Tips, Tricks & Thoughts:
Tips
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Get Sticky and Go Home
6 CommentsReading Time: < 1 minuteMembers
Read more: Get Sticky and Go HomeI will clean this up…tomorrow. While we are on the subject of fun you can have with epoxy—see the last Tip—here’s another. Login to continue reading (scroll down) Learn About Membership Get to know us for FREE Username Password Remember Me Forgot Password
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We Can Never Have Too Many Gloves
8 CommentsReading Time: 2 minutesMembers
Read more: We Can Never Have Too Many GlovesI have been doing a bunch of work on our J/109 with epoxy resin lately. Nothing structural, just mounting some hardware, and improving the mounting for a couple of turning blocks. Stuff that requires replacing core and bonding backer plates. This kind of work involves handling things covered in epoxy and then handling tools…and then […]
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Source For Custom Jacklines
8 CommentsReading Time: 2 minutesFree
Read more: Source For Custom JacklinesWe have long advocated for jacklines made of heavy Dacron webbing, but in recent years it has been difficult to source them already made up. But now there is a new vendor offering custom jacklines. One suggestion, I would not use their Jackline Assembly, consisting of a shackle and cover. The problem with this approach, […]
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AAC Menu Improvements
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Read more: AAC Menu ImprovementsAs happens with any new site design, I’m improving a bunch of little things to make the site easier to use. The latest around the menu: Sticky Menu This design (and the old) have a sticky menu that appears only when we scroll up. The idea is that if we realize we are in the […]
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Q&A—Weather Information In The Southern Hemisphere
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Read more: Q&A—Weather Information In The Southern HemisphereQuestion Member Terence asked: When we went to Polynesia, we used Predict Wind. We could get weather in all latitudes. Next year we will again be sailing south of the US Pacific Ocean Prediction Center maps. Need I again use Predict Wind to get what I need? Someone asked the same question about the south […]
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Just What The World Doesn’t Need
51 CommentsReading Time: 2 minutesMembersRead more: Just What The World Doesn’t NeedI generally don’t get political around here, and we have a rule against that in our comment guidelines, but sometimes a situation is so egregious that I simply can’t keep my opinion to myself: Login to continue reading (scroll down) Learn About Membership Get to know us for FREE
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An Interesting Sailboat Electrical System Upgrade Case Study
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Read more: An Interesting Sailboat Electrical System Upgrade Case StudyScuttlebutt have an interesting two-part story about upgrading the electrical system in a J/105. Worth a read, even though this is a racing boat. To me the takeaways are: All useful, but the biggest takeaways are: Much more on electrical system upgrades:
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How To Blow Up Your Alternator
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Read more: How To Blow Up Your AlternatorAnytime I write about batteries and charging someone is bound to bring up one of the clever gadgets that fool a stock alternator into charging at a higher current for longer without resorting to external regulation. Some of these gadgets, particularly the VRC-200 from Nordkyn Electronics, are undoubtedly very clever—here’s another one I wrote about. […]
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Plumb Bows Are Just Another Rule-Caused Fashion
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Read more: Plumb Bows Are Just Another Rule-Caused FashionThis bow may look old fashioned, but it works. An exchange between Matt and member Charlie in the comments to Matt’s excellent article got me thinking about the latest design fashion to draw boats with plumb bows. Login to continue reading (scroll down) Learn About Membership Get to know us for FREE
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Dark Mode at AAC
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Read more: Dark Mode at AACMember Charlie R suggested in a comment to a Tip about the new AAC site design I’m working on that it incorporate dark mode. Initially I was skeptical because there is no consensus among web site experts that dark modes do anything useful, and I have always believed, as many web designers do, that the […]
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Tap Adapters
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Read more: Tap AdaptersWhile we are on the subject of tap wrenches, here’s another cool way to drive a tap: tap adapters. Login to continue reading (scroll down) Learn About Membership Get to know us for FREE
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Versatile Tap Wrench
6 CommentsReading Time: 2 minutesFree
Read more: Versatile Tap WrenchI’m always on the lookout for tools that will work well on a boat without taking up too much room or adding too much weight. At first glance this looks like any other tap wrench, but look closer and we find: The build quality seems OK and the price is surprisingly reasonable. I got mine […]
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Check The Siphon Break
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Read more: Check The Siphon BreakThe engine on most sailboats is installed at least partially below the waterline, consequently, with most exhaust systems, the only thing preventing the engine from flooding with water after it stops is the siphon break installed at the highest point in the raw-water cooling system. That’s bad enough, but the other problem with siphon breaks […]
