How To Measure Standing Rigging Tension
Whether or not you’ve replaced your standing rigging, you may be wondering how to adjust it. How tight should the rig be? How can you measure it? After all, what good is great rigging if it isn’t tensioned properly to perform its best?
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Upgrade Your Galley With An Electric Water Pump
The first mate didn’t care much for the original water pump in the galley of Summer Dance. She uses a lot of water for making coffee in the mornings, sponge baths, or to wash her hair. Pumping that much water by hand with the tiny, manual pump was more trouble than she wants to take when we’re cruising. And she let me know about it. Every cruise.
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How To Cross-Sheet For Better Single-Handing
Single-handed sailing can seem like playing music as a one man (or woman) band sometimes. You have to do everything yourself and play all the instruments simultaneously. If done well, it’s poetry in motion. If done poorly, it can be a train wreck.
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How To Add a Draft Stripe To a Sail
This project is a companion to my previous projects, How To Add Numbers To a Sail and How To Reproduce a Class Insignia On a Sail. If you’re getting started in club racing or if you just want to get the best performance out of your sails for cruising, draft stripes can help. A draft stripe makes it easier to see how small adjustments in sail trim affect the shape of your sails and therefore, how air moves over them. A draft stripe can help you to optimize the amount of lift your sails produce in different wind conditions and become a better sailor. Becoming a better sailor means you make more efficient use of your time when cruising and have more fun. And if you race, better sailors sail faster.
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How to Refinish Your Aluminum Propeller
Is the propeller on your outboard motor looking a bit worse for wear? Is the paint chipped and is corrosion setting in? It could be time to refinish it before it’s too far gone.
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Choose Your Running Rigging Colors Logically
When we purchased Summer Dance, she had an odd assortment of line colors, mostly the original equipment, run of the mill white with a blue tracer. But the main sheet was white with a red tracer, the jib sheet too, and the genoa sheet was white with a black tracer. None of the colors gave you a clue as to what a line was used for. The halyards in particular were difficult to tell apart unless they were in their proper places.
After you know your sailboat so well that you can sail her in the dark, colors don’t matter, of course. But when you have crew onboard that don’t know your sailboat so well, they need all the help they can get to identify your lines.
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Make a Door for More Storage Under the Galley
Is there ever enough storage space on our little boats? Maybe if you only day sail. But if you anchor out much, particularly over long holiday weekends or longer, no. Your first mate will probably let you know about it like mine. Often. Yet there is a lot of useful, if difficult to get to space, for example, under the galley. The challenge is to make it easier to use. No doubt, Catalina Yachts left out access doors to this and other spaces in the cabin to keep costs down.
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Turn Scrap Lumber into an Outboard Motor Stand
My most essential tool for working on my outboard motor is its stand. Without it, maintaining my 80+ pound, 8 HP Yamaha 4-stroke would be like a wrestling match.
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Remove and Prevent Mildew for Pennies
This guest post is from Drew Frye and first appeared on his blog, Sail Delmarva. Drew also tests products for Practical Sailor magazine and writes for other magazines like Good Old Boat. He graciously agreed to let me reproduce his article here.
The great myth of boat ownership—other than believing that everything takes 3 times as long and costs 4 times as much as you expect—is that mildew is ubiquitous. No matter how leak-tight, no matter how well maintained, it is always there. Well, I disagree wholeheartedly, and I challenge anyone to find any in my cabin. How have I dodged this scourge?
The $tingy Sailor 