american promise sailboat

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American Promise

Specifications, homeport of american promise.

• Rig: Cutter
• LOA: 60′
• LWL: 60′
• Draft: 10′
• Rig Height: 89′
• Freeboard: 6′
• Hull: Airex foam core and fiberglass

American Promise was designed by Ted Hood, made famous by Dodge Morgan’s solo round the world voyage, and then used as an offshore sail training vessel for the United States Naval Academy. American Promise acts as the Rozalia Project’s mothership during our work addressing issues that affect ocean health in New England’s coastal waters and beyond.

• USCG Certification: Oceanographic Research Vessel (Subchapter U)
• Who Sails: Adults
• Program Type: Marine Science
• Normal Cruising Waters – Winter: Gulf of Maine
• Sailing Season: May-October
• Year Launched: 1985
• Number of Crew: 3
• Name of Contact: Ashley Sullivan, Executive Director
• Phone: 7862131685
• Website: http://www.rozaliaproject.org

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American Promise poised for new chapter

By Dodge Morgan

The sloop American Promise has been retired after 25 years of service as the flagship of the United States Naval Academy sail training fleet. She is the vessel I sailed around the world solo and nonstop in 1985-86.

The purpose of the academy sailing program is to engage midshipmen in an intimate and individually challenging relationship with the sea. There is no more effective teaching tool for these lessons than a sailboat, and Promise filled the role admirably. An estimated 300 midshipmen served extended tours aboard her. The boat competed in a dozen ocean races, made four Atlantic crossings, and showed the flag in dozens of foreign ports. She carried a crew of 10 to 12 middies and a sailing master.

On my watch, Promise completed the singlehanded, nonstop circumnavigation in 150 days, one hour and seven minutes, setting 13 solo-sailing records, including the fastest singlehanded circumnavigation under sail, nine days faster than Phillippe Jeantot’s 1983 record in Credit Agricole and 142 days faster than Chay Blyth’s nonstop record in British Steel. All of Promise’s records have now been obliterated, but she will always be the first American sailed vessel to round the world solo and non-stop.

Promise was designed by the inimitable Ted Hood, and built in 11 months in Marblehead, Mass. She is 60 feet overall, 56 feet on the waterline, and 17 feet on the beam. Her hull is glass and Kevlar over a core, and with eight inches of solid glass on the bow, as I specified, she should survive a collision with a container while sailing at eight knots.

Three men have been her major champions during her naval academy career. First was Commander John Bonds, who headed up the academy sailing program when she arrived and defined her eventual role. Next was Jack Reynolds, head of the academy small-boat service yard who refitted her after she was sunk in a collision with a loaded coal barge on Chesapeake Bay in August 1991. She was not holed in the collision, but was driven under the barge and hung up by her rig, then sinking in 45 feet of water 10 minutes later.

Reynolds, who surveyed the boat for the donation, has fallen in love with her almost incomparable strength. Her refit was a two-year project with bureaucratic delays adding another three years. The refit changes amounted to rig and interior layout. She was recommissioned in 1995, and took her shakedown to Bermuda in 1996.

At this time, she entered her most enduring and perhaps her second most intimate relationship (I must claim first there). Dan Rugg became her Sailing Master and served aboard as coach, disciplinarian, cheerleader, teacher to the teams of midshipmen assigned to her, and became her keeper and alter ego. I believe Dan and I are the two men who have found frustration by not figuring out how to consummate our relationship with her.

American Promise’s retirement from the United States Naval Academy closes her second life, a long and celebrated one, certainly. Her first life was with me, a short, intense, highly noted one for sure (she provided my “15 minutes of fame”). She has one more life coming to her I know. And I wonder who and where that will be?

After a two-issue hiatus, Dodge is back in action for Points East. Katy, bar the door.

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AMERICAN PROMISE: In-Mast Furling Pioneer

Here’s a piece of trivia from the Where Are They Now Department: American Promise , the Ted Hood-designed 60-footer that Dodge Morgan sailed around the world non-stop back in 1985-86, is spending the winter at Kittery Point Yacht Yard, just across the river from where I live. I cycled over during the weekend to pay her a visit and found her nicely buttoned up for the season.

I’ve been thinking a bit about Promise and Morgan ever since he died in September 2010, and the one thing that struck me most when I reviewed the boat’s design and original sail plan is that she had an in-mast mainsail furling system.

