Inside Practical Sailor

While you don't have to be an incurable sail-tweaker to cover ground on a tradewind passage, assuring your mainsail is well-trimmed will put you safely on the hook sooner and ensure a smoother, more comfortable ride. Good mainsail trim, of course, is paramount when going to windward.

In advance of a recent summer coastal cruise, we downloaded eSeaChart navigation app, the first iPad charting program to work with Active Captain, a free service that requires registration. It cost $8 and took only a few minutes to download the charts needed for the cruising area-from Tampa to Ft. Myers, Fla.-including detailed harbor charts. One thing I liked about the charts was that they were raster charts, nearly identical to the government versions that appeal to my analog brain. Redraw rates were a little slow, as a result, but at sailboat speeds, this isn't a major issue.

Practical Sailor was recently invited to check out a custom Fastwater 52 sailing cat. The invite was prefaced with the explanation that the boat is a Practical Sailor posterchild of sorts, outfitted with electronics, hardware, and other gear that has survived PS testing and garnered our recommendation. How could we turn down an invitation like that? Our dockside tour did not disappoint.

Were seeing several errors creep into owners manuals. Many of the mistakes seem to be the lost-in-translation variety, but others seem to be just poor writing, or sloppy editing. As General Motors' recent recall demonstrates, mistakes in an owners manuals can have costly-possibly dangerous-ramifications.

Whenever I feel like contemporary yacht designs are losing touch with their raison d etre, these are two of the books I turn to.

Last months report on fast-dissolve toilet paper took on a new significance this past week as we began testing Sealands Vacuflush toilets, toilets that literally suck waste into the holding tank. The chief advantage of the Vacuflush system is the reduced requirement for water for flushing. These units required very little water to flush, but this also makes it harder for toilet paper to dissolve.

I can feel it. This will be a very big summer. The solstice still lies ahead, and look what the year has brought us already. The Americas Cup slips into San Francisco. Brad Van Liew sashays into La Rochelle with a clean sweep in the Velux 5 Oceans around the world race.

This is a sad story about a sailboat accident that didn't have to happen. Apart from the obvious problems with a night-time adventure (likely involving alcohol) with 10 people on a 22-foot sailboat, a couple of details caught my attention.

I've always admired adventurers in small boats. If I were to trace my sea addiction it would likely be to Kon-Tiki, a book that fell into my hands as a boy. So I was happy this month to get the chance to spend some time aboard Kevin Jeffrey's Norseboat 21.5, the sort of craft that inspires small boat adventures. In fact, two Royal Marines were so taken by Jeffrey's Norseboat 17.5, that they sailed one through the Northwest Passage.

In keeping with this blog's theme of offering a glimpse of what's going on "inside" Practical Sailor, this post-our second since we've revamped the new website-will offer a brief introduction to who is behind these missives. Most of the posts from the old Inside Practical Sailor blog have been transferred over here, but a few entries, including biographies of other crew at Practical Sailor have not. We'll find a home for these at the Practical-sailor.com soon.