New Crew Night Vancouver— Come Race Martin 242s

Every year the Vancouver Martin 242 Fleet holds a meet and greet at the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club to enlist those interested in racing on these one-design sailboats. If you have mastered the basics of sailing and would like to try racing, or if you are an experienced competitive sailor and would like to pair your skills with some of the Pacific Northwest’s top sailors, come to the “New Crew Night” on Wednesday, March 29 to meet skippers and learn about the 2023 racing and social events program. It’s a great way to meet new people.

Registration can be done on Eventbrite by searching “M242 new crew.”

The Martin 242 is a fast and nimble four-person keelboat that offers the best in competitive sailing. As boats are identical, performance comes down to teamwork, tactics and boat speed.

The M242 is the most active one-design keelboat in the Pacific Northwest, with fleets at Vancouver’s English Bay, on Vancouver Island and in Washington State. 27 boats raced in the most recent North American Championship.

Vancouver BC’s English Bay M242 Fleet

20+ boats compete in the Wednesday evening and weekend events. Contact Matt Collingwood at mattcollingwood@ gmail.com.

Vancouver Island

M242 Fleet

21+ boats are regularly joined by Washington State M242s in an active race program based out of Victoria and Nanaimo. Contact Luke Acker at lukeacker@gmail. com.

Washington State

M242 Fleet

The WA fleet is anchored by six boats on Orcas Island, with five additional M242s in Bellingham, Anacortes and other locations. Orcas Island Yacht Club hosts one-design club racing weekly from May through September on West Sound. Contact Ken Machtley at ken@machtley.com.

Sideshift recently released a dual-thruster model capable of serving boats up to 40 feet in length with multi-engine set-ups. The new ST230-Dual attaches to the cavitation plates of twin or triple outboard/outdrive motors, providing boaters with complete docking control in any situation. The unique mounting position creates zero drag as the thrusters ride above water when the boat is on plane, and the units can be easily installed in-water in only a few hours. For more information go to sideshift.com.

Yamaha Motor Canada has announced their largest outboard engine ever: the XTO Offshore 450 The 450-horsepower outboard features the same 5.6-litre of big block displacement and features as the XTO 425. The XTO Offshore 450 comes with Yamaha’s TotalTilt feature for fast, easy engine tilting. Go to yamaha-motor.ca to find out more.

Unveiled in January, the Brabus Shadow 900 Stealth Green Signature Edition is the latest luxury tender offering from Brabus Marine. The Shadow 900 is powered by dual Mercury 450R 4.6-litre V8 four stroke racing engines and can reach speeds of 60 knots. Check out brabusmarine.com to learn more.

Book Review

Addicted to More Adventure: Risk is Good, Enjoy It

By Bob Shepton,

Independently published, 2021. Available from Amazon. 265 pages, $20

How many people in their 86th year sail throughout the islands of Scotland, then from England to the Canaries via Biscay and Madeira and then make yet another cruise of Scotland in the cold gales of autumn? Of course, none other than the unstoppable polar sailor and mountaineer, Bob Shepton.

A few years ago, Bob wrote an excellent book recounting many of these endeavours. Addicted to Adventure: Between Rocks and Cold Places (Adlard Coles, 2014) opens with a disastrous fire during his winter on board Dodo’s Delight in the Greenland ice. It goes on to tell tales of pioneering routes on un-climbed cliffs, of a dismasting in Antarctica and of a Northwest Passage transit, to name a few. But he left many stories untold. Happily, his newest book fills the gaps, and was just released on Amazon.

Addicted to More Adventure: Risk is Good, Enjoy It begins with Bob’s youth, in North Africa in 1954 with the Royal Marines. Evidently not finding the desert warfare training to be enough for his level of energy, he and two fellow Marines set off on a 50-mile trek across the hot desert to Tripoli. They covered those 50 miles in only one day, and even made time to drink coffee with a Bedouin in his tent along the way. Adventurers today completing something similar would probably call it an ultra-marathon and make a bit of noise about it on social media. Not Bob. It was just a “yomp” (hike) to him.

This kind of refreshing understatement characterizes the whole book. Whether he’s describing the frequent gales he and his young crew encountered on the long passage from Antarctica to Easter Island or the difficulties of landing climbers onto big walls from the deck of Dodo’s Delight in Greenland, he does so with humour, lightness and quiet understatement.

In addition to the high latitude stories, Bob tells us about a delivery to Peru, another from the Mediterranean, and exploring regions closer to his home in Scotland. The book ends with a voyage to the Antarctic island of South Georgia aboard a friend’s boat. The return trip from South Georgia to the Falkland Islands was marked by a gale strong enough to merit the use of the boat’s drogue. A reader familiar with Bob’s first book can’t help but recall another passage Bob made, sailing nearly 1,000 miles from the former Faraday base in Antarctica to the Falklands under jury rig after the dismasting of Dodo’s Delight.

Throughout Addicted to More Adventure, Bob includes excellent photographs that add to the stories. Having read both books now, I marvel that one person has packed so much superb adventure into his life.

—Ellen Massey Leonard