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
Steve Hiss of North Kingston, Rhode Island, asks:”Ive installed a rebuilt M3-20 Universal diesel on my 29-foot Ericson, and Im wondering whether the new three-blade prop, which looks a bit too big, is correctly sized. When I put the engine in gear just above idle speed the boat moves forward quietly, but any increase in rpm produces a pulsing vibration under the back of
Ralph Manies of Seattle, Washington, asks: “Weve installed a new ICOM-802 single-sideband radio and now we want to test its DSC (digital selective calling) features. Whats the best way to do this?”Gordon West replies:First enter your MMSI number into the units memory and then hook up the second receive antenna to the DSC antenna
This spring, Ronnie Simpson was in California, helping U.S. Patriot Sailing suss out a Class40 that had just been donated to the nonprofit. He was
The schooner Bowdoin, built for Arctic exploration in 1921 at Hodgdon Brothers Shipyard in East Boothbay, Maine, is headed for the Arctic for the first time
Many professional races bill themselves as among the most difficult feats in sailing, but I would argue that the comparatively small and ragtag R2AK should
Good things come to those who wait, and sailing the HH44-SC confirmed the adage. Even under delivery sails—and only a main and genoa, at that—we
Against the backdrop of bustling ferries and commercial traffic on New York Harbor and saluted with spraying water from a New York City fireboat, some
Yacht design is an evolutionary process, built on the successes and failures of previous designs. Those that plied the trade before us provided guidance through
Forty years ago, the solid-state revolution, which gave us computers and a host of increasingly powerful electronic devices, reshaped boat energy systems in ways that
Here’s a photo that seems innocuous enough. We’re sailing along—my son, oldest brother, and husband, and me up forward behind the camera. It’s Boxing Day,
Plenty of magic comes out of the small town of Fredericia on the coast of Denmark. Quorning Boats, builders of Dragonfly trimarans, has set up
It’s mid-December, and I’m more than 3,500 miles from Cape Town, South Africa, bound for Fremantle, Australia, having—at the moment—too much fun. Indian Ocean conditions
