Maintaining Belt Tension
July 24, 2014
One day I discovered the romantically named Belt Tension Jack. Suddenly belt tensioning not only lost all its emotional tension, it even acquired a certain elegance.
One day I discovered the romantically named Belt Tension Jack. Suddenly belt tensioning not only lost all its emotional tension, it even acquired a certain elegance.
If you had told my wife, Mindy, and me 28 years ago that someday we’d be sailing from Florida to the Bahamas and back in a boat little bigger than a dinghy, we wouldn’t have believed you. Back in 1986 when we began dating, the most adventurous thing we had done together on the water was sailing on the Hudson River in Wet Feet, my leaky 13-foot wooden dinghy.
Just before sunset, nine hundred nautical miles from shore, three sailors and a dog jump into in a four-person liferaft as waves crash around them. For four hours they bail water by the gallon, surrounded only by a vast and encroaching darkness.
John D. Macdonald, through his iconic character Travis McGee, observed that one thing never goes wrong on a boat. Instead, things go wrong in threes.
There are two reasons for leaving a scrap of genoa unfurled when you’re not sailing.
Sailing makes the news when there’s a disaster. The rest of the time, thousands of small boats traverse the oceans in safety, carrying hundreds of families with young children.
Sailing is often about the adventures you have and the people you meet, and this could not be truer for the participants of the 2014 DelMarVa Rally, which wrapped up on Saturday, June 14, in Annapolis, MD, with an awards ceremony and party for the cruisers.
One of the joys of cruising is that it enables us to visit extraordinary places, places we may not have even heard of were we not cruising: places like Selvagem Grande, the largest of Portugal’s Ilhas Selvagens, or Savage Islands: population two humans, one dog and 40,000 very noisy seabirds
On board any cruising boat, charts and guides are pivotal for route-planning. But have you ever thought about how those guides are created? We checked in with the co-authors of an ICW cruising guide to get the skinny on guide-writing and ICW cruising.
I’m not sure what madness made me decide to fix our generator myself. Maybe I was feeling especially talented that day. Or cheap. Or downright insane. Back on land, I would never try to penetrate the mysteries of our furnace—I didn’t even change the filters myself. But life aboard changes you.
They had sailed nearly 3,000 miles over the worst the Atlantic had to serve up, crossing from Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (in Spain’s Canary
Don’t confuse helming a boat with steering a boat. Put it this way—you steer a boat when towing a waterskier or maneuvering around a marina
The America’s Cup’s attempt to expand access and training opportunities for future Cup sailors is taking shape in the form of the Women’s America’s Cup
After years of hard work, The Sailing Museum has now officially opened in Newport, Rhode Island. Located in Newport’s historic Armory Building, the museum offers
Offshore racing in the Caribbean is a relatively new concept. In years gone by it was deemed unsafe to even sail at night in the
It’s not often that sailors get a chance to put their rescue and MOB training to the test, rarer still that they do as quickly
The first thing you notice when you look at the sailplan for the Farr 65, Falken, which Mia and I recently added to the fleet
Where does an old VO70 go to retire? Right back to the racing circuit, apparently. This spring saw a remarkable contingent of Volvo Ocean Race
With 2,000 miles of coastline, 270,000 islands and seemingly countless bays and inlets, Sweden is truly a sailor’s paradise. One of the top sailing destinations
Strong winds and a brutal sea state made for record-breaking conditions for a least some of this year’s Newport-Bermuda Race fleet. However, these same conditions
