Show attendees will be able to buy Cornell’s Ocean Atlas at the show and sign up [...]]]> World Voyage Planner
Planning a voyage
from anywhere in the world
to anywhere in the world
by Jimmy Cornell
(Available Sept. 2012) Jimmy Cornell will have World Voyage Planner (pre-publication pages) at Strictly Sail Pacific (Oakland, USA) April 12-15.

Show attendees will be able to buy Cornell’s Ocean Atlas at the show and sign up to pre-order World Voyage Planner.

Jimmy  Cornell will be giving free seminars (Pilot Charts, World Cruising Today, Pacific Marathon, and Highlights of a Sailing Life) Friday and Saturday at the show. Jimmy will be available in the Author’s Corner  between seminars. On Sunday Cornell will give his in-depth Long Distance Cruising Master Class Seminar (registration required).

For more  information, contact info@cornellsailing.com.

Long Distance Cruising Master Class – Including Planning Your Dream Voyage

Location: Waterfront Hotel Date: Sunday April 15, 2012 Time: 9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. Course Fee: $125.00 per person or $200 per couple (includes two one-day tickets to the show).

Jimmy Cornell, long-distance cruising sailor; founder of the highly-successful ARC transatlantic rally; and [...]]]>

Long Distance Cruising Master Class – Including Planning Your Dream Voyage

Location: Waterfront Hotel
Date: Sunday April 15, 2012
Time: 9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Course Fee: $125.00 per person or $200 per couple (includes two one-day tickets to the show).

Jimmy Cornell, long-distance cruising sailor; founder of the highly-successful ARC transatlantic rally; and author of World Cruising Routes, World Cruising Destinations,  A Passion for the Sea, and the recently released Cornell’s Ocean Atlas, will make a rare US appearance at Strictly Sail Pacific to present his popular one-day seminar on long-distance cruising.

In the last three decades Jimmy has sailed over 200,000 miles on all the oceans of the world, including three circumnavigations and two voyages to Antarctica. He has a wealth of practical advice to offer anyone contemplating a trip, whether to Mexico or around the world. Prior to his retirement in 2000, Jimmy Cornell organized 24 transatlantic rallies, five round-the-world rallies and one-round-the-world race.

Jimmy Cornell will offer his Long Distance Cruising Master Class – including Planning Your Dream Voyage – on Sunday April 15, 2012 (9:00 am – 4:00 pm).

This six hour course includes:

• Planning your dream voyage: Planning an offshore voyage starting from US west coast/US east coast and sailing [to the Caribbean/Panama/ Mexico/ Hawaii] … and all the way around the world. Main subjects: routing suggestions, weather routing, prevailing winds, tropical storm areas and seasons, climate change and its possible effects.
• Main voyage planning considerations: Heavy weather, safety concerns and piracy, common breakages, dealing with emergencies.
• Practical aspects of long distance cruising: Downwind sails, cruising in the tropics, cruising around the world in stages, yacht transport.
• Lunch with Jimmy
• Offshore routines: Life on board, daily routines including meals, maintenance, downwind sails, cruising in the tropics, self steering gears and autopilots, provisions, fuel and water, electricity consumption and generation, watch systems, fishing, diving and photography.
• The main factors that can affect the outcome of a voyage: Essential features on an offshore cruising boat, financial considerations, crew and problems that should be avoided, cruising couples, self-sufficiency, the right attitude: from dreams to reality.
• Questions and answers

“What an incredible experience to be mentored on our forthcoming trip by the man who has written the guides we’ve lived by for years.” —Kev and Judith Paixao

“I am a novice sailor with dreams of long distance cruising. Everything in your seminar was new to me, I learned so much!” —Kelly Byron

“Great! Very interesting! Time flew!” –Jay and Dena Morgan

Register online at www.strictlysailpacific.com or call Stephanie Grove at (401) 289-2540.
A two-day pass to the show is included with registration.

Last weekend at the Miami Boat show, Jimmy Cornell conducted 3 days of seminars, signed copies of the new Cornell’s Ocean Atlas, and spent a lot of time talking with cruisers about passage planning, pilot charts, and routing. It was a fantastic weekend with fantastic Florida weather and there were lots of WOWs for [...]]]>

Last weekend at the Miami Boat show, Jimmy Cornell conducted 3 days of seminars, signed copies of the new Cornell’s Ocean Atlas, and spent a lot of time talking with cruisers about passage planning, pilot charts, and routing. It was a fantastic weekend with fantastic Florida weather and there were lots of WOWs for the new atlas, which will significantly affect the ways cruisers make world voyages.

