Inside Practical Sailor

There’s more than a little irony in the need to keep a fiberglass boat away from water. The reason revolves around chemistry and the...

Clip on your safety tether. Far out in the North Pacific, solo sailor John Campbell was about to face the kind of ordeal most...

Everyone hated the first generation of CARB gas cans. While they were intended to reduce volatile emissions by recovering vapors and reducing spills, they...

After nearly three years of sailing the Pacific in the 1980s with my family, land life in British Columbia became a placeholder—by 1999, the...

One of all-chain rodes most popular features among cruising sailors has little to do with anchoring-and everything to do with stowing. With a well-designed bow roller, windlass, hawse hole, and chain locker, your rode and anchor will deploy and stow belowdecks faster and with far less effort than nylon rode requires. But for a smaller boat without a windlass or deep chain locker, an all-chain rode is often impractical. Even cruising sailors who are perfectly equipped for all-chain anchoring often find that their nylon secondary anchor better is suited for some anchoring situations.

The basic design of the humble boat hook hasn't changed much over the years, but it has seen upgrades in construction and materials, along with some minor design tweaks. For this report, we set out to determine what constitutes the ideal boat hook. We evaluated boat hooks currently on the market and took a look at some old models still in service.

Your anchoring system is only as strong as its weakest component, which includes not only the rode, but also shackles, splices, mooring bitts, cleats - in short, any gear used to secure your boat while at anchor. Proper maintenance includes inspection of these as well as laying the rode out for thorough examination at least annually.

Sailing used to mean disconnecting from the everyday—for some, it still does. Days were spent watching the waves roll by, adjusting sails, reading books,...

Depending on the size of your fuel tanks, having a professional clean your tank and dispose of the dirty fuel can cost more than $1,000. But for the careful, competent do-it-yourselfer there is another option. For those sailors whose tanks have reached the contamination point-of-no-return, heres a helpful article on DIY tank cleaning that accompanied our July 2009 test of diesel biocides.

“Every once in a while people say we are crushing dreams,” explains Frank Gonzales of Gonzo Boat Recycling, “but we aren’t trying to crush...