These days this wouldn’t be remarkable, even on a long-distance bluewater voyager like American Promise , but back then, over a quarter of a century ago, the technology was still more or less in utero. It surprises me that Morgan, a very cautious mariner who installed multiple back-up systems (e.g., two generators, two watermakers, multiple autopilots, etc.) all over his boat, was willing to take a chance on it.

Certainly he was aware of its potential for failure. In his original design brief for Promise , he mentioned the possibility of using such a system and was characteristically skeptical:

I have summarily looked at a stowaway main and was impressed by how simple to handle it all looked, how difficult it appeared to replace a blown sail, and how hopeless it seemed to consider my making a serious mechanical repair at sea. The only way I would sail with one is if there were tracks on both sides of the slot so that sails could be set the “old way” when the system fails.

Morgan in fact did have a Hood Stoway mast and main fitted on the boat and during trials the system failed spectacularly, with the sail jamming and the furling rod pulling partway out of the mast. In his book about the voyage ( The Voyage of American Promise , Houghton Mifflin, 1989), Morgan makes it clear that resolving the problem was a high priority prior to his departure, but he doesn’t describe exactly how it was resolved. Nor does he mention whether auxiliary sail tracks were in fact installed on the exterior of his Stoway mast, but near as I can tell from inspecting photographs of the boat and its rig they were not.

Having recently reread the book, I find no mention of the Stoway mainsail furler causing any problems during Morgan’s record-breaking 150-day circumnavigation, though it seems he did have persistent problems with his headsail furler.

We have certainly come a long ways since then. Indeed, in the past decade the concept of the in-mast furling mainsail has passed a tipping point of sorts. Where once it was decried as an unreliable abomination and an insult to the art of sailing, it is now becoming the dominant system on mass-production cruising boats. Some builders now even put them on their boats as standard equipment and charge extra to install conventional hoisting mains.

In-mast furlers have certainly been refined over the past several years and are now reasonably reliable. One unresolved problem, however, is that they can only be used with a fundamentally inferior sort of mainsail. Unlike headsail furlers, which demand no changes in the basic architecture of a headsail, in-mast furlers require that the entire concept of the Marconi mainsail be reinvented. Vertical battens, of course, help restore some of the lost area in the roach of a furling mainsail, but in fact I’ve never met a vertical-batten sail that was as efficient as a proper sail with horizontal battens. And most furling mains, of course, still have no battens at all and carry hollow leeches that make them simply atrocious air-foils.

Unfortunately, the nature of the technology involves a fundamental contradiction. The entire purpose of a modern Marconi rig–the reason we put up with all the highly tensioned rigging and extraneous hardware in the first place–is so we can fly very aerodynamic sails that improve performance, most particularly to windward. To take this already complicated performance-oriented rig and further complicate it by installing furling gear with many moving parts inside a mast, just so we can fly a sail that degrades its performance, is only self-defeating.

Leaving aside the question of performance, there are still other issues with in-mast mainsails. For one thing, because the sail track on the furling rod is located inside the mast, it can be difficult to bend on and hoist the sail. Some riggers I know estimate that about half those who own boats with in-mast mains feel compelled to hire a professional just to perform this simple job. This obviously is good news for riggers, but can be a real pain in the butt for owners.

Also, because the sail must feed through a relatively narrow slot in the back of the mast to reach the furling rod, some care is always needed when furling or reefing it. To prevent the sail from jamming in the slot as it rolls up, it is best that it be unloaded with little or no pressure or tension on the leech or clew. This ensures the neatest furl and makes for a flatter, better-shaped sail as it is reefed down, but it means the sail must be feathered into the wind as much as possible before turns are taken on the furler. To do this the boat may need to be turned to windward, at least to some extent, as the sail may otherwise get pressed hard against the edge of the slot as it enters the mast, increasing friction and hampering the furl.

Note too that this will be more of a problem on one tack than the other, as the sail will be folded hard against the leeward edge of the slot whenever it is being rolled on to the leeward side of the furling rod. Unfortunately, it is also most likely to be an issue when sailing off the wind in strong conditions, which is precisely when one would most like to be able to shorten sail without having to round up.

On the other hand, as Dodge Morgan found, there’s no denying these systems can be incredibly convenient and easy to use. Personally, I’d say that for larger boats, starting at about 45 feet, they do make sense. And the larger the boat, the more sense they make. A large boat like American Promise with a long waterline and more inherent speed potential to begin with can better suffer some degradation in performance than a small one. On a large boat with a proportionately larger rig the ability to handle sail more easily is also proportionately more valuable. Finally, being forced to round to weather sometimes to reef or furl a sail is both safer and less intimidating on a large boat than it is on a smaller one.