Jimmy also had his proofs for his upcoming book World Voyage Planner and hundreds signed up to pre-order. World Voyage Planner will be released in September 2012.

Jimmy Cornell dropped by West Marine’s new Flagship store in Fort Lauderdale, Florida on February 15 to talk with West Marine customers and sign copies of the new Cornell’s Ocean Atlas which had just arrived in the store.

West Marine had gotten the word out, and a steady stream of boaters came in to [...]]]>

Jimmy Cornell dropped by West Marine’s new Flagship store in Fort Lauderdale, Florida on February 15 to talk with West Marine customers and sign copies of the new Cornell’s Ocean Atlas which had just arrived in the store.

West Marine had gotten the word out, and a steady stream of boaters came in to talk with Jimmy. Several cruisers brought their World Cruising Routes, World Cruising Destinations and other Cornell books for Jimmy to autograph.

Other cruisers came to say thank you for the excellent advice in Jimmy’s books that had made their passages and circumnavigations successful.

And of course, Jimmy personally autographed many atlases for buyers.

If you missed them, you will find his earlier reports below: • Report 1- Delivering a Strictly Sailing Cat to Miami • Report 2- A Good Old-Fashioned Spinnaker Wrap [...]]]> Jimmy Cornell is sailing from St Martin to the Strictly Sail Miami Boat Show aboard Kitty Cat, an Outremer 49 catamaran. Here is his last report.

If you missed them, you will find his earlier reports below:
• Report 1- Delivering a Strictly Sailing Cat to Miami
• Report 2- A Good Old-Fashioned Spinnaker Wrap
• Report 3- Testing Times on Kitty Cat
• Report 4- A Radical Change of Plan

We had a bit of a drama last night, while anchored at Cat Cay on the edge of the Florida Strait.  We had tried hard all of yesterday to make it to Bimini before landfall, but as the skipper did not want to cross the last section of the Grand Bahama Bank in bad light, we decided to anchor for the night in the lee of this small island and continue to Bimini in the morning.

We were woken up in the middle of he night by flashes of lightning and heavy rain as a thunderstorm loosened its fury upon us. Suddenly the instruments alarm went off, but as Jean Pierre could not find cause, and the storm had abated, he turned all systems off and we returned to our bunks. This morning, however, as we prepared to leave, we found that nothing worked. No depth, no wind, no autopilot, absolutely nothing. Jean Pierre tried to call the backup service in France but it was closed for weekend.

Ivan working on an “app” for Cornell’s Ocean Atlas

So here we were at Cat Cay (obviously not a friend of Kitty Cat) with 8 miles to go to Bimini, and no solution in sight. So Ivan put his lateral thinking cap on, managed to isolate the suspected faulty section (everything is integrated on this boat – even the wine cabinet auto-locks when there is an electronic problem), but eventually Ivan the Unterrible got depth and autopilot back on and we managed to make it Bimini.

We now believe that we got a lightning strike – or at least a build-up  of static – at the top of the mast during that thunderstorm. It was Friday night, after all!

Yes, but why Bimini and not Miami itself, which was, after all, our intended destination? Well, as most sailors don’t know, any non-US citizen who arrives in the USA on a private yacht must be in possession of a proper US visa. Unfortunately Jean-Pierre had been told by the US embassy in Paris that the usual visa waiver system applied to ordinary tourists included those arriving by yacht as well, which unfortunately is not the case.

So Jean Pierre, Valérie and myself had to board a commercial plane in Bimini for the sort flight to the mainland, while Ivan, who had had the foresight to get a proper visa, took over as captain and, with the help of the Outremer agent, who has met us in Bimini, sailed Kitty Cat across the Florida Strait and delivered her, as planned, to the Miami boat show. Mission accomplished!

Sunset over North Miami

Our voyage from St Martin has been a very interesting and enjoyable experience for us two dyed-in-the wool monohull sailors, and also an eye opener into what long distance cruising on a catamaran might be like… although I must add that Kitty Cat is not just any alley cat, but a comfortable, well designed, well built, well equipped, and fast cat…. with a professional skipper on board and his willing wife to do all cooking and household chores as long as us boys did the rest, which wasn’t much.

