Cruising Tips

We were maybe a quarter-mile from the mooring, motoring slowly home on a still summer evening, when the piercing bleat of the engine cooling-water alarm made us all jump. I looked over the side: Sure enough, the flow of water out of the exhaust had ceased.

The eternally fascinating mental exercise of choosing, equipping and organizing priorities on my ideal cruising boat has kept me awake on countless night watches over the last 30 years and 300,000 miles of bluewater sailing and coastal cruising. No matter where I sail or how ambitious my plans, there are a few things on my dream boat that are not negotiable.

Here are four inexpensive additions and upgrates from experienced cruiser Terry Kotas, who sails Cetus, a Fantasia 35.

Recently launched boats boast of high-performance, luxury and quality that sailing enthusiasts can’t miss out on. Think high-performance sub-30-foot racer/ cruiser multihull and you think trimaran. But the imminent arrival in the United States of the Rackam Wing 26 Xtreme could quickly change that.

It was a pleasant day in May when our family boarded Val-De-Ri, our Catalina 34. We were preparing to sail from our homeport in Bath, North Carolina, to Chesapeake Bay, a long-anticipated cruise. Little did we know that we were in store for a smoking engine, medical issues, a storm from the north, and an unintentional grounding.

On our Allied Seawind ketch we fly the national ensign from our mizzen topping lift, rather than flying it from a short staff on the rail under the mizzen boom where it would be at odds with the mizzen sheet.

Perfect O-shaped coils of rope look mighty nice when done up properly, and in many cases this is a fine way to make up and stow an idle line on a sailboat. But in some instances lines trained to coil down in ovals develop problems when working. This happens most often with lines that run through a multi-part tackle. If you coil the tail of a line that runs through a tackle in perfect ovals, you’ll soon find the line twists up in the tackle when you’re using it. Eventually you must unreeve the line from the tackle, untwist it so it runs fair again and then re-reeve it. To avoid this, you should coil the line in a figure-eight pattern when stowing it.

Inflatable dinghies are rough and tough, but their skin is thin. If your rubber duck leads a hard life, adding some protective padding in key spots will reduce chafe and help prevent the little boat from developing an odd list when least expected.

I lost at least 25 percent of the storage space in my galley when we installed our watermaker, because the only place it could fit aboard our cramped 37-foot sailboat was directly under the galley sink. Now I’m constantly looking for ways to save space in the galley. Here are a few of my favorites.

The night sky over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and Tunnel flashed white with lightning, like a silent artillery barrage. The storms were so far up the bay the sound of the thunder never reached Sonata, the 1981 Pearson 36 cutter…