How to Rig a Self-Tacking Jib for Free!

You may not have seen or even heard of a self-tacking jib before. They’re usually only found on luxury sailboats. But that’s exactly what one is, a headsail that sheets itself when you tack. You don’t have to cast off the working sheet and haul in the lazy sheet on every tack. In fact, after you set it up, you don’t have to touch the sheet again while sailing. You just push the helm to lee, come about as you normally would, and the jib passes through the fore triangle by itself and stops on the new lee side at the same sheeting angle as it was before the tack. I set one up for free and you can too.

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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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Quit Spending Setup Time on Turnbuckles

Turnbuckles are great for tuning your rig but they’re the least convenient way imaginable to loosen and detach the forestay and lower shrouds for unstepping the mast. I vowed long ago that I would quit wasting time on turnbuckles during setup and tear-down.

This post is a companion to my previous post How to step a mast single-handed with or without using the boom as a gin pole. I mentioned quick release levers in that post and you can also see them in use there, but they need more explanation together with the other topics in this post.

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The Complete Beginner’s Guide to Winch Maintenance

The winches on your sailboat are the workhorses of your rig. They do the heavy lifting and make your job as skipper easier so you can enjoy the ride. They’re also the most expensive hardware aboard so it only makes sense to take good care of them. In this post, I describe how they work and how to maintain them in peak condition. If you’re a beginner to winch maintenance, this post will bring you up to speed with the savviest captains.

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