And all this in a very French atmosphere, with apéritifs at midi (politely declined), and at sunset (warmly welcomed), three proper meals a day around a large cockpit table where glasses and cups stayed where you put them, just one three hour night watch followed by six hours of uninterrupted sleep in your own cabin on a comfortable double bed without lee cloths…Yes, I think I could get used to it.

Kitty Cat (Outremer 49) in St Martin

But before I give the impression that I am now converted to catamarans, I hasten to add that this voyage, and the long conversations with Jean Pierre on the suitability of catamarans for blue water cruising, have reinforced a view which I have always held, and which was also endorsed by Jean Pierre, is that here are three golden rules to catamaran cruising:

• keep the boat light,
• keep the route to downwind sailing,
• and keep your cruising area to low latitudes.

Which is exactly what we did!

Au revoir.

Jimmy Cornell

See also

If you missed them, you will find his earlier reports below: • Report 1- Delivering a Strictly Sailing Cat to [...]]]> Jimmy Cornell is sailing from St Martin to the Strictly Sail Miami Boat Show aboard Kitty Cat, an Outremer 49 catamaran. Here is the 4th of several reports that he is sending along the way.

If you missed them, you will find his earlier reports below:
• Report 1- Delivering a Strictly Sailing Cat to Miami
• Report 2- A Good Old-Fashioned Spinnaker Wrap
• Report 3- Testing Times on Kitty Cat

Caribbean Sea & Bahamas – February (Cornell’s Ocean Atlas)

We had carefully timed our landfall at San Salvador to arrive off the island late in the night or just before dawn, heave to if necessary just as Columbus had done all those years ago, then sail along the island’s west coast, stop at Cockburn Town, clear into the Bahamas and start our eagerly awaited mini-cruise.

But, as often happens with even the best laid plans, our carefully constructed scenario came apart when we received an email from the Outremer agent in Fort Lauderdale that the boat had to be delivered as quickly as possible to his base as there was of long list of things to do before Kitty Cat could be exhibited at the Miami boat show. With no choice but to proceed at a fast clip to Florida, we decided to stay on an offshore route, pass to the east and north of Eleuthera and then cut across the Grand Bahama Bank along the Northwest Providence Channel to Bimini.

Our drastic change of plan cannot have pleased Aeolus because as soon as the decision was taken to sail this route, the trade winds which had given us such an exhilarating ride from the moment we had left St Martin, dropped to next to nothing, so did our speed, and, to make things worse, we also noticed a strong contrary current slowing us down to a few knots.

Now with a deadline to meet, we had no alternative but turn on the engines and hope that the current would change with the tide and, judging from the look of the sky, that we would also get same wind. Wrong! Six hours later, the current was if anything even stronger, so tidal it was not.

From what I remembered, east of the Bahamas there should be a north-setting current, a secondary branch of the North Equatorial Current, whose main body turns north through the Yucatan Channel becoming the Gulf Stream. The MaxSea charts showed such a north-setting current east of the Bahamas, and so did the current pilot chart for February.

So I flicked open our own Ocean Atlas to the page showing the February chart for the Caribbean and Bahamas, and to my great surprise, I saw that our own data did in fact depict such a south-setting current in those very same waters. Ivan looked as pleased as I was when I pointed this out. However, as a scientist, he was inclined to more skeptical of any data which could not be checked against another source, and tried to dampen by enthusiasm, whereas I, being of a more pragmatic inclination, was very happy to have yet another proof that the data obtained from the meteorological satellites, as used in our Ocean Atlas, has once again been shown to be more accurate than the current pilot charts, most of which have not been updated for many years.

I cannot think of anything more frustrating and boring on a sailing boat, especially on such a good sailing boat as Kitty Cat, than to be motoring to a deadline, but at least for a few hours the monotony was enlivened by a lively debate, with Jean-Pierre and myself being ready to accept the accuracy of the latest data, and, rather bizarrely, Ivan, who had actually processed that data, telling us not to jump to any conclusions as in the world of science nothing is as clear cut as that.

“Of course it’s not”, I said, “and you scientists don’t believe in superstitions either. But how can you explain why whenever anything goes badly wrong on a boat, it always happens on a Friday?”

… As indeed happened to us the following day. But more of that tomorrow!

Jimmy Cornell

Next report: Bahama Drama

See also