Soon after I bought my aluminum cutter Lunacy it became apparent I needed to remove the heavy 20-year accumulation of hard antifouling paint from her hull. After I brought the boat from Florida to Maine all the old paint started flaking off in alarmingly huge chunks, presumably due to the dramatic change in water temperature.My initial plan was to soda-blast the boat down to its
Lewis K. Redmond of Plainfield, Illinois, asks:”We have an Adler/Barbour cold machine refrigerator, which is air-cooled with a small vertical evaporator. The ground wire and its retaining screw on the PCB board somehow were burned black. The technicians guess was that something must have been thrown across the terminals to have caused this burnout. What measures would you
Tom Kamlowsky of Salt Lake City, Utah, asks:”While sailing in San Francisco Bay last month, I contacted the Coast Guard on VHF channel 16. On receiving my call, the Coast Guard radio operator asked me to change frequency to channel 22. I changed both my Icom M304 and M34 radios to channel 22 and quickly found that I could not use the M34 because of interference from a
Harold Simpson of Dallas, Texas, asks:”I was replacing the solar fan mounted in the front hatch of my 1987 Hunter 23, and when I removed the hinge screws, I found clear water in the screw holes in the cabintop. I also recently developed a leak in the cabin roof, which appears to be coming through the mounting screws of a block on the port side of the mast. The water is
Elroy Schwartz of New Orleans, Louisiana, asks: “When I was learning to sail I was taught when reefing a mainsail (with slab reefing, that is) to first tighten up the reef line securing the clew and then take full tension on the halyard to tighten the luff and tack. When I reef this way on my current boat, which I bought used a couple of years ago, the foot of the sail gets
Doug Nicholson of Seattle, Washington, asks:”My 5-year-old, 37-foot sailboat has mild steel keel bolts, nuts, washers and channel spacers securing a cast iron keel. The bolts, nuts, etc. are all quite rusted. The shallow bilge has not been kept dry, and theyve been sitting in water for some time. How worried should I be? My surveyor suggested I just knock off all the
Ron Samuelson of South San Francisco, California, asks:”When the crane crew at my yard began lifting my keel-stepped mast out of my boat, the man below- deck hastily took a pocketknife and cut all the wiring free. Now the mast is back in place, and I have about a dozen loose wires going nowhere. Can they be spliced back together, or must the mast be
Frank Hague of Jersey City, New Jersey, asks:”I repowered my boat last year with a new Westerbeke engine that came with a 100-amp alternator with an external regulator. I also have a solar array and an Air Breeze wind turbine feeding juice to my house batteries. When the house batteries are full and I am feeding them power from the alternator, my tach needle will suddenly
Lee Andrews of East Hampton, New York, asks: “Ive had electrolysis issues on my Tartan 3800, so Ive installed a galvanic isolator, I deploy a zinc grouper whenever Im in a slip, and I use shore power only when I have to. When I hauled out last fall I could see my shaft zincs were far less corroded than in previous years, but paint continues to pop off my lead keel in
Hal Garner of Fort Myers, Florida, asks: “My mast doesn’t have sheaves for a spinnaker halyard, so I fly my asymmetric spinnaker on my second genoa halyard. I also bend the sail’s tack onto a line that runs down through a block directly behind the forestay to a winch in the cockpit. When tacking the boat, I handle the spinnaker the same way I would a genoa. However I’ve
It’s late May in Sweden, the sun is shining, and boats are launching. Sweden, with its thousands of miles of spectacular coastline and DIY culture,
It’s sometimes hard to wrap your head around all that’s evolved since 1851, when a syndicate of owners from the newly minted New York Yacht
The 2014/15 Volvo Ocean Race was the first sailing race that I ever tuned in for. I was in college at the time—hard to believe
I love quick and clear access to data when I’m racing. Even when I’m cruising, I enjoy running numbers through my head. In both cases,
For more multihull reviews and stories, subscribe for free to Multihull Power & Sail This winter, a young couple moved aboard a first-of-its-kind, fresh-from-the-factory Fountaine
There’s a scene in the movie Moana when Tala, the grandmother figure of Motunui, a fictional South Pacific island, is lying on her deathbed, speaking
Sometimes you draw the long straw with a boat test and get the chance for a multi-day delivery to really put the boat through its
Sometimes you add value to the boat, other times the boat adds value to you. Own a sailboat? Pete Van Hamersveld didn’t even know how
Some of the best gifts come in small packages. So it was when my sister-in-law asked me and my husband if we would race her
More and more, “smart” systems are becoming the norm on boats. Case in point, the Smart-Hatch, which swaps out the hinge and handles of a
