My first date with Wayne was an almost-2,000-mile passage from Fiji to Majuro in the Marshall Islands. I had met him virtually when he posted a question on my blog back in 2013. We were both single-handers and liveaboards, with me on my Caliber 33 Talespinner in Florida and Wayne on Learnativity, his 52-foot Kristen steel cutter, in Fiji. When I flew out to meet him after four weeks of emails and video chats, we figured that after the passage, we’d either never want to see each other again, or we’d sell one of the boats.
During that passage, the bolts holding the lower end of the rudder shaft sheared off, leaving us with no steering. Wayne had to dive down and lash the rudder amidships. We steered with the sails for the last 375 miles to Majuro, entering the atoll’s pass without assistance and sailing right up to the mooring ball.
Three months later, I sold Talespinner and moved aboard Learnativity. It was a little more than a year later, on the passage back south to Fiji, that Wayne handed me an e-reader and suggested that I might like the book Voyaging Under Power. As a hardened sailor with some 40 years of experience, I started reading Robert Beebe’s book with the attitude that I’d never become a powerboater, but I was willing to humor my new husband.
The more I read, the more I realized that while thousands of sailboats had crossed oceans, doing so in a powerboat run by a couple, not a professional crew, was nowhere near as common. Slowly, I came around to the idea that passagemaking in a powerboat might be a new challenge worth exploring.
Quickly, Wayne and I were having serious discussions about designing and building our own power passagemaker. There was one big problem for me: I had already been down this road. Almost 40 years earlier, my first husband and I had spent three years in a DIY boatyard building a 55-foot sailboat from a bare fiberglass hull. When we launched that boat, I swore: Never again.
Wayne and I read everything we could find from the likes of Steve Dashew, Michael Kasten, Dave Kerr and others. We read Tony Fleming’s memoir, Riding the Tide: Art, Engineering and a Thirst for Adventure, as well as Crossing an Ocean Under Power, Ken Williams’ tale of a fleet of Nordhavns that crossed the Atlantic. Then, while in Savusavu, Fiji, we met the owner of one of Dashew’s FPB 64s. He invited us aboard for a tour and intrigued us with stories of fast passages, no longer dreading squalls, and traveling in a straight line.
Eventually, I concluded that this was my fate. It seems I always fall in love with men who dream of boatbuilding.
We wanted a vessel that would be strong, safe, fast, fun and efficient. We settled on the concept of a long, lean aluminum passagemaker, a descendant of Beebe’s and Dashew’s designs. She would be a displacement boat capable of speeds faster than the average trawler, which meant a longer waterline.
That was when we started searching in earnest for a designer. At first, it seemed like most yacht designers wanted to draw the boat they wanted for us. Or, they limited us to choosing a design from their portfolios. We wanted to incorporate our combined 100,000-plus miles of experience into what Wayne came to calling Project Goldilocks, the boat that would be just right for us.
Finally, in Dennis Harjamaa of Artnautica Yacht Design in New Zealand, we found a designer willing to listen. He had already built, for himself, a smaller version of a sleek aluminum passagemaker in his LRC 58. He understood our type of boat.
In 2015, we contracted to have him design our custom boat, and we became the clients from hell. During the next three years, we exchanged thousands of emails as the boat took form in a 3-D modeling program. Harjamaa was exceedingly patient with us. The word saintly is not an exaggeration.
Wayne and I were cruising aboard our steel sailboat in Fiji, and every time we opened an email with a new model attached, it was like Christmas. We would pour ourselves a glass of wine, and then pour our attention over all the recent changes. What had started out as a 70-foot boat soon grew to 78 feet.
That year, Harjamaa sailed up from New Zealand as crew on Hull No. 2 of his LRC 58 series, Broadsword. The owner later took her to French Polynesia, and his crew took her on through the Panama Canal to the Bahamas—against the trade winds. (And that boat didn’t even have paravanes.) Seeing Broadsword’s performance confirmed we had chosen the right designer.
Long before our design was complete, we began our search for a shipyard. Harjamaa prepared a portfolio of 2-D estimation drawings, and Wayne began flying out from Fiji to visit shipyards in New Zealand, Tunisia and Turkey. We also wrote to yards in the Netherlands, Canada and the United States. We were looking for a place where we would like to live, as we intended to move there for the duration of the build. Taking into consideration climate, labor rates and cost of living, we soon zeroed in on Turkey.
In late 2016, we sailed to New Zealand and turned Learnativity over to her new owners. We had narrowed our builder search down to two, both located in the Free Zone in Antalya, Turkey. It’s a tax-free zone where dozens of boatbuilders have clustered, importing goods and equipment duty-free. As long as the boat is not registered in Turkey, that savings can be passed on to the new owners. So, as Harjamaa continued to perfect all the design details, we returned to the United States in early 2017 to prepare for our move to Turkey.
When we finally arrived in Turkey to apply for our residence permits, we chose Naval Yachts, owned by the Turkish brothers Dincer and Baris Dinc, to build our new boat. We believed they understood our desire to build what we called “a collaborative work of art and engineering.” We would not be the owners who disappeared and came back only when the boat was complete.
