About our boat

Roger here. This posting should have come first, but a lot was happening the last few days before we left.

ILENE, the boat, is a Saga 43. She was built by Saga Yachts in St. Catherine's Canada in 1999.

She is hull number 23 of only 53 built before bankruptcy, but a new company has acquired the molds and is waiting for the economy to turn around and hoping to build more of them. Details and photos are available on the company's website, http://sagayachts.com/intro_43.html . Saga also built smaller numbers of 35, 40 and 49 foot long models. The boats' owners have an active internet forum so when I have a problem I can ask and get several prompt, thoughtful replies.

She is 43 feet long with a plumb vertical bow rather than the graceful overhanging bow of most boats. This vertical feature maximizes her length at the waterline, which permits a greater theoretical maximum speed. Like clipper ships of old, also built for speed: she is narrow and tall, with only 12 feet of beam (width) and a mast topping out at 63.5 feet above the water line (just short enough to pass under the fixed bridges of the Intercoastal Waterway which are 65 feet above the waterline at high tide). Her lines include a concave curve forward gradually converting to a convex curve about a quarter of the way back. She was designed by Robert Perry, a well regarded designer of many boats. Her keel is lead, dips 5' 8 " down into the water and comprises about a third of her 20,000 pound weight. But she currently weighs several tons more because of all of the water, diesel fuel, people, tools, personal effects, food, repair parts, etc. loaded aboard.

She is an "old man's boat", having zero exterior teak with its high maintenance, an electric windlass to raise her anchor and its 300 feet of chain and an electric winch to haul up her mainsail.

She has a solent rig, presumably named after the body of water by the Isle of Wight, off the south coast of England where the first Americas Cup race was won by the America. She has two head (front) sails, jibs, each mounted on a roller furler, one almost directly behind the other, that run from the front of the deck to the top of the mast. The forward one is a big genoa which is used in lighter winds. The smaller jib behind the genoa is to be used in heavier wind. It's bottom rear corner (clew) is attached by its single sheet (control line) to a block on a track that runs athwartships from port to starboard, so that tacking (changing course to put the wind from one side of the bow to the other) is easy: the sheet slides from one side to the other -- it is called "self tacking". Tacking while using the big frontal Genoa sail, however, requires planning and effort: the sail has to be furled, and then unfurled on the other side after the boat's direction has been changed.

We acquired ILENE in Annapolis in November 2005, from her original owner who had maintained her well and sailed her little. We have used her quite a bit during the last five summers including two months in the Chesapeake in 2006, living aboard her for almost five months in 2007 while our apartment was renovated and 79 days in Maine in 2008, in addition to day sailing, weekend sails, and shorter cruises of two to five weeks. But this is the big one!