BOAT/U.S. Magazine articles from November 1999

BOAT/U.S. Magazine archives from November 1999

BEHIND THE BUOY.
November 1, 1999... By the time you read this column in early November, the daily countdown toward the new millennium will surely have begun in earnest. And, whether you're a purist who believes that the actual new millennium won't come around until January 1,...

Hurricane Warnings Taken Seriously.
November 1, 1999... Thousands of boats were damaged or sunk from the Bahamas to New England by Hurricane Floyd in September. The Category 2 storm damaged as many as 25,000 boats and caused $127 million in boat losses, according to estimates by BOAT/U.S. Marine...

California Passes Boating Safety Bill.
November 1, 1999... Recreational boaters in California under the age of 45 will have to pass a test on safety and pollution rules and receive a state-issued certificate under a bill approved by the California Senate this summer. The bill, AB 1287 by Assemblywoman...

Life Jacket Loaner Partners Needed.
November 1, 1999... Local community groups and marine businesses interested in making their waters safer for youngsters are encouraged to apply to the BOAT/U.S. Foundation for Boating Safety to join its Life Jacket Loaner Program for Kids. This popular program...

Boat Show Boost.
November 1, 1999... Deep within the Miscellaneous Tariff and Technical Corrections Act of 1999 is a change that will help American boat shows get their share of the mega-yacht business from abroad. The Foreign Flagged Mega-Yacht bill will ease the financial burden...

EPA Panel Calls for MTBE Phase-Out.
November 1, 1999... A blue-ribbon panel of experts assembled by the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to study the gasoline additive MTBE has recommended that the substance be reduced or phased out of the nation's fuel supply. There is widespread...

Safety Board Criticizes Coast Guard.
November 1, 1999... When the 34-foot sailboat Morning Dew struck a jetty at the mouth of the harbor to Charleston, SC, before dawn on Dec. 29, 1997, no one could have foreseen at the time that this accident, which took the lives of an adult and three teenagers,...

Nature Takes Its Course.
November 1, 1999... Although record-low water levels complicated life for Great Lakes boaters this past season, at least one biologist says that might be the price you will have to pay for better fishing. Dr. Doug Wilcox, a biologist with the U.S. Geological...

Pact to Ban Longlines Reached.
November 1, 1999... Like politics, fishery management sometimes makes strange bedfellows, and an unlikely alliance to halt longline fishing has put anglers, the tackle industry and commercial fishermen in the same boat. In mid-September, the Blue Water...

Clean Water Grants Available.
November 1, 1999... Does your boating group have ideas for creative, hands-on environmental projects that will help clean up our waterways? The BOAT/U.S. Clean Water Trust is now accepting grant applications from volunteer groups for environmental boating...

Stop or I'll Shoot.
November 1, 1999... The war on drugs in the Caribbean has taken a new tack as the Coast Guard announced this fall that it is using sharpshooters firing from helicopters for the first time to disable "go-fast" boats carrying drug smugglers. Federal officials say...

Vote for the Coast.
November 1, 1999... What will the coastal areas of the United States look like in the year 2025? What do we want them to look like? For the past year, BOAT/U.S. has been working with officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, along with...

Montana Auxiliarists Win Best Flotilla Award.
November 1, 1999... Association President Richard Schwartz, right, presented the BOAT/U.S. Award for Best Flotilla in the Nation to Cmdr. Robert Berge of U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary Flotilla 10-03 of Helena, MT, recently at an awards ceremony held in Orlando, FL....

MEMBER FORUM.
November 1, 1999... Staying Power This marks my 10th anniversary as a member of BOAT/U.S. I was amazed, to say the least, of all of the "behind-the-scenes" efforts I read in the "Behind the Buoy" editorial in September. I know BOAT/U.S. was involved in...

DEVIANT READINGS(c).
November 1, 1999... The last weeks of the 1900s present a good time to look back on the past ten centuries in boating. For boaters, in particular, it's been a good thousand years. To get anywhere in a boat when this millennium began, it was frequently...

