Friday, November 18, 2011

YACHT OF THE WEEK: Ferretti 731. 2010.

Beautiful yacht.  Great deal!
A new Ferretti 720 retails for nearly twice the "try" price of this 731!

Thursday, November 17, 2011

10 TIPS FOR TAKING YOUR DOG ON A BOAT


Good information for taking "man's best friend" on the boat!

Reprinted from October 31 Boats.com blog.

If you have a dog and you don't take him on your boat, poor little Fido is missing out.
Most dogs love getting out on the water as much as you and I do—and you wouldn’t leave you best friend stuck on shore every time you left the dock, would you? So the next time you grab your sailing bag or fishing rods, also grab the leash and the water bowl. Just remember to use these dogs-on-board tips, to keep the trip a fun one for everyone.
1. Bring plenty of fresh water. Dogs can’t perspire, and they’ll need to lap up lots of H2O in order to stay cool, especially when the sun is blazing.
2. Let him off the leash—if you trust him not to take a flying leap. Usually dogs won’t jump from a boat that’s moving (except in the case of a poorly trained hunting dog, or an inexperienced puppy), and he’ll be curious, and want to move around a lot. Note, however, that when the boat isn’t moving plenty of dogs will take an unexpected plunge.
3. Bring a piece of indoor-outdoor carpet. Lay it in the cockpit, and your dog will be able to keep a solid footing. Fiberglass nonskid decks may provide a secure footing to you and I, but they can be quite slippery to a dag’s paws.
4. Don’t cut bait, and leave it sitting out. Do so, and there’s a good chance it’ll get gobbled up. Yech—worm breath!
5. Don’t leave lures swinging from fishing rod tips. A dangling temptation with hooks is NOT what you want your pup to go chasing after.
6. Make sure the dog has a chance to relieve himself, before you leave the dock. Nothing ruins a trip on the boat like having to go… and being unable to!
7. Be prepared to turn around on rough days. Yes, dogs can get seasick, too. It’s not as common as it is with people, but it does happen. Don’t plan on a long day in rough waters until you’ve had a chance to expose your dog to rocking and rolling, and you know for a fact that he doesn’t get green when the waves kick up.
8. Take plenty of treats. Positive reinforcement is always the best way to get a pooch to do your bidding. With a handful of treats, you can get him to stay put when you’re occupied with important tasks, like setting the anchor or tying up lines.
9. Consider buying a dog vest. These provide floatation, and neoprene models also provide some warmth if you’re boating in cold waters and chilly air. This is especially important for retrievers, which almost always find a way to get wet sooner or later. In fact, jumping off the dock before you even shove off is a distinct hazard with this breed!
10. Use a ramp or carry your dog onto the boat, if it sits well below dock level. Otherwise there’s a fair chance your dog will try to jump onboard, and possibly injure himself. Boarding and disembarking should always be controlled, planned motions.
-Lenny Rudow

Thursday, November 10, 2011

50 YEARS OF BERTRAM: FIRST-HAND HIGHLIGHTS





"Thank God it's a Bertram!"
Bertram was known for its creative
advertising campaigns.


Marking Bertram Yacht’s 50th anniversary, company president Alton Herndon touts today’s Bertrams as “hard-core fishing machines,” which is what your grandad also might have said about the boats Richard Bertram built. He might have had a few other choice words for them as well: rugged, seakindly, maneuverable, rough-water boat, a sea keeper.

The Bertram legend lives on, although the boats have changed since grandpa’s day. The legend was born in April 1960 during the 172-mile Miami-Nassau race, when Bertram’s 31-foot Moppie knifed through 8-foot seas and a 30-knot wind to finish two-and-a-half-hours ahead of its nearest rival.

Moppie, named for Bertram’s wife, averaged a little more than 20 mph in those seas, riding a deep-vee hull conceived by C. Raymond Hunt, the design genius who revolutionized powerboating with this hull. Departing from the flat aft section that enables a boat to plane easier, but also causes it to pound, Hunt designed his hull with a constant 24-degree deadrise so the boat could cut and track through big seas. He added horizontal strakes to lift the boat on plane and deflect spray, and he gave it a rounded, bell-shaped V bow to soften the ride.

“Moppie could be driven hard into steep head seas, rolled very little in the trough and could track straight before following crests, a situation in which traditional underbodies would go dangerously out of control,” yachting journalist and racer Carlton Mitchell wrote of Bertram’s 31-footer. “Every successful ocean-racing powerboat since has been a modification of the same basic form.”

