Boat Maintenance

In a stick-built boat, a shipwright builds piece-by-piece the interior furnishing—lockers, berths, settees, etc. The interior structures on contemporary boats, by comparison, are often...

Don’t ask an adhesive to do more than it can. If a bolt breaks, we accept it as deterioration or faulty design, not a...

However you choose to use your scarce time, we’ll wager that you’d rather not spend it removing bottom paint. If you are an owner of an older boat with a decade of accumulated hard bottom paint that is flaking and cracking, now is a good time to start weighing your options for removing the old paint. Should you do it yourself, or hire the professionals—or a bit of both? Our experts break down the different approaches to removing old antifouling and the compare the estimated costs of each.

Rock-solid deck hardware installation begins with a tightly sealed core. Installing new hardware on a cored deck means sealing the core around every penetration. Skip...

Prior PS bottom paint testing focused on saltwater locations in Florida and Massachusetts. This time we’ve moved our testing racks to the brackish waters...

Six years ago (“Marine Sealant Adhesion Tests,” published November 2016) Practical Sailor began exposing samples of marine sealants to weather and sunlight to compare...

Spring and fall on the Chesapeake Bay delivers cruising at its best. Last fall, we were ready to go, the crowds were gone, along...

A dockside expert told me that larger objectives made binoculars brighter, and that his optical view was actually brighter than ambient conditions. The problem...

Small boat sailors are plagued by a lack of storage space, and nowhere is this pinch felt more dearly than dinghy storage. Transportation to...

One of the “never-evers” of boat building is to use high density polyethylene (HDPE) as a backing plate or load bearing spacer, but the...