Liferafts For Cruisers—Positioning and Mounting
Reading Time: 10 minutes
Figuring out where to mount and how to secure a liferaft can be one of the most vexing problems in offshore boat preparation.
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Starting With The Basics On A New-To-Us Cruising Boat
Reading Time: 9 minutes
Colin continues the story of making a basically sound, but nearly half-a-century-old, boat ready for sailing. Vital reading for anyone buying a used boat.
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Going Up The Mast—More Improvements
Reading Time: 9 minutes
Further refinements to the mast climbing system we figured out last year. Even after 50 years of climbing masts, we are still learning.
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John’s Tips Tricks and Thoughts—May
Reading Time: < 1 minutes
12 posts this month, including a couple of interesting questions answered and an important heads up about radars.
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Liferafts For Cruisers—40 Years of Real-World Experience
Reading Time: 12 minutes
John shares which raft he and Phyllis would buy for various cruising scenarios and why.
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Nine Autopilot Usage Tips and Hacks
Reading Time: 12 minutes
So far in this series we have got deep into the technical weeds of how autopilots work, and how to make them work better. Now let’s look at some simple tips, several of which will help with vane gears too.
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AAC Is 20 Years Old
Reading Time: 6 minutes
The story of our two decades of writing and publishing about offshore voyaging.
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Liferafts For Cruisers—Purchase Criteria
Reading Time: 8 minutes
It’s tempting to just shop for the “best” liferaft, but it’s way smarter to think first about why we are buying one.
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John’s Tips Tricks and Thoughts—March-April
Reading Time: 2 minutes
I got so absorbed in writing the recent Adventure 40 and autopilot articles, as well as winding up the two-winter refit on our new-to-us J/109—tell-all coming soon—that I completely forgot the March heads-up about new Tips Tricks and Thoughts posts. Anyway, over the past two months I have written 25
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How To Tune An Autopilot To Steer Better—Part 2
Reading Time: 10 minutes
How to set gain, counter-rudder, and trim to make an offshore passage faster and more comfortable, and save battery, too.
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Finding and Buying a Dream
Reading Time: 10 minutes
Now Colin and Louise have found and bought their new boat, the real work begins…but they got the basics right. Here’s how.
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Adventure 40 Deck-2.0
Reading Time: 13 minutes
Maxime and Vincent have been hard at work over the last couple of months refining and improving the Adventure 40 deck design. Let’s take a look.
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How To Tune an Autopilot to Steer Better—Part 1
Reading Time: 12 minutes
We can make a huge difference to comfort, speed, and electrical use by manually adjusting our autopilots.
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Autopilot Buyer’s Guide
Reading Time: 14 minutes
How smart and expensive an autopilot do we need for offshore shorthanded cruising? Lots of options. Here’s how to make sure we don’t select the wrong one and that we get what we paid for.
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Storm Strategy—Fore-Reaching
Reading Time: 11 minutes
Comparing fore-reaching to heaving-to and streaming a Jordon Series Drogue as storm survival strategies as well as equipment and techniques required for safe fore-reaching.
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