Inside Practical Sailor

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...

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...