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Ask Sail

Repairing Deck Dings

When someone drops a winch handle, spinnaker pole or outboard shaft on a fiberglass deck, it will sometimes produce a minor ding in the gelcoat

Ask SAIL: Noisy LED Lights?

A DIN WHEN DIMMING Q: I just purchased an 18ft roll of amber/white flexible LEDs to light up our cabin down below. They are plenty bright

Ask SAIL: Repairing Deep Gouges

DEEP GOUGES Q: While on a night passage aboard my boat, I struck an unidentified floating object. It did not penetrate the inner laminate, but

Ask SAIL: Serious Battery Drain

SERIOUS BATTERY DRAIN Q: While sailing on a friend’s boat we noticed what we thought was excessive voltage loss overnight. The vessel has five 8D

Ask SAIL: True Colors

Q: The electronics at my nav station rely on the old NMEA 0183 protocol for sharing data. I can’t seem to find my original wire-color

Ask SAIL: Disappearing Zincs

Q: The prop shaft zincs on my Cal 33, which I keep in a marina on Long Island Sound, have been disappearing rapidly for a

Ask SAIL: Too Much Weather Helm

Q: When the breeze builds above 16 or 17 knots my 31-footer gets hard to handle and has significant weather helm. The autopilot does not

Ask Sail: Tachometer Gone Wild

My sailboat is equipped with a Yanmar diesel. Often while motoring, the tachometer suddenly pegs out beyond the highest value. At these times there is no change in the engine itself; it is not racing.

Boat under shrinkwrap

Selecting a Marine Pro

Note: This story is excerpted from SAIL Contributing Editor Christopher Birch’s upcoming book The Four Seasons of Boat Maintenance—a compendium of lessons learned during his

Squalls at night are no joke, but good preparation will get you through safely. Photo courtesy of Andy Schell

Storms & Sea Stories

The wind built faster than it was forecasted to. We ate dinner with full sail, close-reaching on a building SSW’ly breeze. Before dark we had

Photo: Lisa Smith Molinari

A Charter Passage Rewritten

Sailing on a schedule is famously a recipe for disaster, but on charter you don’t have much of a choice. The adventure is what you make of it. 

Photo: Zuzana Prochazka

Tahiti Revisited

After a long absence, one sailor finds herself sailing the waters of her youth and contemplating years of change in all its forms.

C1_SAIL_0526_Final-01-may-2026

May Issue Preview

Spring is in the air and warmer weather is right around the corner. Get ready for the season with SAIL’s adventure issue! Through the Eyes

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