Mitchell described that legendary race from Miami to Nassau with Bertram and champion racer Sam Griffith this way in a May 24, 1965, Sports Illustrated article:
“We didn’t get caught out in bad weather; we went out in it deliberately. Small-craft warnings had come down at midnight before a 7-o’clock-in-the-morning start, and seas generated by a three-day nor’easter were running undiminished in the Gulf Stream. In that blow, Moppie became airborne at the end of the Miami breakwater to land somewhere short of Cat Cay with a crash that not only collapsed my chair but drove my spine into my skull, and I emerged from the eight-hour ordeal — in which we set a record — feeling like a survivor of the Battle of the Atlantic. But bruised and battered though I was, especially as the wind piped up harder than ever in the Tongue of the Ocean, I had learned that some modern power vessels don’t scare a crew to death in a bit of a blow. They can take it if you can, with comfort or lack of it in direct ratio to speed, and they get you to port safely.”
"BERTRAM WEATHER"
So was born not only the Bertram legend but also the descriptive term “Bertram weather” — weather only a Bertram will go out in. David Napier, of Dania, Fla., who retired in 1991 as Bertram’s chief designer after 22 years with the company, kept a Bertram 28 Flybridge at his dock for six months in the early ’70s for his personal use, as employees were encouraged to do then. “I’d take it out in the worst weather” — weather the Coast Guard warned him was too rough for small craft, Napier says. But he’d go out anyway and he’d come back in safely.
“After a while, they’d say, ‘OK, Bertram, we’ll keep an eye on you,’ and I’d go out and jump waves on that boat,” says Napier. “I’d go airborne and slosh down comfortable as could be. You couldn’t hurt that boat and it wouldn’t hurt you if you knew how to run it.”
That was the era when Bertram, known for its creative advertising, ran a series of ads generically known as “Just ask them in the boondocks.” These were tales of Bertram owners in Mexico’s Baja (“How to survive seven years in the Baja”) and Tahiti (“In Tahiti, even the best mechanics may have better things to do than fix your boat”) and the Dominican Republic (“When you want to know which boats hold together and which boats fall apart, ask the guys in the boondocks”).
You still hear stories about Bertrams’ legendary ability to hang tough in stormy seas. While visiting Homer, Alaska, in the early spring a half-dozen years ago, Napier saw three Bertrams — two 31s and a 28 — in the town marina among the commercial fishing boats. The air was still cold, about 30 degrees, and seas were running high. Napier says he saw a fisherman in boots and parka tossing fish off the Bertram 28 Flybridge onto the dock. He asked the obvious question.
“Been out fishing?”
“Yup.”
“Out there?” Napier asked, eyeing the seas.
The fisherman looked at him with puzzlement. “Why not? We’re running a Bertram here.”
Napier was stunned. The mystique of invincibility endures.

The 31' Moppie was the boat that started it all.

RACEBOAT IS MODEL FOR THE 31'

Dick Bertram was not first and foremost a powerboater or a boatbuilder on the day in 1958 when, as one of the America’s Cup crewmembers on the 12 Meter Vim, he saw a 23-foot tender with a Hunt-designed deep-vee hull slicing through a heavy chop on Block Island Sound. Bertram was a champion sailboat racer who had won trophies in college and crewed on winners in the Southern Ocean Raving Conference and the Newport-Bermuda Race, which he and Mitchell won three times running — 1956, 1958 and 1960 — on the yacht Finisterre. He also was a successful yacht broker and boatyard operator who had been helping to nurture the emerging sport of offshore powerboat racing.


After seeing the way the Hunt-designed tender ran through the slop, he commissioned Hunt to build him a 31-foot wooden deep-vee, Moppie. After winning the 1960 Miami-Nassau race, that hull became the plug for a fiberglass mold of the groundbreaking Bertram 31. Bertram built more than 1,800 Moppies until regular production ceased in 1983.

The early Bertrams were built for all sorts of recreational uses — racing, fishing, cruising — but as time went on sportfishing became the Bertram niche, says Lee Dana of Vero Beach, Fla., Bertram’s chief engineer from 1960 to 1989. The builder took a few stabs early on at building motoryachts with jazzed-up interiors to compete with Hatteras in the family cruising market, but Bertram’s target was the hard-core angler.

“That was our thing,” Dana says, so the company aimed for the bull’s-eye. It tricked out the boats for big-game fishing. Interiors were typically Spartan. One early 1980s ad that featured a letter from an angler’s wife named Diane Perry says it all. She writes that her husband bought a 28-foot Bertram Flybridge that she wasn’t all that crazy about.

“I was shocked at the high price we paid for what I considered to be a rather dull and sparsely appointed boat,” the letter reads. “My husband was quick to point out the quality of workmanship down to the tiniest detail and the high resale value. But for two seasons, I felt cheated bouncing around on our highly priced ‘fishing machine.’”Then she tells of encountering 10-foot seas while cruising offshore from Atlantic City, N.J., to Annapolis, Md., and getting tossed around “like ping-pong balls in a fan. … With waves hitting us broadside, the hull slapping down again and again with an ear-splitting sound, and the whirring of propellers in the air, I never felt so close to dying.” But they reached an inlet and made it safely to the marina. Concluding, Perry writes, “Our Bertram is worth every penny we paid for it. … Thank you for making the best boat on the water.”

That was what the men and women who toiled on the floor of the Bertram plant liked to hear. “We told ourselves we’re going to build the finest offshore powerboat in the world, and we really had that in our minds,” Napier says. And the builder had the staff to do it: skilled craftsmen, a crackerjack designer and one of the best engineering departments in the business under Dana.


