Anchoring, safety, electronics, engines, maintenance and destinations — browse by department or start with the newest guide.
Nine anchor alarm apps side by side: which phones they run on, what they really cost in the App Store, which ones let you watch the boat from ashore, and what each is called in the store. Includes the one everybody searches for that turns out not to be an anchor alarm at all. One of the nine is ours, and it says so.
Read articleAnchoring, tying up, moorings, ground tackle and the rules on where you may stop.
Shout, throw, point, press MOB — then the Quick Stop, Figure-Eight, Lifesling or powerboat approach. Getting back to the person is the easy half; the lift over the freeboard is the part that fails, so plan it first.
September 26, 2026
How to run jacklines so a tether cannot reach the water, webbing vs Dyneema vs wire, tether length and the quick-release hook, when clipping on is not a judgement call, and what the OSR and ISO 12401 require.
September 26, 2026
The slow approach, hand signals, four ways to get the pennant aboard, the catamaran bridle and chafe — then the part that matters: who laid the mooring, how much to trust it, and the 40 m alarm centred on the ball.
September 25, 2026
Bow and stern lines hold the boat in; springs hold it still. What each of the four lines does, the cleat hitch, tying up in a slip, allowing for tide, how many fenders and what size line — and the one push test to do before bed.
September 17, 2026
Med mooring is anchoring, and everyone judges it as docking — every eye is on the stern while the thing holding the boat is forty metres away at the other end. The manoeuvre in six stages with the failure and the tell at each one, the three different things people call Med mooring, how far out to drop and why too close is unrecoverable, crossed chains, and why the alarm you want on a quay is a creep alarm rather than a swing alarm.
August 7, 2026
A windlass is a lifting machine, not an anchoring machine — and almost every expensive failure comes from asking it to do one of three jobs that belong to the engine, the chain stopper or the snubber. The drop, the handover and the recovery step by step, the current draw and duty cycle that explain the technique, why chain jumps the gypsy, what to do when the windlass dies, and why your chain counter is a guess with a decimal point.
August 1, 2026
Safety gear, pre-departure checks, float plans and the lights you must show.
A marine 5-B holds about ten seconds of powder. The Coast Guard rules straight from 33 CFR 175 Subpart E: which boats must carry one (the closed spaces, not the engine), how many by length, 5-B, 10-B and 20-B against the old B-I and B-II, the model year 2018 line, the 12-year rule for disposables, what serviceable means since the 2022 rule, dry chemical vs CO2 vs clean agent, where to mount them, how to use one, and fire at anchor: the galley, lithium charging and the burning boat upwind.
October 9, 2026
Everyone searches for a Type II; the shelf sells Level 70. What each of the five old Types was for, why the Coast Guard took the Type codes out of the law in 2014 and replaced them with Level 50, 70 and 100 labels shared with Canada, the old Types translated into newtons, how to read the new icon label, the federal rules (one per person, the throwable at 16 ft, children under 13), why the label itself is part of the law, the inflatable rules that changed for under-16s, which jacket for which boat, and the life jacket at anchor.
October 8, 2026
Navigation lights aren't there so you can see — they're a sentence you write to another boat. What the red and green lights mean, why the arcs are 112.5°, 225° and 135° (they tile a circle), the visibility ranges by boat length, exactly what to show under power, under sail and at anchor, and the five mistakes made by boats whose lights are working perfectly.
July 29, 2026
A float plan is a one-page record of your boat, crew, route and a raise-the-alarm time — left with a trusted person ashore, not filed with the Coast Guard. The one thing everyone gets wrong, exactly what goes on it, who to give it to, and why closing it out matters as much as leaving it — with a save-and-pin checklist card.
July 25, 2026
A pre-departure checklist you can run in five minutes before every trip — boat and systems, safety and crew, then the plan and the weather — plus the distinction that makes it useful: it checks the state of the boat right now, not the seasonal maintenance, the gear inventory or the float plan. The four lists people confuse, side by side.
July 24, 2026
The full federal requirement table by boat length — life jackets, throwable, fire extinguishers, distress signals, sound device, engine cut-off switch and placards — plus the two extinguisher rules that fail more safety checks than anything else (the 2018 labelling change and the 12-year date stamp), and the gear the law forgets: an anchor, and an alarm for the hours you're asleep on it.