On smaller boats–certainly on any boat where a conventional mainsail can otherwise be hoisted, handed, and reefed by a single person–I feel strongly it is best to stay away from in-mast mainsails. Here the increase in convenience is relatively slight compared to the loss of performance.

Getting back to the WATN Department: I see from googling around a bit that American Promise is now being used as an environmental tool. As of last year she was the mothership of the Rozalia Project , which is dedicated to finding and removing trash from the marine environment. According to the project’s website, the boat is now “packed full of underwater garbage hunting technology, she has 2 VideoRay ROV’s (remotely operated vehicles) capable of diving down to 1000ft, equipped with a Blueview imaging sonar, manipulator arm, Tritech’s Starfish sidescan sonar for imaging the ocean floor and a Lynn box for making fuzzy images sharp.”

I note, too, however, that she no longer carries an in-mast mainsail.

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Many fond memories of working on and sailing AP. I was the 1st person to disassemble AP’s mast after Dodge sailed around the world. That was about a year after USNA got the boat. Also sailed AP to Bermuda, Newport and trans-Atlantic from Annapolis to Brest France over the Flemmish Cap. Great times.

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The 'american promise'.

Rachael Miller's life changed forever when she took a vacation to Matinicus Island.  A nor’easter had washed piles of trash up along shoreline. Repulsed, Miller said she couldn't take it anymore, so her husband suggested she do something about it.

A million pieces of trash later, Miller and her team of scientists and interns scour the coastlines and waterways for marine debris.

In three years, the Rozalia Project has become a nationwide organization dedicated to protecting the environment through action, technology, outreach and research.

The Rozalia Project recently visited Ocean Point Marina in Boothbay to welcome the public aboard the American Promise , a rugged 60-foot sailboat armed with a remote operated vehicle, (ROV), surfboards and two furry Newfoundlands.  

In four days, curious onlookers were treated to a formal presentation, trash hunting demonstrations and even a sea chantey entitled “We're Sick of Seeing Garbage in the Ocean,” sung by the lively crew.

Miller said she acquired the American Promise from the United States Naval Academy, but it was no ordinary sailboat.

The American Promise had belonged to Dodge Morgan. In 1986, Morgan became the first American to sail solo around the world in 150 days without stopping. He broke the previous world record by 142 days.

Miller reconfigured the interior and had the vessel outfitted with an Austrian diesel engine, a clean, energy-efficient system capable of pushing the 75,000-pound vessel at 9 knots through the water with just a gentle purr, said Mark Naud, the project coordinator and a friend of Miller.

“It's just a great platform to do the work they're doing, and it supports the staff and the floating laboratory that (Miller) wants,” Naud said.

On the water the Rozalia Project crew uses nets and hooks to pick up trash on the ocean surface, while relying on sonar imaging, and their underwater robot named “Hector the Collector” to roam the sea floor, send images back to the crew, and collect garbage with its mechanical claw.

Miller said the most common trash collected includes plastic bottles and containers; however, other bizarre items hauled over the railing have included an old ship’s bell, an antique bottle of moonshine, a witch hat, fake buttocks and traffic cones.

Every single piece of trash collected is documented and entered into the Rozalia Project’s databank.  

According to her research, Miller said 80 percent of marine debris comes off the land; and since land people tend to congregate in cities, the Rozalia Project operates mostly in urban and coastal waterways up to 100 miles offshore.

“When we’re near shore we tend to get items that are more intact,” Miller said. “It’s a lot easier to pick up a bucket, while it’s still a bucket.”

Miller said she calculated a five-gallon plastic bucket turns into 10,000 pieces of plastic smaller than 5 mm in diameter, called microplastics that flow into slowly churning garbage patches called ocean gyres.

Rozalia Project’s first mate and scientist Marina Garland said there are five major gyres spread throughout world’s oceans. Garland said last year she visited the North Pacific Gyre, a patch of marine debris which people falsely claim to be a floating island of trash, twice the size of Texas.

“It’s not a floating island, it's actually a lot harder to research, and hopefully not impossible, but at present, it’s impossible to clean up because it’s really spread out,” Garland said. “You can’t take a picture, and you can’t fly over it and see it. It’s more like plastic chowder with lots of chunks and really teeny bits.”

