriate bulk tank to the supply tank rather than gravity feed. This is a slightly more manual operating mode but has some advantages that we really like. The first advantage is that a leak in the supply system can put…
For the first few days after arriving in Barbados, we attended the informal 2016 Nordhavn Barbados Rendezvous with Robbie and Jo Ashton of Nordhavn 47 Southern Star and Jennifer and Mark Ullmann of Nordhavn 46 Starlet. They’d just crossed the Atlantic together from the Cape Verde Islands and had arrived in Barbados a few days…
We arrived into Barbados 25 days and 3,689 nm after leaving St. Helena. We’re told this is the longest non-stop run in a Nordhavn under 100ft. Including the 11-day, 1,711 nm trip from Cape Town to St. Helena, we’d been at sea six weeks to the day between Cape Town and Barbados, and covered exactly…
Stabilizers are used on ocean-going vessels to remove the discomfort of ocean swell. Generically they come in two broad forms, passive and active. Passive stabilizers are the metal fins that you might have seen hanging from outriggers on fishing trawlers. And, if you saw the movie The Perfect Storm, that was a passive stabilizer that…
Oil changes at sea get pretty close to a universal response from boaters I know. Everyone says loudly “DON’T DO IT.” The risk of something going wrong when hundreds, if not a thousand miles, from shore is simply too high. And, with oil change intervals ranging between 250 and 375 hours, there typically is no…
We currently are underway on a 3,650nm non-stop run from St. Helena to Barbados. Prior to this passage, our longest non-stop run without fueling was 3,023nm from Dampier, Australia to Rodrigues, Mauritius. The current 3,650nm passage is at the very limit of Dirona’s range and we are, naturally, monitoring fuel economy closely to ensure we…
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PassageMaker Magazine April, 2016: A Nordhavn owners’s remote cruising habits inspire a generator overhaul.
You never know your boat’s real range until you start to make substantial ocean passages. Theoretical range in flat water with no current and little wind can be surprisingly optimistic so we probe the bounds conservatively. The 3,023 nm Indian Ocean crossing from Dampier, Australia to Rodrigues, Mauritius is the furthest we have ever gone…
Excess engine room temperatures are hard on the equipment and tough on the people. Engine room checks end up less detailed and, if you need to do emergency service, it can become a safety problem. We are all sufficiently motivated to want lower engine room temperatures but its actually not that easy. Engine room temperature…