July 21, 2026
Knots, points of sail, the glossary, logbooks and what cruising really costs.
Why a reefed boat is usually faster, when to reef (15–18 kt first, 22–25 second, adjusted for your boat), five reefing systems compared, the slab reefing sequence step by step, reefing downwind and single-handed, and shaking a reef out without tearing the sail.
September 26, 2026
"Logbook" is one word doing two jobs, and the collision costs people real miles. The RYA and ASA books are personal records — a countersigned CV of days, miles and night hours that follows you from boat to boat — while the ship's log belongs to the vessel and stays with her when she's sold. What an examiner actually accepts, the Yachtmaster thresholds and their traps, the ASA ladder to an IPC, and the pipeline that turns one logged passage into both books.
September 2, 2026
Almost every abandoned logbook failed one of two opposite ways: too empty to answer anything, or so ambitious it stopped in June. The fix isn't discipline, it's knowing which entries pay you back — so every candidate entry is sorted by a blunter question: who is going to ask for this, and when? Plus the nine passage fields, the legal position for a private boat, and the honest case for and against paper.
August 26, 2026
The points of sail aren't eight names to memorise — they're one continuous variable, the angle between your bow and the wind, and everything else on the boat is a function of it. A diagram with the angles marked, what each point feels like and how it goes wrong, the single trim rule that replaces memorising sail positions, and the diagnosis that tells you whether the problem is the angle or the sheet.
August 8, 2026
Every answer to this question is a monthly figure, and the monthly figure is the wrong number — it averages a year in which nothing big broke. The three buckets a liveaboard budget actually has, the 10% rule that dominates all of them, why where you sleep swings the annual total by a factor of two or three, and an indexed comparison of marina, mixed and anchor-out living.
August 6, 2026
Every knot in the book holds — that isn't the hard part. On a boat the question is whether you can get it off again after twelve hours of load, in the dark, one-handed. The working set organised by job, the full anchoring set from anchor bend to bitter end, what a knot costs you in line strength, and the five ways knots actually fail. With a save-and-pin reference card.
August 3, 2026
Fishing from a boat: setting up, anchoring on a spot and staying on it.
Kayaks, paddleboards, towables and personal watercraft.
Chartplotters, GPS, apps and the anchor alarms that watch the boat.
Nine anchor alarm apps side by side: which phones they run on, what they really cost in the App Store, which ones let you watch the boat from ashore, and what each is called in the store. Includes the one everybody searches for that turns out not to be an anchor alarm at all. One of the nine is ours, and it says so.
October 10, 2026
The MMSI is the boat's phone number: nine digits that belong to the vessel, not to you and not to the radio, sent by the red button to the coastguard and by the AIS to every ship in range. What the digits encode and the country codes, the free US routes (BoatUS, US Power Squadrons) and the $220 FCC licence a boat needs before the Bahamas or Canada, the UK, Canadian and Australian routes, why the radio accepts the number once, what to do when a boat or a radio changes hands, how to look an MMSI up, the Coast Guard's 90% / 60% finding, and the number at anchor.
October 6, 2026
A marine stereo is rated at its loudest second, paid for in its quietest hour and judged from the next boat. Real current figures for the common head units and amplifiers at the volume people actually use, the overnight drain of a stereo left muted, RMS versus peak, marine versus car speakers, plotter control over NMEA 2000, how far 80 dB carries across the water and why further at night, the exhaust laws and the harbour quiet hours, the unwritten rules, and the stereo at anchor.
October 5, 2026
GPS is a utility on a boat, not a product: five or six receivers aboard all hear the same satellites, and what differs is the antenna's view of the sky, the update rate and the screen the fix lands on. GPS versus GNSS, what WAAS and EGNOS correct, dual-frequency phones, the Wi-Fi iPad that has no GPS at all, plotter antennas, handhelds and Bluetooth pucks in one accuracy table, chart datum, and which fix the anchor alarm should use.