HANDS-ON FISH TAGGING.
November 1, 1999... Three residents of the Texas Gulf Coast reportedly were abducted on August 17 and subjected to examination and testing in a strange, laboratory-like environment. After attaching what appeared to be monitoring devices to their bodies, their...

West Winds.
November 1, 1999... For our 33-foot trawler Queen Maeve and her crew, the invasion begins at zero-dark-thirty -- that handy Coast Guard term which translates roughly to "any predawn hour at which you have to roll out of your bunk." It's a peaceful onslaught,...

'Lost' Skipper Unfazed by Massive Search.
November 1, 1999... An Ohio family cruising off the Atlantic seaboard last summer sailed into oblivion and back again -- and didn't even know they were lost. After a month at sea in their 65-foot, twin-screw motorsailer on a planned voyage from Newport, RI,...

Distress Communications Set for Major Upgrade.
November 1, 1999... At 2:17 a.m. on Dec. 29, 1997, a voice was barely heard over VHF Channel 16 in Charleston, SC, where a U.S. Coast Guard watchstander was on duty, listening. The garbled transmission was answered several times, without making contact; then...

EXUMAS EXCURSION.
November 1, 1999... Three Cays Aweigh There's an old ditty in the Caribbean that is useful when you're travelling over shallow waters. It goes something like this: White is not all right; see brown, go aground; green could still be mean; and blue means come...

Is There Safety In Numbers?
November 1, 1999... It Depends on the Statistics A 59% decline in the number of boating fatalities over the course of the past 25 years and an absolute decline in 15 of the last 25 years are plenty of reason for safety experts to cheer. But precisely why this...

BOATERS IN LINE FOR BETTER FORECASTS.
November 1, 1999... The National Weather Service (NWS) offered a sunny outlook for improved forecasts when it proclaimed its 10-year, $4.5 billion overhaul of the nation's weather prediction apparatus complete this summer. But recreational boaters,...

AND THE WINNERS ARE...
November 1, 1999... BOAT/U.S. member Dave Smialek of Westwood, MA, won the Grand Prize in the Yale Cordage/BOAT/U.S. Sweepstakes -- a week-long trip for two to watch the America's Cup Challenge Series in New Zealand this month. Smialek joined BOAT/U.S. in 1986,...

Grow North, Young Fish.
November 1, 1999... Fishing duo Esther Winslow and Gerlad Miszkin of West Chatham, MA, have been reeling them in for years, but until this August they'd never caught a tagged fish. Then, in one week, they caught three -- all stripers. Two of the fish had...

Leap at the Chance.
November 1, 1999... Tired of duck hunting and bass fishing but can't afford an African safari? New hunting challenges are only as far as Illinois next summer where we're notified that bullfrog season runs from June 15 to Aug. 31. There are rules, however. Frogs...

Duck, Duck, Moose?
November 1, 1999... In 1992, some 29,000 plastic toys -- yellow ducks, blue turtles, red beavers and green frogs -- were lost from a container ship en route from Hong Kong to Takoma, WA. Nine months later, the toys began appearing along 850 kilometers of Pacific...

An 'Armey' of Fishermen.
November 1, 1999... Congressman Dick Armey (R-TX), an avid bass fisherman, led a contingent of invited anglers at the First Annual Majority Leader's Potomac Classic in September. Fishing just a few miles from his office on Capitol Hill, Armey caught and released...

All in the Family.
November 1, 1999... Six years ago, Tristan Mouligne, then 13, made his first Newport-to-Bermuda passage with his parents and younger brother John Jay aboard the family's Freedom 44, Frog Kiss. Halfway there, a gale blew up and the automatic steering failed. For...

A Big Fix for OMC's Ficht.
November 1, 1999... When OMC introduced its new fuel-injected Ficht gasoline-powered outboards in 1997, the Waukegan, IL, engine maker expected to revolutionize marine two-stroke outboard design while meeting strict requirements to reduce hydrocarbon emissions....

ON THE HORIZON.
November 1, 1999... Draft legislation that would regulate boat repair shops in Maryland will be introduced when the state's General Assembly convenes in Annapolis in mid-January. Proposed by Del. Shane E. Pendergrass (D-Howard Co.), the draft bill resembles...