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Cool New Winch
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Read more: Cool New WinchOne of the most important advances in sailing hardware in my lifetime was the self-tailing winch. If you came to sailing after these came on the scene you will not fully appreciate them, but, trust me, suddenly having both hands free to put our full weight on the handle was game changing, particularly for shorthanded […]
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Another Reason To Buy an Electric Outboard
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Read more: Another Reason To Buy an Electric OutboardThanks to an article by Eric Klem, and to a lesser extent one of mine, we all now clearly understand how bad weight in the ends of the boat is for sailing performance. What’s this got to do with electric outboards? While thinking about a new outboard for our J/109, it just struck me that […]
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How I Know Drag Is Bad On An Offshore Sailboat
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Read more: How I Know Drag Is Bad On An Offshore SailboatWe just published another article on the importance of keeping drag low on our offshore sailboats. Some may wonder why we make so much of this? Here are two (of many) reasons, which got cut from the article to keep the length reasonable: #1 Fixed Props Suck Back when I had my Fastnet 45 I […]
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Four Winter Layup Tools
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Read more: Four Winter Layup ToolsI don’t think any boat owner would argue with the statement: Moisture is the enemy of boat reliability and gear longevity. And that goes double when the boat is laid up over the winter. The above photo shows four useful tools in the battle against damp. Starting from the left: Davis Air-Dryr 1000 Davis call […]
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Cool Boat—Dragonfly 40
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Read more: Cool Boat—Dragonfly 40I don’t generally put a lot of weight on magazine Boat Of the Year competitions, but I think Cruising World got it right picking the Dragonfly 40. I haven’t seen a 40, but I have drooled over the web site pages and videos and I was very impressed with the Dragonfly 28 when I was […]
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Why Cheap Boats Are Not Inexpensive
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Read more: Why Cheap Boats Are Not InexpensiveAn irrational drop in price makes a boat cheaper. A rational drop in price makes it more expensive. Originally Gautam Baid about investments, modified for boats by me Never truer words were said. Refits almost always cost more than the purchase price of the boat, often double or more. And worse still, the money we […]
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Great Weather Product
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Read more: Great Weather ProductThe good folks over at the Ocean Prediction Center have a feature on their weather-maps page to cycle through weather maps for the last 3, 7, or 14 days. A great way to study how systems are moving and evolving over time in the area we plan to cruise or the ocean we plan to […]
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PredictWind Unlimited With GO! Exec Better Than I Thought
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Read more: PredictWind Unlimited With GO! Exec Better Than I ThoughtA few weeks ago I wrote a Tip pointing out that the “unlimited” air time package for Iridium GO! exec was not actually unlimited and therefore I recommended staying with the truly unlimited package available on the original Iridium GO!. I have now dug into this in a series of emails with Craig and Matt […]
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Beware AI-Generated Weather Maps
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Read more: Beware AI-Generated Weather MapsI have repeatedly recommended looking at forecaster-generated weather maps, as well as GRIBs, to get an overall understanding of how weather systems, and particularly fronts, which are not drawn on GRIBs, are developing. But wait, lately some of the GRIB-viewing tools have added AI-generated fronts. So can we now not bother to go through the […]
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Beware Lithium Battery Sales
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Read more: Beware Lithium Battery SalesIn the last few weeks I have been getting a series of emails from Battle Borne aggressively promoting sale pricing on their lithium batteries, see the above. As far as I can see, these are batteries that don’t have any way to communicate with external charging sources or even a way to inform you that […]
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Life-Threatening Seasickness?
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Read more: Life-Threatening Seasickness?I was very sad to read of the recent death of a crew member on the Salty Dog Rally. According to this article by Don Street, the cause may have been, at least partly, dehydration from seasickness. And Don suggests how that could possibly have been avoided: a seasickness medication delivered by suppository. Based on […]
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Wind Generators Can Be Dangerous
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Read more: Wind Generators Can Be DangerousA few weeks ago I wrote an article on renewables in which I opined that the days of wind generators are, for most cruising usage profiles, over. Too much windage, too much noise, in return for less generated electricity, particularly when it matters, than many people believe. The interesting thing is I got surprising little […]
