SAIL.SailMagazine

Not everyone knows that you can use a Digital Selective Calling (DSC) VHF radio to call friends on other boats without using channel 16. It’s a great feature, particularly if channel 16 is very busy or if you want your call to be somewhat private. Here’s how it works.

If I want to call a friend on Jubilee, I select a working channel—channel 72, for example—and check to see

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Steering close-hauled in darkness is largely a matter of feel. As the boat falls off the wind, heel angle may increase. She'll start to slow down when she falls off 15 degrees or more below her best course. But when she luffs above the optimum course, she will come upright and lose some of her way before the sails begin to complain audibly. It's easy to feel the boat coming upright, so being high
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A single-line reefing system can have an advantage over systems that handle a mainsail's luff and leech separately. Probably the most important reason is that the single-line reefing operation can be done entirely from the cockpit, making a trip to the mast unnecessary. But when you use a winch on the reefing line, you must constantly watch for friction and chafe on both the sail fabric and the
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Have you noticed that it was easier to hoist your mainsail when it was new? This may be because the luff hardware (typically metal or plastic sliders or slugs) has become worn or deformed, causing excess friction. Chris Caldwell of Piranha Sails in Marblehead, Massachusetts, has a neat short-term solution that’s as simple as making a quick stop at the supermarket for a bottle of dish

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After we moved our boat to a new dock in our marina, we had problems getting under way. The docks on either side of us were much higher than those we were used to, and, because of the foot traffic on them, we couldn’t just put our relatively heavy lines on the dock and leave; we had to coil them and carefully place them on the dock before we could start backing out of our slip. Experimenting

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