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Attainable Adventure Cruising

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Tips, Tricks & Thoughts:

safety

  • Slippery Deck Shoe Fix

    3 CommentsReading Time: < 1 minuteFree

    My Gill deck shoes were completely losing their grip. We are talking scary-slippery, to the point I nearly went on my ass, and overboard was a real possibility.

    We have seen this before. Seems like whatever material deck shoe soles are being made of these days, it develops a hard yellowy layer way before the shoe is worn out—shoe on right.

    We have tried sanding before, but with not a lot of success, so this time, in desperation, I took a grinder with an 80-grade disk to them—shoe on left.

    That fixed it, as grippy as new.

    Keep at it until the yellow is gone and wear a respirator, I can’t imagine the dust is good for us.

  • Safer Transom Ladder

    3 CommentsReading Time: < 1 minuteFree

    Our new-to-us J/109 has a robust transom swim ladder that could definitely enable someone who fell overboard get back into the boat, at least in smooth water.

    But check out the photo above: There’s no way for someone in the water, particularly wearing a lifejacket, to deploy the ladder unassisted. The angle is just wrong for that.

    So I made the modification in the photo below. Works a treat.

    I will be writing more over the next year about changes we are making to the boat to reduce crew overboard risk, in our Online Book on the subject.

  • No Position

    2 CommentsReading Time: < 1 minuteFree

    We were out sailing our new-to-us J/109 when I realized that neither of the default screens on the plotter or TZiBoat showed position. Pretty standard these days…and oh so wrong. Imagine a crew overboard and we need to radio for help, but first have to dig through a bunch of screens to find our position. Two minutes to fix (above photo), but worth thinking about.