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I have been thinking about safely a lot lately. I guess that stands to reason, given that I’m in the middle of a series of posts on person overboard prevention—not to speak of the fact that I had a very nasty accident a few months ago—and, up until a couple of days ago I was [...]
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Grippy soled, well-protected sandals One thing we have a ban on aboard Pèlerin is going around the decks with no shoes. Stubbed toes can easily be badly damaged, as I found out one night in a pitch-dark harbour when another yacht announced that they were coming alongside by the simple expedient of slamming straight into the [...]
Staying safe on deck needn’t be an eyesore. Question: What’s one of the easiest ways to sustain a serious injury on a yacht? Answer. A fall. Question: What’s one of the easiest ways to prevent that happening? Answer: Decent non-slip everywhere! So why is such a simple way of staying safe so often ignored? When [...]
At the beginning of each working season we used to take our old boat out on a really breezy day and push the boat hard to check that everything was in good working order. Whilst we had run through our winter maintenance schedule with great care, winter always seemed to find a chink in our [...]
The winter we spent in London England living on Morgan’s Cloud at St Katharine Haven next to Tower Bridge, was wonderful. We walked all over the city and soaked up the history and culture. And the pubs…wow!
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Question [Edited for brevity]: We have been upgrading the safety equipment on board our boat and are thinking of installing radar reflectors to amplify and enhance the radar signal we create to alerting oncoming vessels of our position during offshore sailing in bad weather and heavy seas. The Echomax Active-XS-Dual Band reflector seems very good, [...]
We are really careful about getting our liferaft serviced each year. So back in the fall we contacted Raymond Harvey at Air-Sea Safety and Survival Inc, here in Charleston, South Carolina, where we are spending the winter.
When we were formulating our long-term list of places to visit during our cruising life, the Pacific northwest was high on our list. And having spent Christmas and New Year on the shores of British Columbia and Vancouver Island, we can confidently say that as a cruising ground it has now gone well up the [...]
One of the many things that attracted John and I to each other is that we are both gimped. John has one leg shorter than the other and a slight scoliosis and I have congenitally flat feet and knock-knees. John walks like a duck and I walk like a penguin. It is a match made [...]
There is so much about this story that worries me that it is hard to know where to start. A single-handed sailor abandoned his boat because he was totally exhausted from three days of hand steering, not because there was anything wrong with the boat.
Long gone are the days when sailors could drift with the wind and the tide, without worrying about the demands of bureaucracy. It’s now a rare country that doesn’t impose limits on how long foreign sailors can stay, with the added requirement in some jurisdictions (the U.S. for example) to phone in whenever you move [...]
After nearly 20 years of going North, our decision for 2010 was to head South in search of new horizons and the sun. Last year in the Hebrides was wonderful, but when the weather broke in August we were glad to move on, and we know we’ll be back one day.
Fire blankets are a great idea, particularly to smother a grease flare-up in the galley without the mess of a dry powder extinguisher, and we have long carried one on Morgan’s Cloud; however, it was bulky and ugly and so was relegated to a locker up forward, much reducing its effectiveness in a fire where [...]
We spent a month taking care of Polaris, a sailboat wintering over on the west coast of Greenland. Before he left for home, Michael (owner of Polaris), Phyllis and I talked about managing risk, particularly as it related to falling overboard into the sub-freezing sea water there.
It has been something of a culture shock to be back in Cornwall, where the volume of boat traffic is on a completely different level to the western isles of Scotland. Up there other yachts really are few and far between, whereas sometimes around the Falmouth area we may be altering course for another yacht [...]
Question: What are your views on the Portland Pudgy as a “proactive” life raft?
Question: What sort of life raft do you have on Morgan’s Cloud?
Question: Do you carry survival suits and do you do anything special for working in the dinghy? I’ve seen ice suits, and all sorts of combo work/survival suits and we are wondering if we should carry something similar for the wilder areas?