Christmas greetings from our scribes

Fred Caron was a contributor to the first two Circumnvigators and, hopefully, more editions in the future. He and his wife, Christianne, are in Malaysia in the course of a leisurely circumnavigation of the world with the Nordhavn 46 Arcturus. (Click here to read about their first encounter with heavy weather when they were novice passagemakers.)

Senior contributing editor Milt Baker has been with the magazine from the outset. He and his wife, Judy, crossed the Atlantic last summer with Bluewater, their Nordhavn 47. In 2008, they plan to depart Barcelona for a slow cruise eastward, with lots of stops along the way: France, Italy, Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, Montenegro, Croatia and Slovenia. The decision whether to go on to Greece and Turkey in 2008 will be made later in the season.

Farewell to a wolf in sheep's clothing

Here's something we didn't know:

The Nordhavn 57 was designed by Jeff Leishman in 1995 and its style and configuration came in response to his previous design, the Nordhavn 62. In its early days, the N62 was deemed “too radical” for many boaters who just couldn’t imagine it parked at their yacht club. The N57 was more stylish, had a stand-up engine room and a look which pleased many people. Little did they know from a casual look that the N57 was an almost exact duplicate of the N62 in specifications, structure, stability and capability. Essentially, it was a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

This comes from the Nordhavn site with news that the Nordhavn 57 has been taken out of production and the molds destroyed.

Dream boating

What do you make of this dream I had last night?

Significant Other and I were heading across Lake Ontario in our TomCat 24 At Last when by chance, in a foggy area where a group of boats were fishing, we met Contributing Editor Garrett Lambert and Senior Contributing Editor Milt Baker. Garrett was with his wife, Helen, shown in the photo, aboard their Pacific Trawler 40 Legato, and Milt was with his wife, Judy, aboard their Nordhavn 47 Bluewater.

The thing is Legato is in Sydney, British Columbia, while Bluewater is on the hard in Barcelona, Spain, both thousands of miles from Lake Ontario. Although we are in touch frequently by email, I haven't seen Legato and her crew since we sea-trialed the Nordhavn 68 in August. Bluewater and her crew I haven't seen for about a year, before they started their trans-Atlantic adventure.

--Georgs Kolesnikovs

In praise of smaller passagemakers

Letter to the Editor:

I really look forward to spending a few quality hours with my new magazine. It is exciting to see the new growth and directions at PAE; however, I hope that you don't abandon your roots.

Large and complex yachts have been crossing oceans for many years, but Robert Beebe's dream, that anyone with a safe and simple boat could cross oceans, was fulfilled (on a large scale basis) by PAE. This premise has thus far been the bedrock of your success. You have made history over and over proving Beebe's vision.

I congratulate you on your spectacular growth and success, but I hope the market will continue to support research and innovation in moderately priced smaller passagemakers. --Guy Bugbee

With 61 boats launched to date, the Nordhavn 40 is the standard by which smaller passagemakers are measured.