BIGGER BOATS
As anglers ventured farther offshore, the boats became bigger. Dana remembers the Bertram 46 and 54 as its most popular and profitable sport fishermen. “They ran good, they looked good and they caught fish,” he says. The 46, introduced in 1970, was the first Bertram to abandon the Hunt deep-vee hull. Dana says the bigger, heavier boats needed a 15- to 17-degree deadrise in the aft section so they could come up on plane more quickly with less power.
The 54, which debuted in 1981, became an icon of the modern Bertram, a reliable, good-looking sea boat with a big cockpit for fishing and a more luxurious interior for the family and a growing number of anglers who appreciated a finely appointed lair. In the ’70s and ’80s, “We became more competitive in terms of interiors, goodies, galleys and staterooms,” Dana says.
A big contributor to that was Bertram in-house interior designer Marty Lowe. “I think ours were just as good as Hatteras’ toward the end [of that era],” says Dana. “When the boats weren’t doing serious fishing, they became motoryachts. We got the ladies aboard.”

Whittaker Corp., Bertram’s owner from 1967 to 1985, steered Bertram through its halcyon years. The recession of the late 1980s and early ’90s and a short-lived 10 percent luxury tax in the early ’90s nearly killed Bertram, as they did most other luxury yacht builders. Wrecked by these economic tsunamis, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, then ran through a series of caretaker owners before Ferretti Group, a large and respected Italian boatbuilder, bought Bertram in 1998 with the intention of restoring the luster to the name and legend.

Today’s Bertram  is more luxurious and more finely styled than the Bertram of yesteryear. The lines are lower and sleeker but still clearly recognizable as those of a Bertram. And the yachts are getting bigger still. Bertram introduced an 80-footer at the 2010 Fort Lauderdale boat show. The $6 million flagship of the fleet is “185,000 pounds of muscle,” with twin 2,400-hp MTUs, a top speed of 35 to 37 knots, and a cruising speed of 30, says Herndon, Bertram’s president since February 2010. With a big, wide-open saloon, galley and dining area looking out through enormous windows and a spacious cockpit and flybridge, the 80-footer could be a very luxurious cruising yacht or a big, bruising sportfishing boat.
Herndon says to expect two more new models soon. “They’ll be longer, lower, sleeker, faster,” he says. “They’ll look like they’re moving while they’re sitting still, but you’ll still recognize them as Bertrams.”
Yet Herndon, a hard-core angler himself and president of rival Hatteras for 11 years in the ’80s and ’90s, is just as excited about the redesigned 54, Bertram’s new tournament battlewagon. Equipped with a pressurized live well, two freezers and six ice and storage compartments in the cockpit, plus storage below for 25 rods, the boat is fitted out for serious fishing. Typical of a Bertram, it offers good speed (40 knots) and a comfortable ride. It, too, is available in a version suitable for cruising or for more laid-back family fishing, but Herndon leaves no doubt where his heart is. And he says he has owner Ferretti’s backing in this.
“It’s sportfishing first,” he says. “We have to build hard-core fishing machines. That’s our heritage.”

WATCH THOSE WASHERS: A TIP FROM "MOTORBOATING"

Make sure to properly position washers in order to avoid excessive heat build-up.
by Vincent Daniello / Wed, 9 Nov 2011 / Motorboating.Com


High-amperage fuses for main DC power feeds and bow thrusters are held in their holders with nuts and washers. Make sure the washer sits just beneath the nut, and never between the fuse and connecting cable lug. That thin stainless steel washer doesn’t conduct electricity particularly well and might heat significantly under long, high-amperage loads. Boat fires have been attributed to inappropriately placed washers.

YACHT FORUM: REPLACING WINDOWS ON AN 1984 BERTRAM 54

Click on the following link to read how one 1984 Bertram owner is replacing windows on his yacht.

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

ADVANCED ITALIAN: FERRETTI 620

Chris Caswell of Yachting Magazine just posted this review of the Ferretti 620, heading it with:


"The Ferretti 620 will have Americans speaking the language of love".


Click here for full story:  Ferretti 620 Boat Review | Yachting Magazine



Tuesday, November 8, 2011

SAT TV ANTENNA FOR SMALLER BOATS

Another interesting product!  SAT TV for a center console running 40 knots?  Yes, with Intellian's s6HD digital marine satellite antenna system.  Take a look at this video from the Ft Lauderdale Boat Show.

or watch below


Monday, November 7, 2011

FREE NAVIGATIONAL APP FOR IPAD/IPHONE

Video demo of the FREE Jeppesen Plan2Nav app for IPad and Phone.  This looks like a great tool....a free worldwide base map, weather with wave data & wind info, even marina photos & services...all for FREE!  Specific charts can be purchased for as little at $19.99.

or watch below


Saturday, November 5, 2011

NOVEMBER '11 "WATERWAYS" NEWSLETTER

Check out the Waterways November 2011 edition!

This issue is filled with a variety of new and nearly-new Ferretti Group greats...Ferretti, Riva, Pershing, Bertram, etc., as well as many brokerage yachts that have been recently reduced.  You'll find the yachts that made their U.S. debut last week at the Fort Lauderdale Boat Show, as well as some excellent ready-to-go trades.

Please take a look and share it with a friend -- or two!