Surveys are expensive so here are six things we should check ourselves first.
Building series drogues to Don Jordan’s design from single-braid Dyneema and Spectra has suddenly become popular. But there’s a big problem that will make retrieval difficult to impossible.
We strongly believe that the series drogue designed by Don Jordan is the best storm survival option. A belief based on good science and interviewing some of the best offshore sailors of our time about their experiences. John continues that learning and data gathering process in this article.
Saildrives are becoming ever more common on cruising boats. But are they a good idea, or just yet another way to make the builder’s life easier while making the owner’s harder? John has some thoughts.
There are always lessons to be learned from a disaster, and this one can teach us many things, as well as remind us all of some fundamentals of good seamanship.
There are a huge number of second-hand fibreglass cruising boats for sale, but very few good ones. Here is how to weed out some of the junk.
Randall Reeves and John spent a couple of hours discussing storm tactics in general and the series drogue designed by Don Jordan in particular. Here’s an excerpt.
When an anchor that thousands of sailors rely on has a dangerous flaw, we need to write about that. Also, some thoughts on the the Vulcan and the Mantus anchors.
John and Phyllis want to buy a 40-foot sailboat. There are thousands of second-hand boats for sale, but most of them are not fit to go offshore. So how do we weed through all the junk to find a decent and safe boat at a fair price? And what about refitting an older boat? This is the first of a series of articles to answer those two questions.
One of the saddest things that can happen to a cruiser is buying a fundamentally bad boat, and there are plenty of those out there to tempt the uninformed. Here’s how to make sure that the boat you buy is well designed.
First a book and then an article get Phyllis thinking: What does respectful voyaging mean? How do we know if we have crossed lines as travellers that we shouldn’t have crossed?
When the subject comes up of buying an old and tired boat and refitting it as a way to get out there ocean voyaging inexpensively, John tends to start throwing around a lot of cold reality, and generally being a spoil sport. But sometimes this approach can work.
Beautiful and remote, Little Bay Islands, Newfoundland, is a gem of an outport harbour. Phyllis writes about the village’s struggle to stay viable and how it resolved.
How to select the size and material (galvanized steel, stainless steel or aluminium), for the primary anchor on a cruising boat.
Tucked into the heart of North America, five hundred miles from the sea, lies one of the world’s great adventure cruising grounds. A quarter-million square kilometres of water, and seventeen thousand kilometres of coastline, call out to sailors seeking a season or two off the beaten path.
Susie Goodall was one of the few competitors in Golden Globe Race 2018 with a series drogue to Don Jordan’s design. But it failed her, and her boat pitchpoled What went wrong and does Susies’ terrible experience indicate a fundamental problem with the series drogue and/or Don Jorgan’s science and engineering? John digs in to find out.
In the last two chapters we have reviewed the SPADE and SARCA Excel anchors. So which of the two is best, and are there other anchors as good or better? We also cover four anchors we should never use.
Now that the Golden Globe 2018 is nearly over, it’s time to figure out why it turned into a demolition derby, and how to fix it so that there will be future editions.
We pursue a technical vein here at AAC. But sometimes it’s nice to take a break from anchors and electrons. To that end, John is trying his hand at fiction.
Everyone loves to tout the benefits of their favourite anchor, John included, but this article is about much more: how to cut through all the claims to the criteria that really matter when selecting an anchor.