Even when your anchor is well designed and ideally matched to your boat, there are four common factors that can cause an anchor to drag: poor bottom, short scope, insufficient shock absorption, and yawing. Each of these reduces the holding capacity of the anchor, and they are additive. That is to say that any one of them can ruin your day, solving only one or two of them does not ensure good holding, and the more problems you solve, the better you’ll sleep.
Systems & Propulsion
After settling on the material, one of the most basic mainsail design questions is whether to have an attached foot or loose-foot. A sail with an attached foot, secured to the boom with a bolt rope or sail slugs, has a small advantage in area, while a loose footed sail is easier to...
Belowdecks & Amenities
The human body runs on electricity and if you overload the nervous system with an external field, everything goes haywire. Every year several people die because they go swimming near a dock, a wiring fault creates an electric field in the water, and their muscles freeze. It is...
Belowdecks & Amenities
We often get this question. “My car has air conditioning when I’m running down the street so why can’t my boat?” First, your car only has air conditioning when the engine is running, which works out fine because we only need air conditioning when the engine is...
June 24, 2019
The widespread use of Dyneema and similar high-strength, high-tech lines presents a slippery problem for the knot-tying sailor, especially if they are tying a gripping hitch. A gripping hitch is the knot you would use to tie one line to another (or itself) when you don’t want the line to slip. Here's a look at some of the gripping hitches that we've tested for holding ability and ease of tying.
19%
12%
60%
9%
