Take Control
Gary DeSanctis, President of the AIM Marine Group, the parent company of this magazine, bought a new boat this summer, a 24-foot Jeanneau NC 795 with a pilothouse and a single outboard. DeSanctis spends lots of time at the helm of a variety of vessels, most of them larger, often much larger, than his Jeanneau. But he discovered that, like many outboard and single-screw inboard boats, the pocket-sized Jeanneau can be a handful to maneuver in close quarters: The boat’s shallow draft and light weight make it skittish in a crosswind; to complicate things more, DeSanctis’ berth is alongside a floating dock, tucked between two other boats, in an area of strong tidal currents. Bottom line is, the wind, the current and the limited room for error frequently made docking maneuvers unduly thrilling.
Rather than limit himself to using the boat only on calm days at slack tide, DeSanctis decided to install a bow thruster. It’s no longer the 20th century, when thrusters were only for
