We are back in Annapolis! The summer was so busy between our cruise south, meeting friends in multiple locations, and work firing up again for me that I just didn’t have an ounce of bandwidth for blogging. But we’re back home now and getting back into a more normal routine. So lets blog!
Continue reading After A Summer Living Aboard, What Do We Think of The Sabre 38 MKII?By Rich
If you are lucky enough to be able to spend a season in St. Martin, be sure to join the St. Martin Yacht Club. Dues are very inexpensive, you get a discount on food and drinks and, best of all, the proceeds of your dues go to training the next generation of local sailors. Another major perk: you get to take out the Club’s dinghies! They have excellent trainers like the RS Zest I have been taking out, in addition to other other offerings like Lasers.
I’ve gone out sailing in the lagoon three times now, each time in gusty winds ranging from 0 to massive 30 knots gusts (seriously – the breeze here is really up and down)! It’s terrific practice and instantly brough me back to that giddy, child-like excitement one feels when a dinghy accelerates in an instant and hops up on a plane. The sea state in the lagoon is also very flat, making for an excellent training ground.
Continue reading The St. Martin Yacht Club: Dinghy Sailing Here Is Too Much Fun To Be Legal
By Rich
Our WordPress website data shows that over the last six years of blogging my yacht reviews are the most popular posts with our readers by a considerable margin. The data surprised me somewhat, since I am neither an industry nor sailing professional. No matter – I love writing them and people seem to love reading them so I’m going to keep them coming! Having covered thousands of miles aboard our own 2006 Hylas 54, Rover, and as crew aboard the 2015 Hylas 56 Odette, I thought it was high time I put my reflections on these yachts down on paper for the benefit of anyone who might be interested. Moving forward, I plan to segment my yacht reviews into the following sections:
By Rich
Editor’s Note: when we sold Le Saberage, we set up a full website to market her. As part of that site, we created a page detailing the Sabre 42 design elements. I enjoyed creating the content so much that I thought it would be fun to adapt and reprint it here on svrover.com. The timing was also appropriate given that Sabre’s founder, Roger Hewson, was recently interviewed for Sabre Yachts’ upcoming 50 year anniversary celebration. As part of that interview he said in no uncertain terms that the Sabre 42 was the best sailboat the company designed during his tenure:
Given our experiences with the Sabre 42, we’re not at all surprised this design was Hewson’s favorite! So we thought it would be fun to reprint our reflections on the design here. Continue reading Sabre 42 Design Elements
By Rich
Recently I’ve been lucky enough to steer a variety of sailboats nearly back-to-back, and I’ve been amazed at how different each helm felt. Most of the differences can be traced to the boats’ widely varied rudder designs, which caused me to ponder the challenges naval architects face in designing them. Continue reading Reflections on Yacht Design: Rudders
By Rich
Those looking for a small family cruiser should take a hard look at the Sea Sprite 34. Built in Rhode Island in the early 1980s, the Sea Sprite sports a full keel, generous interior space and an excellent cockpit for a boat of this size. Continue reading Yacht Review: Sea Sprite 34
By Rich (Photo Credits: North Point Yacht Sales)
Editor’s note: to get our new blog going, we’re importing articles we’ve written in the past about our sailing adventures together. This article was written in September of 2013, and since then the accompanying YouTube videos have gotten a ton of hits (the most of any video on Rich’s channel by a wide margin). Given the evident interest in the boat, we thought it would be fun to re post the review almost a year to the day after it first ran.
Thanks to North Point Yacht Sales here in Annapolis, we got a wonderful and unexpected treat today: the opportunity to test sail the brand new J/88 from J/Boats. At 29 feet in length, the J/88 could be considered a modern day interpretation of the 1980s era J/29. As former owners of that wonderful design, we were keen to get a sense of what the 2013 version of the boat would feel like.
Editor’s note: to get our new blog going, we’re importing articles we’ve written in the past about our sailing adventures together. This article was written in January as the first in a two-part review of our week-long charter in the British Virgin Islands aboard a Sunsail 41. Part II of the series was a review of the charter as a whole, while this article focused on the boat itself.
For the past week I’ve been living aboard a Sunsail 41 (sold as the Jeanneau Sun Odyssey 409 to the retail market) during a week long, two-couple cruise of the British Virgin Islands. Before relaying too many of my reflections in print, let me share two iPhone video tours of the boat to give the reader a better sense of its layout:
Above Deck Tour:
Below Deck Tour:
Rover's Blog 