Inside Practical Sailor

When you get to the surface, focus on floating and stabilizing your breathing. You are not going to be able to swim or do anything productive for several minutes, and as a cold water overboard victim, there is nothing you need to do for a minute or two. Focus on not drowning. If you have a PFD, that will be a huge help. If not, try to tread water with as little effort as possible. Calm down and realize you have some time.

Join Practical Sailor Editor-at-large Ralph Naranjo for a day-long Safety at Sea Seminar in Hampton Roads, VA on February 24th. The seminar is aimed at mariners of all levels and will cover navigation, heavy weather sailing, and man-overboard recovery. The cost is $130 ($150 after Feb. 1). The unique event is being in honor of Capt. Henry Marx, a respected safety-at-sea expert and frequent contributor to Practical Sailor.

Most recreational anchors are optimized for hard sand or clay bottoms, which provide much better holding than softer bottoms (or rocky or weedy bottoms, for that matter). This logical bias toward hard-sand bottoms might actually hinder anchor performance in soft mud. For example, one of the observations from our 2006 test of anchors in soft bottoms was that anchors equipped with roll bars performed far below our expectations in soft bottoms. But there was one exception.

The rope should be tightly coiled or tied in a daisy-chain, and then placed inside a pillowcase. Front-loading washing machines are recommended; an up-and-down motion is preferable to the rotary motion of most common household machines. Without coiling or daisy-chaining, a rope can turn into an impressive tangle. The pillowcase further restricts the motion of the rope and prevents the rope from wrapping around the central agitator, which can destroy ropes and break washing machines.

Sometimes it is not what has been added to your fuel that matters, but what is missing. Anywhere between 5 to 20 percent of the contents of a portable or installed polyethylene tank can vanish during the course of a year, the result of breathing losses and permeation. The remaining fuel is lower in octane, contains fewer of the volatiles that are so essential for easy starting, and has reduced solvency for gum and varnish. It often looks perfectly good, but is perfectly rotten and potentially harmful as fuel.

Practical Sailors search for longer lasting prop paints has led us down many rabbit holes, we've experimented with several different prop paints with varying degrees of success, although none of the results so far have been dazzling. Some of our testers have had better success with dedicated slick prop paints such as PropSpeed. In our testing, however, mostly in Chesapeake Bay, no prop paint had lived up to our increasingly faint hope that the paint repel growth as effectively as our hull paint.

In recent years it seems as if not a fall sailing season goes by without at least one presumably sound vessel and experienced crew running into trouble off Cape Hatteras. It is almost as if todays sailors are suffering a severe case of amnesia, causing them to forget that this stretch of water has rightly earned the moniker Graveyard of the Atlantic. Or perhaps this is just another example of how improved weather forecasting and state-of-the-art navigation and communication systems (not to mention distress signaling) has led us to become complacent?

The problem with survival suits is that theres no telling when the big wave or brutal wind gust will hit, and it may not leave time to don a survival suit. Some survival suits have sewn-in gloves that make it almost impossible to turn on the radio or deploy a personal locator beacon. Thats why wearing a comfortable, breathable drysuit makes sense. It leaves you much more ready to manage the boat in heavy weather. And should the unexpected happen, your odds of survival in the water are better than they would be in foul weather gear.

In our recent report on plastic tank repairs, we explore several different methods of repair, including heat-welding using commonly available welding kits. As that article points out, the manufacturers of these tanks do not recommend such repairs. However, our long-term tests of steel-mesh reinforced repairs of water and holding tanks (not fuel!) have so far been very promising.

Perhaps the best reason to touch-up or add a coat of varnish in the fall is to avoid having to do it in the spring, when you are anxious to get back in the water and have so many other critical tasks to carry out. But once your varnish work is done, what do you do with partially full cans that you don't want to go bad?