Once we were Turkish residents, we settled into our ninth-floor Antalya apartment with a view of a sliver of the Mediterranean Sea from the spare bedroom that was my office. We signed a contract with Naval, and, from that point forward, Wayne’s office was at the shipyard.
There were so many milestones during the next three years, high and low moments. We have fine memories of the first CNC-cut aluminum parts that arrived from Istanbul, of welding the last of the hull plates, of turning the hull, of starting on the interior systems and furnishings, and of installing the engine. Wayne went to the shipyard every day (Naval provided him with an office), and I visited several times a week.
We made several choices that were unusual. The boat is powered by a single 150-hp Gardner 6LXB engine. These British-made engines are only available as rebuilds. The Gardner would turn a Nogva controllable pitch prop, so we would have no transmission. Our get-home plan was a combination of our inboard diesel tender and a LibertyKite sail from the French company Beyond the Sea. We designed a hydronic in-sole heating system using water from our Kabola diesel heater for the living areas (it worked fabulously during our first liveaboard winter in Turkey). Also, although we had the boat designed and built with reinforced cofferdams for active-fin stabilizers, we chose not to install them for now. Harjamaa also designed aluminum A-frame booms with passive paravanes for our stabilization.
In the middle of building a boat, there is always a time when you begin to feel like you are staying at the Hotel California (“You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave”). Every time you remove an item from the punch list, you add two more. We chose to name our new boat Möbius, after the Möbius strip, a single-sided surface with no boundaries. The artist M.C. Escher’s interpretation had ants crawling on the never-ending figure. As 2020 came to a close, we were starting to wonder if we were those ants.
Then, on February 19, 2021, the boat mover arrived. Möbius made her way out of the shed and down to the sea. Her bow sported her new model number, XPM-78. XPM stands for Xtreme Passage Maker. We broke the champagne bottle on her stem, but after the launch, we spent another three months in the Free Zone harbor, shaking out bugs and doing sea trials. The boat was officially ours in May.
We spent another year in Turkey, living aboard and wintering over at Finike Marina, then spent the next spring and summer between Turkey and Greece. Last fall, we found ourselves out of Schengen Visa time, and we decided that after four years in the Mediterranean, we were ready to head across the Atlantic to the warmer waters of the Caribbean. This would be the opportunity to really see our girl stretch her legs, and for us to fulfill our dream of crossing an ocean as just a couple on our bluewater passagemaker.
We left Kalymnos, Greece, at the end of October and made a dash across some 2,000 miles of Mediterranean, most of it along the coast of North Africa, arriving in Gibraltar just under a month later. We had been lucky with finding good weather windows and had not yet deployed the paravanes. However, we ended up waiting on weather for three weeks in Tangier, Morocco. That delay paid off with another relatively easy passage down the 700 miles to Las Palmas in the Canary Islands. Because of occasional contrary currents, we often saw 9-plus knots of boat speed, but we averaged about 8.3 knots for the entire trip.
After eight years of dreaming, designing, building, outfitting and fine tuning, on New Year’s Day 2023, Möbius departed for our first real bluewater ocean crossing with me, Wayne and our two elderly dogs as crew. By the second day, we were into the boisterous trades, and they continued all the way across. We saw whales and dolphins. Flying fish littered the decks every day. On one night watch, a real high flier even made it into our skybridge.
Like any monohull going downwind, we rolled as the big swells passed beneath us. We deployed the paravanes, and they helped tremendously. The rolling was still substantial, however, I cooked every evening on the induction cooktop with no pot clamps. I just put a silicone baking sheet mat over the glass, and the pots rarely needed any minding.
We did engine-room checks every two hours, collecting reams of data for Wayne to massage, and the Gardner diesel purred along like a champ. The only issue we had was the sargassum seaweed that continually fouled the paravane lines and reduced our speed, raising the exhaust gas temperature as well. This meant the engine was working harder, and we were not getting the efficiency we had built her for.
To solve the seaweed issue, we had to slow down and clear the weeds every four to six hours. That hurt our passage time. The weeds also broke a shackle holding one of the fixed paravane lines, but the retrieval line held. Wayne tied a bowline loop on the end of the line and looped it back over the top of the A-frame with a boat hook. Other than that, we had no breakage on the trip.
What an incredible feeling we shared early in the morning on January 15 when we set the anchor at Sainte-Anne, Martinique, and turned off the engine just after dawn. Project Goldilocks, which we had brought from a dream to reality, had just carried us safely across an entire ocean. Möbius was just right for us.
Our passage, by the numbers:
Las Palmas, Canary islands, to Sainte-Anne, Martinique: 2,718 nm
Total elapsed crossing time: 13 days, 23 hours
Average speed: 8.1 knots
Average nautical miles per 24-hour day: 195
Total diesel fuel consumed: 1,340 gal.
Fuel consumption @ 8.1 knots: 2.03 nmpg
This article was originally published in the July/August 2023 issue.
