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.
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.
How do you step the mast on your trailerable sailboat? With a gin pole? With the trailer winch? With the help of friends or family? With your fingers crossed? No single system works for every sailboat or for every skipper. If you’re new to mast stepping, you don’t like your current method, or you just want to simplify or speed up the process, this post is for you. I must warn you though, this is a long post, even for me. To make it as short as possible, I’ve included five YouTube videos that show how this system works. By the end of this post, you’ll know everything about how I step the mast on Summer Dance single-handed in minutes, even on the water.
Continue reading “How to Step a Mast Single-Handed With or Without Using the Boom as a Gin Pole”
In a previous article, I described how to rig a cruising spinnaker. If you don’t have a spinnaker yet, or even if you do have one but you don’t want to raise it for short runs, one of your best options when sailing dead downwind is to set your sails “wing and wing.” That is, with your mainsail eased all the way out on one side of the boat and your headsail eased all the way out on the other side of the boat. With both sails catching as much wind as possible, you’ll achieve top speed.
Continue reading “Use Your Boat Hook to Sail Faster Downwind”
Galvanic corrosion can happen when dissimilar metals, stainless steel and aluminum, for example, are in contact with each other, exposed to an electrolyte, and an electrical current is applied. That’s the technical definition. The layman’s definition is it’s the white stuff that grows around your stainless steel fasteners in your aluminum mast and boom when you are around salt water.
Continue reading “Beware of Galvanic Corrosion!”
It can be tempting to keep every possible item that you might ever need aboard your small sailboat. You know, Boy Scout style, ready for anything. But storage space is very limited and the more you keep aboard, the harder it is to find what you’re looking for. Getting organized below deck not only makes your sailboat more comfortable, especially for overnight trips, but it also makes your sailboat safer by eliminating clutter and excess weight.
Continue reading “Tips To Get Organized Below Deck”
Handheld GPS devices have been around for over 30 years now. If you have one but don’t use it for sailing or if you’d like to try using a GPS but don’t want to buy a more expensive, dedicated, marine GPS, then this is the article for you. I’ll share some of the tips and tricks that I use with my 20-year-old Garmin eTrex H to help me sail better. And I’ll show you free software that you can use to visualize your GPS data.
Continue reading “GPS Tips & Tricks for Sailors”
When I made my first canvas project, a mainsail cover, I cut out the pieces using scissors as usual. Later, when I made the cabin cushion covers, I discovered how much better a hotknife works for cutting synthetic marine canvas like Sunbrella. Instead of the edges unravelling, they fused solid. That not only makes them easier to work with and prevents getting pieces of thread everywhere, but it also helps to ensure that the seams won’t come loose after years of use and abuse.
Continue reading “A Hotknife for the Rest of Us”
It’s the holy grail of sailing, the one thing that is denied every sailor, yet they yearn and struggle for it anyway. I’m talking about pointing higher upwind. No matter how good of a sailboat you have or how good you are at trimming its sails, there’s a limit to how close into the wind you can sail and that limit can affect your course whether you’re cruising or racing. On a short course, it can mean the difference between one tack and two tacks to reach your destination or between 8 tacks and 12 tacks on a longer course. Every tack you make, you lose speed and time. Sometimes it doesn’t matter, sometimes it does. Continue reading “Put That Lazy Sheet to Work and Point Higher”
The $tingy Sailor 