Get the Best Out of Your Furling Headsail
March 14, 2013
Getting set for the first sail of the season? Here’s a quick guide to getting the best out of your furling headsail.
Getting set for the first sail of the season? Here’s a quick guide to getting the best out of your furling headsail.
For many people, sailing across the Atlantic falls into the same category as climbing Mt. Everest. Even among serious sailors, a transatlantic crossing is not something to be taken lightly.
Anchoring involves more than dropping a chunk of metal overboard and fastening your boat to it. The best way to improve your technique is through practice, but this can be hard to come by if your boat is often on a mooring or dock.
If it’s true that gentlemen never sail to weather then what the hell am I doing here, I wondered as my knees slammed into the foredeck at the trough of yet another wave.
Like most sailors, I have accumulated a wide range of boat-related clothing over the years. And also—like most sailors, I suspect—I still possess almost all of it.
Keen on making the leap to ocean cruising, but not sure where to start? The World Cruising Club is offering a two-day Ocean Sailing Seminar in Annapolis, MD, on March 23-24 to help you prepare.
I love this time of year. In Wisconsin, April is when people prep boats to go back in the water. It has been a long, hard winter of reliving last year’s races at the bar, reading magazine stories about other people sailing in warmer weather, visiting ocean racing websites and yearning. And now it’s time for the northern sailor’s rite of spring: getting ready to launch.
The first bareboat I ever hired in the Virgin Islands, many moons ago, was from a small hole-in-the-wall charter outfit with a rather motley fleet of vessels.
At 74 years old, Sven Yrvind wants to save the world. When I ask him how he plans to do it, his answer is simple: circumnavigate in a ten-foot sailboat. If—or rather, according to Sven, when—he accomplishes this, he will have skippered the smallest boat to circle the world.
The wind was too light to sail, so we started out motoring. Soon, however, my buddy’s motor started heating up. The access hatch was buried under camping gear, and he didn’t want to investigate right then, so he shut his engine down, and I took his boat in tow.
The saying “Nothing goes to windward like a 747,” is one of my favorites. I actually once took a 747 upwind, retracing my earlier downwind
If you missed the first installment, click here. The hull and deck of Shirley Rose had been repaired, but what kind of sailboat would she
The Mini Transat is a roughly 4000-mile course that comprises two legs— Les Sables D’Olonne, France to Santa Cruz de La Palma in the Canaries,
In 1975, as a senior at Harvard, the question for Chicago-area sailor Mike Jacker became what to do next. The answer, as related in his
With a start planned for February 21 in Antigua, the famed 600-mile Caribbean race is back. The course circumnavigates 11 Caribbean islands starting from English
The fully crewed, round-the-world Ocean Race has experienced tremendous change over the years. From the 1993 transition to a one-design fleet to an ever-shifting route,
We’re currently outfitting and refitting our Swan 59, Icebear, for the upcoming, round-the-world Ocean Globe Race (OGR, oceangloberace.com) in 2023, a reenactment of the early
NOAA and Saildrone Inc. have teamed up to pilot five new saildrones in the Atlantic to gather data that will improve the understanding of hurricanes.
There is something almost mystical and more than a little eerie about scuba diving in the deep ocean, hundreds of miles from land and a
