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| The Mini 6.50 Eight Cube |
There has not been any other sailboat class that has sparked as much innovation as Classe Mini, the class association behind the Mini 6.50 sailboats. These tiny yachts are on the cutting edge of sailboat design and have been since the class was first introduced in 1977. Take for example the Mini Eight Cube which will be skippered by the Swiss sailor Simon Koster in the upcoming Mini Transat which starts on October 1. Koster was one of the first to go with the blunt scow-like bow rather than a conventional bow and the boat
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Note: Paul Exner is Isbjorn’s racing skipper and a very close friend of Andy & Mia. He and his young family – including wife Liz (whose Irish), their 3 1/2-year-old son Eoin & 9-month-old daughter Eva – stayed on in Tortola after the island was devastated by Hurricane Irma. As I write this, Hurricane Maria is making landfall in Puerto Rico, where Paul grew up, and she is undoubtedly being felt in the nearby BVI. Paul has checked-in twice on Facebook since IRMA, and these are his thoughts. We’ve setup a fund where you can donate directly to Paul & his ...
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The news that Maria has strengthened from category 1 to category 5 hit like a gut punch. Learning this update at dinner last night stopped all conversation, then brought on questions: how does this happen in only half a day? Has it ever? Dreaded already for the track this storm is forecast to trace near Irma’s fresh path, prospects for Maria’s impact now feel unbearably worse.
While we waited for news of Irma from a safe perch in St Lucia I summarized the tools for hurricane season weather forecasts that we use most on Totem. Not two weeks later it’s ...
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208: As I record this, Isbjorn is stuck in medieval Visby, on the island of Gotland smack in the center of the Baltic. We’ve only made it about 100 miles south of Stockholm, on this our 11th and LAST passage of 2017, due to horrendous weather. Recent guests the Veber family reported gusts over 50 knots in their homeport of Falsterbo, on the Swedish southwest coast about 200 miles from here and on our route. So we’re sitting tight. What follows is a roundtable meeting recorded about 6 weeks ago with Isbjorn’s crew from our PREVIOUS passage, when we were ... Read More
Here we go again! Hurricane Maria, now a Category 5 storm, has reportedly devastated the island of Dominica and is expected to clobber Puerto Rico on Wednesday, give the Dominican Republic a glancing blow early Thursday morning, and then run right over the Turks and Caicos on Friday.
Meanwhile, the islands of Barbuda, St. Barts, St. Martin, Anguilla, Tortola, Virgin Gorda, Jost Van Dyke, and St. Thomas are still reeling from the direct hits they so recently suffered from Hurricane Irma.
An infrared image of the eye of Irma directly over Barbuda, where she first made landfall. The beginning of ...
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Chapter 8 is a close-up look at spinnakers. A bit about the history of the spinnaker, different panel layouts, symmetrical versus asymmetrical and a whole lot more. In Part 3 we look at spinnakers by the numbers. It can get confusing because sailmakers are quick to drop a number thinking that you know what he’s talking about. Here is a quick guide. Note, however that some sailmakers have their own coding system.
You can download this chapter as a pdf here
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| Beautiful membrane Code 0 on this cruising boat |
Spinnakers by the Numbers
Spinnakers have gone under countless names since ...
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I was a tad bummed to see this pic on my Facebook feed this morning. The red and white boat washed up there after Hurricane Irma was my ride for the 89/90 Whitbread Round the World Race. It’s called Fazisi and was the Soviet Union’s first, and by happenstance, last entry in the Whitbread. When the race started the boat had a large Hammer and Sickle flag flying off the transom; by the time the race was over the Soviet Union had pretty much disintegrated. I formed a partnership with the boat’s designer and we chartered Fazisi for $1 ...
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#207: Jake Albano, who’s still in his 20s, is a longtime friend of mine and has been an integral part of sailing Isbjorn and managing the cruising rallies I used to be involved with. I first met Jake at the ARC Europe rally in 2014 when he was sailing aboard Persistent Lady, the dramatic story of which you’ll hear in the episode. Jake then sailed with me as mate on our first ‘test’ trip for our business model on Serenity, a Shannon 43 ketch we were loaned before we bought Isbjorn, and he’s sailed with us since on many ... Read More
Totem and crew are in Grenada. Time and mobility were our key advantages to get safely far from the devastating path of Irma when others could not. When Irma made landfall at Barbuda, we were secure in St Lucia. Clouds streamed from the west at sunset, sucked in the “wrong” direction by Irma. We watched the system’s arrival via glowing laptop screens, as Jamie stayed up half the night glued to live data from weather stations until they succumbed – then followed as best we could in the aftermath, waiting anxiously for news from the friends squarely in Irma’s track....
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That’s Paul’s Solstice dead-center, just to the right of the big grey boat on it’s side. He built her from a bare hull over 10 years in Wisconsin and then sailed her to the Caribbean where he runs expeditions on her through moderngeographi.com. You can easily distinguish her by the bowsprit, foredeck hatch, liferaft & dorades and the distinct curve to the cockpit coamings. Paul doesn’t yet know her status, as he’s stuck on the other side of the island…
I’ve been glued to Facebook looking for news of my Caribbean friends since Irma struck the other night. Paul Exner, ...
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