Another gyre exists in the North Atlantic ocean, prompting the Rozalia Project to collect data to better understand how and where trash accumulates off the coastline.  

Miller said her hypothesis for “Mission Atlantic” is pinpointing high concentration areas off the Gulf of Maine where cooler and warmer waters converge with faster and slower moving currents. “That’s where trash accumulates,” Miller said, as she displayed a chart modeling their initial findings.

The Boothbay Sea & Science Center invited the Rozalia Project to the region as part of the center's inaugural program.

Center Director Pauline Dion said Miller and crew plan to return in the fall to work with local teachers to raise environmental awareness and further education in the ocean sciences.

For more information on the Rozalia Project, visit www.rozaliaproject.org .

For Boothbay Sea & Science Center schedules and course registration, visit www.boothbayseaandsciencecenter.org.

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Dodge Morgan: First American non-stop circumnavigator

Dodge Morgan, former Air Force fighter pilot, working journalist and successful entrepreneur, first dreamed of sailing solo non-stop around the world in the 1960s. Morgan spent a couple of years living aboard his 36-foot schooner, Coaster, and sailing from New England, through the Panama Canal to Alaska. He loved the experience, but it wasn’t until the early 1980s that the dream of his circumnavigation got some traction. Having achieved financial independence by selling his electronics company for a reported $35 million, at the age of 52 Morgan found himself ready to tackle his dream.

Up until Morgan’s effort in 1985, there had been no American sailors who had completed a non-stop single-handed passage around the world. There were American circumnavigators, the most famous of course Joshua Slocum, but his and other circumnavigations done by American sailors always had ports of call.

The last non-stop circumnavigation had been completed 15 years previously by British sailor Chay Blyth aboard the 59-foot British Steel. In that effort Blyth spent 292 days sailing from west to east against the prevailing winds. Morgan wasn’t looking to make a westerly passage. He did want to sail the 27,000-mile voyage in 180 days or less. That meant an average speed of 6.25 knots. Morgan writes that though setting a record was something he had thought about, the trip itself was the thing: “Although I do have the record-making time of 180 days as an objective, my fundamental purpose is most certainly not the record book.”

Morgan hired Ted Hood to design and build a 60-foot fiberglass cutter. Hood designed a boat for Morgan that was meant to be comfortable and safe-speed was not the first consideration. “Let’s make things redundant,” writes Morgan of a conversation he had with Hood and “boy, did we make things redundant.” Morgan wanted at least two of everything on American Promise so that if something broke, he wouldn’t have to fix it. The boat was outfitted with two complete sets of sails (14 in all); two rudders (one retractable); four electrical power sources (two diesel-powered generators, the engine, and a propeller-driven water generator as a final backup); 3,000 pounds of batteries to store that power; 60 circuit breakers; two autopilots; two satellite navigational systems; two machines to convert salt water into fresh water; two 60-gallon water storage tanks; 13 winches; five 200-gallon fuel tanks; five watertight bulkheads; and three bunks. American Promise, all 30 tons of her, was a high-tech, state-of-the-art, $1 million-plus sailboat. From the cockpit Morgan could furl or unfurl the sails with the touch of a button.

Morgan was only the 4th person to circumnavigate non-stop. He made the passage in a record-breaking 150 days one hour and six minutes, completing the voyage on April 11, 1986. His average speed was 7.13 knots.

After the record-breaking passage, Morgan donated American Promise to the U.S. Naval Academy. It was involved in an accident in 1991 in the Chesapeake and sunk as a result. The Navy refloated the vessel and it continues as a cadet sailing vessel. Morgan bought an island in Maine and lived there until his passing in September 2010. Of interest is the book he wrote called The Voyage of American Promise. It is a primer on all the information that Morgan collected about the circumnavigation. Very useful information for someone who might to want to follow in his shoes.

Morgan considered himself a competent celestial navigator and did noon sights three times weekly. He never mastered star sights and relied both on his noon LANs and the fixes he obtained from the pre-GPS satnav system.

Let us join Morgan aboard American Promise as he rounds Cape Horn on Feb. 28. His DR at the time of LAN is 56° 04’ S by 67° 45’ W. The Hs of a lower limb shot of the sun is 41° 41.6’.

A. Calculate the time in GMT of LAN.

B. Reduce Hs to Ho.

C. Calculate latitude.

A. Time of LAN at DR in GMT 16:44.

B. Ho 41° 53.7’.

C. Latitude 56° 01.2’ S.

By Ocean Navigator