The Bermuda Challenge

Catamaran posts a record of 728 miles in 36.5 hours on 2 four-stroke outboards

By Wendy Mitman Clarke
Staff Writer for Soundings

Using new high technology and plain old nerve, two men have set a speed record from the East Coast to Bermuda in a 26-foot open catamaran powered with twin 90-hp, four-stroke outboards.

Larry Graf, president of Glacier Bay Catamarans in Monroe, Wash., and Troy shields, general manager of Todd Marine in Virginia Beach, Va., sped 728 miles from Lynnhaven Inlet at Virginia Beach to Northeast Rock light off St. George's in 36 and a half hours. They arrived at 12:30 a.m., Sept. 22, with seven hours of fuel to spare, Graf says.

"It was just an incredible ride," says Shields, 34. The two made the trip answering a challenge set forth by Boating Magazine. It proposed a New York to Bermuda run in a powerboat under 40 feet, emphasizing safety and the newest fuel-efficient technologies and hull shapes, says Richard Stepler, Boating's editor-in-chief. Graf, 39, and Honda Marine manager Tom Wriggle already had been tossing around such an idea for months.

The Glacier Bay 260 center console catamaran departs New York for Bermuda on Sept. 20

"We started talking to Larry Graf about how efficient his boat is and how efficient our motor is and we started thinking of a way we could demonstrate that," Riggle says. "We thought, what if we could go to Bermuda non-stop with nothing but the fuel we could carry in the boat? That's an impossible task for a two-stroke engine."

In February, Boating senior writer David Seidman and Graf took the newly launched Glacier Bay Canyon runner for a test run off fort Lauderdale and decided to try for the challenge. They asked Todd Marine, which specialized in sportfish catamarans and Honda outboards, to rig the boat.

Furuno supplied complete electronics and an autopilot, and Boating donated safety gear, including a life raft, EPIRBs, a satellite telephone, and charts for the GPS. Glacier Bay's 26-foot, center-console Canyon Runner is designed and built specifically for sport fishing and running well offshore, Graf says. The hulls are solid glass and three foam-filled cavities in each hull and foam block in the stern as well. The bows are Kevlar-reinforced, and seven athwartship bulkheads tie the hulls together. The deck is cored with threequarter-inch Klegecell and the hull-deck joint is bonded with urethane adhesives and through-bolted every four inches. The only changes to the stock boat, Graf says, were to convert two forward fish wells into 90 gallon fuel tanks. Combined with the boat's 120 gallon tanks aft, that gave the outboards 420 gallons for the trip. They also added a small dodger forward, behind which the person off watch would sleep on an air mattress.

Honda's four-stroke motors, Riggle says, needed far less fuel and engine oil than a two-stroke. He estimated the same run with two-stroke motors would have required at least 210 more gallons of fuel and probably more than that. After weeks of waiting, the Bermuda Weather Service finally saw a clear weather window Sept. 20. They loaded the boat with high-energy snacks and junk food, sandwiches and fluids, and left at noon. They fell into a system of watches and every eight hours or so would shut the boat down, inspect everything and just take a short break. The person on watch wore a safety harness and life jacket with a person EPIRB and an 8-foot tether attached to kill switches on the engines.

"We probably drove the boat about two to three hours of the trip and the autopilot did the rest," Shields says. "Right away we started naming the electronics. The GPS was Einstein and the autopilot was Parnelli Jones."

Initially, the boat, fully fueled, weighed about 10,400 pounds and was traveling 4,600 rpm at about 20 mph, getting about 1.5 miles per gallon. At first, Graf worried about fuel consumption but knew as the boat lightened it would improve. By Saturday morning, they were making 21 mph at 2.1 miles per gallon, and by late Saturday afternoon, despite a 4-to6-foot swell, a confused chop and about 25 to 30 knots of wind, the boat was making 24 miles per hour.

"Only 207 miles to go," Graf wrote in his trip log at 2 p.m. Saturday. "Beach Boys' 'Little Deuce Coup' playing, sunny, warm, life is good."

The weather held until late Saturday afternoon, when they encountered several squalls and a confused ocean. But by 9:30 p.m. they called Bermuda Harbor Control to say they were approaching St. George's Harbor.

"We told him we were 26 feet and he says, '126 feet?' and we say, 'no, 26 feet,'" Shields recalls. "One of his last questions was, 'What kind of boat are you, are you a sailboat or a motor yacht' I said a 26-foot Glacier Bay sportfishing center console and I think he thought we were completely crazy."

They made Northeast Rock light at 12:30 a.m. Sunday, Sept. 22, and John Trimingham, the Bermuda Honda dealer and friend of Shields', met them to guide them into St.George's Harbor. "John evidently had called up 10 of his friends and they had come out on the boat with him and they were cheering us," Shields says. "It was great."

Shields says he believes they could have cut another three hours off their time had they not routinely stopped to check the boat. Regardless, the two have won the Bermuda Challenge Cup, Stepler says, and their names are in the record books.

Reprinted----from Soundings,The Nations Newspaper
Vol. XXXIV,No. 6, Copyright 1996 Soundings Publications, Inc.