Seamanship

Here is Part 2 of John’s tips on how to decide which old salts to listen to, as well as how to decide between conflicting opinions expressed by experienced voyagers.

Blindly following the teachings of old salts, no matter how experienced and well meaning they are, can lead to poor gear choices and big mistakes once out there. But how do we decide who to believe or between two conflicting opinions? John has ten tips that even the most inexperienced offshore sailor can use to make that easier.

“Things are different now” is a mantra on “Morgan’s Cloud”. And never more so than now, as John and Phyllis try and act their age.

It’s always easier not to fix our boats right, and using the excuse that everyone does it like this is a tempting way to excuse doing extra work and spending more money, but the sea does not recognize excuses.

John muses on why doing basic seamanship tasks, like moving heavy weights safely and efficiently using only the boat’s own gear, are so satisfying…and why the practice is important too.

Seamanship is a word that gets bandied about all the time in the cruising community. But what does seamanship really mean? John and Phyllis get a hard real-world reminder.

No matter how long you have been around boats, there’s always something new to learn.

John tells a story about an exceptional seaman, and what we can all learn from it about the seamanlike way to make decisions.

Learning to tie knots quickly is a vital seamanship skill. But the good news is that you only need to learn five simple knots.

I’m constantly amazed by the number of accepted “facts” about offshore sailing that, when subjected to rigorous analysis, turn out to be wrong. Here are 20 such myths.

We start this Online Book with a list of important seamanship rules.

I suspect that this post is not going to make me popular, but I’m seething about what’s happening with these rallies and offshore voyaging in general, so here goes—brace yourselves. What the heck is going on here? As I understand it, 116 boats were registered in the Salty Dawg Rally and at least five of [...]

We offshore sailors tend to throw the word seamanship around with gay abandon, but what does it really mean? I have been thinking about that a lot lately. Here’s my definition.

I have got to the age where I’m comfortable with my bad habits and so the standard New Year’s resolutions hold little interest for me—I’m simply not giving up whisky* or chocolate. But as a voyaging sailor, I know that forgetting the basic rules of seamanship can be the slippery road to disaster. And even after [...]