Inside Practical Sailor

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...

When an anchored boat spins, the anchor chain twists, and the anchor can come up backward. One solution is an anchor swivel, but failures with some poor designs are a concern-a lovely stainless swivel on one of our test boats had an interior crack that became visible only when disassembled. And as we found in our most recent test, many swivels arent very effective at reducing twist due to the inherent friction in the swivel.(see How Well Do Swivels Reduce Twist, Practical Sailor March 2016 online).

With all the talk about a record El Niño coming this summer and climate change generally leading to more severe storms, we all need...

Yawing is the result of imbalance between windage (you want it aft) and underwater resistance (you want it forward). If the center of windage...

Anyone who has spent a night pitching in an exposed anchorage would not be shocked to learn that in many dragging incidents the snubber parted, or was stretched to its limit, allowing the chain and boat to absorb some teeth-rattling shock loads before something finally gave. Recently, PS testers have devised a series of tests to determine what the ideal snubber looks like. Some of our findings run contrary to popular assumptions. Some will surely surprise you, and may even-one day-save your boat. What does your snubber look like?

The sailing season is here again and everyone is doing their spring checks. Something that is often overlooked are the alarms that may one...

The 1666 London Fire. The 1871 Chicago Fire. The 1906 San Francisco Fire. Common factors shared by all of these disasters were inadequate spacing...