Two 21-foot Hobie Cats thread South America's only natural river link, GPS spoofing stacks a dozen ships at a phantom point off Poland, and a lithium bank fails ten days into high season

Eighty-three videos from 67 channels spread across 13 cruising regions this week. The fleet published a Brazilian coastal hop that ended with miracle berries, a diesel-electric catamaran deciding whether to rip out its propulsion system, and a crossing of South America on two Hobie Cats lashed together through mosquito country.

Hashtag Sal analyzed a 1994 expedition in which Adriano Plotzky and three crew crossed South America on two 21-foot Hobie Cats, threading the Casiquiare canal 0:49 — the world's only natural link between the Orinoco and Rio Negro basins — to avoid portage. One boat surrendered its mast for a custom mosquito-proof canvas tent 1:32 that became sleeping quarters and galley, rafted nightly to its sister hull. With no official river charts, the team steered by 1994-era GPS and paper maps 2:11, their 200-liter fuel limit forcing them to bargain for gasoline in remote settlements and navigate conflict zones near the Colombian border. Seventy-five rainforest days brought them to Belém, where they faced a decision about the final thousand miles to Natal.

Sailing Florence closed the Polish coast near Kaliningrad only to watch the chart plotter stack a dozen commercial ships at a single phantom point — GPS interference and AIS spoofing 0:14 that forced the crew to fall back on radar overlays and visual lookout 2:27 rather than trust the electronic feed. The 38-footer pressed on to Hel Marina 7:17 on the tip of the Hela Peninsula, found berthing with a helpful harbour master, then sailed sixteen miles across Puck Bay to Gdansk Central Marina, threading active shipyards before anchoring off Sopot beach.

Sailing Yabá sailed north from Paraty to Ilha Grande, dropping the hook in Saco do Céu where shelter behind tall hills turns the sea to mirror-calm water 7:16 — a reprieve along an otherwise exposed coast. After a fuel stop in Angra dos Reis the crew walked inland to see stingless native bees 8:42 and sample miracle fruit that flips sour to sweet, then hiked from Vila do Abraão across the island to ruins that tell a darker story 18:04.

Vagabond Voyages rode out 40-knot squalls 0:56 at anchor in Vanuatu that spun the boat 180 degrees mid-breakfast, an unwelcome surprise in what should have been settled July trade-wind season. The crew traced the chaos to a La Niña pattern warping the usual forecast models, the kind of volatility that turns high season into a guessing game when shore services are days away—ECMWF and Access both showed instability where predictable weather 3:52 normally prevails. A short three-mile motor shifted them to sandy holding before the next front, the anchor extracted clean from its week of rocky bottom and the chain marked with scraps of tricolor flag at forty-meter intervals.

Sailing Doodles spent ten days tied to a dock in Koh Samui 0:30 while their Island Spirit 525's lithium system threw fault after fault, eventually tracing the trouble 8:50 to one bank in the six-battery array. Technicians isolated the bad bank 9:15 — disconnecting three batteries and reconfiguring the charge cycles — and brought enough power online to sail again. Bobby now plans to discuss 10:30 with Island Spirit whether to pull the electric drive entirely and replace it with traditional Yanmar diesels and a generator, trading the hybrid promise for offshore reliability.

The week was bigger than this — the fleet kept filming long after the issue was full. Project Brupeg welded a custom winch mount 2:12 across two roof ribs of a Cairns trawler, while Wildling Sailing grounded on an oyster bank 12:39 threading the Lisbon estuary to reach a boatyard. Every one of these videos, and everything filmed before them, is indexed and searchable in plain language at sailing.directory.