Make holding-tank chemistry work in your favor Iss...
March 12, 2026
Red sky at night, sailors’ delight. Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning. This little ditty is pretty useful, and the author of Marine Weather Forecasting knows it also; it’s short...
When we go to sea in good old boats, we go to enjoy the romance of sailing. In the preface to The Annapolis Book of Seamanship, John Rousmaniere says that to enjoy the romance fully, we must have R...
If I had to come up with an alternate title for this book, the only one that could do it justice would be Zen and the Art of Sailboat Maintenance. It has all the same elements: an epic journey, intell...
This is not your typical how-to book, as the title may suggest. While there is a well-presented discussion about rigging your canoe for sail, the author takes the reader on a brief romp through the hi...
Hal Roth is perhaps best described as an adventurer — but not the foolhardy type. Hal is also a storyteller extraordinaire. Fortunately for him and his wife, Margaret, who has supported his many...
Break. Break. Break. Staccato, rushed and emphatic, the words punched across the airwaves . . . “My wife’s gone . . . I was off watch and just got up . . . I don’t know what happened...
As a child growing up in Maine, one of my early memories was seeing the immense J-class boat, Ranger, sailing on Casco Bay. Gary Jobson’s annotated treatment of newly recovered photographs of Am...
In 1991, when Details of Classic Boat Construction first appeared (published by W.W. Norton), I rushed to get a copy. I wasn’t disappointed. Larry Pardey and his wife, Lin, built their cutter, S...
Dan Spurr, editor of Practical Sailor magazine, has written the book good old boaters (indeed, perhaps the world) awaited. Heart of Glass is the text that belongs on good old reference shelves everywh...
Charles and Corinne Kanter have taken a look at equipment needs and checklists, put them together with some personal cruising stories, and come up with a book that makes for interesting reading. Admit...
This is not a book about boat construction; it’s a book about using epoxy resin in boat construction. The value of this book lies in the background of its authors. These people are chemists. The...
San Francisco is one of the top tourist destinations in the world. What better way to see the city and its environs than from your own cruising yacht? Bob and Carolyn Mehaffy, using many photos, chart...
Lovers of sailboats, the shapes of their hulls, and the shapes of their sails (no matter how many masts or how the sails are cut) . . . people who are caught immobile in contemplative reflection at th...
A book like this comes around rarely. It reads like a gothic novel but has all the research and facts of a court presentation. It is a true story, but its truth may be instinctively denied by the read...
Don Casey wants to make electricity as simple as possible. So in Sailboat Electrics Simplified, part of the International Marine Sailboat Library series, he omits extensive theory and keeps his explan...
It is nice to see a story about an older boat and one rich in history like Tristan Jones’s Sea Dart. I have followed some of Jones’s writing and knew he was quite an adventurer, one who ha...
To some modern navigators the admonition: “Do not rely on a single source of navigation” means they are safe with a second GPS receiver aboard. I remember one night sailing down the East A...
People who love to sail tend to dream. Any body of water, fresh or salt, and a little time on one’s hands can provoke compelling fantasies. Dreams played a significant role in the decision of Ch...
“You know, especially now, that life does not exist to be fair. It throws us obstacles to our well-being, as it’s supposed to. Who we are depends on how we handle those obstacles, how we d...
A camera is probably the only tool that Dee Carstarphen and her husband, Stu Hopkins, don’t use in telling the tale of a trip down the Intracoastal Waterway. Dee’s book, Narrow Waters: An ...
I purchased my good old boat at the end of the 1997 sailing season. As a first-time boat owner I knew that what I didn’t know was what I needed to know the most, but I didn’t yet know what...
It may be an oxymoron, but Tom Dove’s book, The Cruising Sailor, is a great little book. Its 133 pages are only 8.5 by 5.5 inches but full of helpful ideas and information. The author’s ai...
In The Seaworthy Offshore Sailboat, John Vigor offers a hands-on guide to the evaluation and upgrading of a production fiberglass boat for long-term bluewater cruising. He shows what to look for, what...
If you ever wondered what life is like on a sailboat during a passage at sea, this is a real-life account of the interaction of a family of four: the husband, an experienced son of a sailor; the wife,...
Reese Palley has written about things he knows — sailing, people, and art. His sailing books are: There Be No Dragons, Unlikely People, and Unlikely Passages. There Be No Dragons gives the wanna...
At 33,000 feet over the Atlantic, I look down on a cloudless day and imagine someone on a small sailboat living and dreaming down there. It is one of those days when my “eight to six” has ...
Readers of Good Old Boat know Mary Jane Hayes as one who captures the beauty of boating eloquently in vibrant pictures. We print these photos to remind ourselves why we’re doing all this work on...
Illustrated Sail and Rig Tuning is a little book which takes on a big job. Since it’s 9 1/2 by 6 3/4 inches and 80 pages, we had to wonder. The book is intentionally small and of high quality pa...
Most readers of Good Old Boat are likely to have a good old sense of adventure. Quite a few will harbor dreams of striking out to distant horizons aboard their less-than-state-of-the-art vessels. Shac...
When I made a career change requiring I move to Philadelphia, I had to decide where to live. My home was more than 100 miles away on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Despite the relative proximity, I ha...
