Having capitulated, here’s how to raise the waterl...
September 25, 2026
Circumnavigating Vancouver Island provides stiff sailing, natural wonders, and kind locals. Issue 135: Nov/Dec 2020 Years ago, after decades of sailing the Salish Sea, my wife, Carey, and I decided we...
No halyard? No bosun’s chair? No problem for this crew. Issue 135: Nov/Dec 2020 It was a warm July day when my crew and I set out from Chesapeake Bay aboard Sequoia, our modest but trusty 1977 T...
Sailing seemed over, till an old friend returned. Issue 135: Nov/Dec 2020 “Sailboat for sale. $400.” The ad caught my attention: just what I was looking for, and the price was right. “It just ne...
Edson Marine clearly has an eye for what the market needs, adding to its products a garden hose connector fitting made by Banjo, one of the best-known manufacturers of this style of fitting. It’s an i...
In my experience, quick-release fire extinguisher mounting clasps are cheaply made and easily broken. Bungee cord can solve part of this problem, but it eliminates any quick-release capabilities. A be...
Issue 135: Nov/Dec 2020 Marvin Creamer, a New Jersey geography professor who became the only known person to circumnavigate the globe without any instruments whatsoever—not even a timepiece—died in Au...
Issue 135: Nov/Dec 2020 At Highland Yacht Club in Toronto, two of the last three years’ sailing seasons were cut short by months due to high water levels. It was the same for all Lake Ontario sailors....
Issue 135: Nov/Dec 2020 When I think about my friend, Larry Pardey, I picture an old cowboy crossing the open range and coming across a barbed-wire fence. Though he cuts it in disgust and drives his h...
A simple elevator system enables top efficiency for depth sounder transducer. Issue 135: Nov/Dec 2020 If you haven’t run aground, you haven’t sailed the Chesapeake,” is a common refrain among those wh...
Even a small boat can teach big lessons when it comes to abrupt, discontinuous change. Issue 135: Nov/Dec 2020 Ellen and I have owned our 12-foot catboat, Finn, for 16 years. We love how the working c...
Bolted boltrope? Try this handy harpoon to retrieve it. Issue 135: Nov/Dec 2020 Many good old boats (and newer boats with laminate sails) feature mainsails that attach to the mast via a boltrope in th...
Working alongside shipwrights shines a new light on hands-on. Issue 135: Nov/Dec 2020 Not long ago, as I was combing through the employment want ads, one job leaped from the page. A shop that speciali...
“There you are! Are you out for a sail, or out for a swim?” With these thoughtful words, a fellow club member sailed by us in his Laser. We were indeed swimming, next to my swamped open-hulled ...
In the August edition of The Dogwatch, we published Janie Meneely’s wonderful poem about Nasty Nell, the mermaid who was not to be gotten the best of by two hungry sailors. Here, Meneely revisits the ...
Offense Taken While I appreciate the idea of the umbrella for creating easy cockpit shade (“Cockpit Umbrella,” September 2020), as a 40-years veteran of the Navy, I take offense at your statement that...
“We are inching toward the middle of nowhere,” reads an entry in Michael’s log of the cruise of Juliet, a CSY 44 sailboat that is carrying the Partlow family of four through the San Blas Islands of Pa...
Time to Winterize If you live and sail where it gets really cold, you know about winterizing your boat. But did you know that insurance companies insure against freeze/thaw damage? And that coverage m...
Laura S. Wharton’s debut novel The Pirate’s Bastard, is set in colonial America in the first half of the 18th Century. This was an exciting place, especially for a young, ambitious man like Edward Mar...
It’s been said that the most useless things aboard a sailboat are an umbrella and a Naval officer. However, sometimes that’s just not completely true. Cruising in New England, I would ofte...
I wonder how many sailors secretly long for a relationship with, or owning or at least experiencing, a wooden boat. Though most sailboat owners nurture fiberglass craft, my guess is that deep down ins...
More Drones Drones are everywhere, and here is a use case that might make a lot of sense. Imagine a Remote Controlled Lifebuoy. That’s what the folks at OceanAlpha are calling their new water rescue d...
More Words on Electrification I have read through the reader letters in response to your question about electric propulsion and I want to offer one more point that I think was addressed only tangentia...
Maybe you’ve found the exact boat you want and have the money to pay for it, but you don’t have the free time to bring it home. Maybe you dream of cruising far from your home port, but you have only a...
Sam rushed on deck to meet us as we rowed across the still starlit patch of water between our two boats. “Hey, good to see you two. When’d you get back? How was your delivery job? Climb on board and m...
Being able to get the sail cover on quickly means we don’t have to resent the time it takes to protect our sails. Just as important, if a halyard starts slapping the mast just when we are starting to ...
I guess we could sense trouble even before it started. The 35-foot sloop was making a downwind approach into the crowded mooring area, its engine running, a spray dodger in place so the helmsman had a...
Steering chains lurk unloved, out of sight, in one of the toughest environments on the boat, a constantly damp bilge. And steering failure ranks near the top of the list of reasons why boats are aband...
Marlow Blue Ocean, as far as I know, is the first dockline made entirely from recycled bottles. Though counterintuitive, plastic water bottles are made from the same polymer used to make virgin polyes...
Cleaning a fouled diesel tank started with polishing some dirty fuel on the fly. Issue 134: Sept/Oct 2020 Aboard our 1984 Moody 47, diesel is the elixir of electricity, and electricity is what drives ...
