Install Midship Cleats and Dock Like a Pro
What’s the sailing maneuver you’re worst at? If it’s not tacking and gybing, it’s probably docking, especially if you sail single-handed or short-handed. Sailboats aren’t very maneuverable in tight spaces. If you don’t do it frequently enough to get good at it, it’s sort of a semi-controlled crash landing. You can make the process a lot easier, safer, and more predictable with this easy, cheap upgrade.
Make This Boom Tent: the Poor Man’s Bimini
It’s a cloudless mid-summer afternoon. You’ve had a great day of sailing but you’re ready to drop anchor, start dinner, and relax for another stunning sunset. You’ve been in the sun all day so some shade would be great but you don’t have a bimini on your sailboat. You don’t really want to go down into the cramped cabin yet. The first mate will be making dinner and you’d just be in the way.
So You Just Bought Your First Sailboat—Where Do You Begin?
Photo courtesy of Dianna Keen at These Days of Mine
You’ve fantasized about it, you’ve looked, you’ve shopped around. You crawled in, under, and around a bunch of sailboats that other people wanted to get rid of. Finally, one grabbed your imagination more than any other. In your mind’s eye, you could see yourself as its proud owner and in command of its sails and rudder. You made the decision and you brought it home.
Quick and Simple DIY Turnbuckle Boots
This project is one of the easiest you’ll ever do to your sailboat. There’s no epoxy, painting, drilling, wiring, or splicing involved. If you can saw through a piece of PVC pipe, you can do this job. Heck, this might be a good project for a junior crew member to work on their stingy sailor skills!
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How to Rebuild an Outboard Motor Water Pump
If you’ve already read 15 Outboard Motor Maintenance Blind Spots You Can’t Afford to Miss and discovered that your outboard motor’s water pump (#7 in the list) is one of your maintenance blind spots, then this post is for you. It’s also for you if you didn’t read that article and you don’t have a clue how to maintain a water pump.
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Handy and Cheap Line Hangers
When I first started sailing, I stored all my unused lines, sheets, and cords in a large plastic bag in the starboard lazarette. I knew there was a better way to organize them, but I hadn’t seen it yet. First, I came across some teak line caddys. And while I liked their design and the fact that the teak would look at home in Summer Dance, they wouldn’t afford a lot of storage for the amount of space that they would occupy. In a C-22, you have to maximize every cubic inch.
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How to Rig a Cruising Spinnaker in 4 Stingy Stages
If you don’t have a spinnaker for your sailboat yet, aren’t you a little envious of those big, colorful, billowing sails you sometimes see at your favorite cruising spots? Nothing says, “Yeah, we’ve got this!” quite like a racing or cruising spinnaker. It’s as though the sailboat is puffing its chest out with confidence and strength. No wonder it’s called the fun sail.
In this post, I describe the strategy I used to get started with an asymmetrical spinnaker. You can use the same strategy with a symmetrical spinnaker but the cost is higher due to the required whisker pole and its control lines.
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Sew This Jib Sock to Protect Your Furled Headsails
If you install a cruising furler like I describe in Headsail Furlers For the Trailer Sailor and you don’t also add sacrificial cover strips to the leech and foot of your headsails, those edges of your sails will be constantly exposed to UV sunlight and the weather and will deteriorate much faster than the rest of the sails. Having a sail loft add sacrificial strips can be expensive, particularly if you have it done it to multiple sails, say, your jib and a genoa. An alternative solution is to make this DIY jib sock. You can use it to protect whatever sail you have on your furler and at a fraction of the cost of sacrificial strips.
Take Heart, Have Faith
This is my annual Christmas message in which I share a bit about my faith and I don’t apologize for it. I’ll return to posting the usual content in the next post. If reading this post would offend you, then … Continue reading Take Heart, Have Faith
The $tingy Sailor 