October 4, 2026
AIS is a VHF broadcast of who you are and where you are going, and the classes differ in how they get a turn to speak: Class A and Class B+ reserve a slot, plain Class B waits for a gap and in a crowded harbour may not get one. The three transponders and the receiver side by side, reporting rates by speed, what a ship's bridge sees of you and the status field it never gets, the MMSI and where it comes from, who must carry AIS, 2026 prices, and the AIS at anchor.
October 3, 2026
Marine VHF is line of sight: range is 2.2 times the square root of the antenna height, at each end, added together, and watts only make the voice clearer inside that circle. A range table for handhelds, rails, mastheads and coastguard aerials, why a heeling sailboat wants 3 dB and a powerboat 6 dB, how much signal RG-58 throws away, the SWR test, AIS splitters, and the handheld on the cockpit table at anchor.
October 2, 2026
Batteries, charging, solar, wiring and shore power.
Build the energy budget in Ah/day first, then size the array: 100 W gives 25–35 Ah in the Med, half that in Britain, and half again under the boom. Why a fridge-and-autopilot boat needs 300–400 W.
September 26, 2026
Flooded, AGM, gel and lithium lifespans in years and cycles, the 50% rule, the three-stage charge and a resting-voltage table — and why most boat batteries die of neglect, not age.
September 25, 2026
Lay-up, recommissioning, cleaning, antifouling and service intervals.
What fouling costs, how copper biocides work and where they are restricted, the five paint types and when each fails, what goes over what, and the haul-out job step by step — chosen by how you use the boat, not by which paint is best.
September 26, 2026
Almost everything written about winterizing is written for a boat that will freeze — which is why owners in the Med skim it and decide it doesn't apply. It mostly does. Winterizing is about water that has nowhere to go, and only one of the three ways water wrecks a laid-up boat involves frost. The list split by climate, why the oil change goes before storage rather than after, the fuel step people miss, and the ventilation mistake that grows mould under a perfect cover.
August 11, 2026
A boat maintenance checklist that works like a schedule, not a wish list — what to check before every trip, monthly, at the annual haul-out and every few years, organised by system — plus the piece most lists miss: three separate clocks (the calendar, the engine hours and plain condition) that decide when each job is actually due, and why a dated log matters more than doing the jobs.
July 23, 2026
Outboards, inboards and diesels: servicing, fuel, cooling and lay-up.
Dewinterizing is winterizing run backwards: batteries, fuel, antifreeze out, impeller and oil before the engine; hull, anodes, seacocks and prop before launch; then a first start with someone watching the exhaust for water within 30 seconds.
September 26, 2026
Kill cord, neutral, vent, primer bulb and fuel age before any tool comes out, then fuel, spark and compression in order. Most dead outboards were stopped wrong, not started wrong: fuel left in the carburettor is the whole story.
September 26, 2026
An outboard is not a small inboard. Almost all winter damage comes from two things — water that cannot drain out, and fuel that degrades where it sits. The order the jobs go in and why it matters, the storage rule that cracks castings when people get it wrong, what the gear oil is telling you (and the fishing line behind the propeller that usually caused it), and where two-stroke and four-stroke part company.
August 20, 2026
Choosing a boat, tenders and inflatables, outboards and personal watercraft.
Cooking aboard, stoves, provisioning, coolers and grills.
Heads, holding tanks, bilge pumps, fresh water and ventilation.
The GPH on the box is measured with no hose and no lift; a 25 mm hole a foot down lets in more than a real pump moves. Types, how many, wiring, float switches, and the pump-keeps-running diagnosis.
September 26, 2026
Manual, electric and composting heads, the flush cycle from seacock to holding tank, the vented loop, discharge rules, the vinegar treatment for a calcified hose and why the joker valve is a consumable — and why the toilet is never the culprit.
September 25, 2026
Deck hardware, seating, biminis, covers and canvas.
Foul-weather gear, deck shoes, layers and sun protection.
Towing, launching and retrieving, and trailer maintenance.
Country and region guides to the anchorages worth the detour.
The regional hub for the Eastern Caribbean and Bahamas: the December–May season and the hurricane box, the trade wind and the winter north swell, how the rules turn over from the BVI to the Grenadines, clearing in, and the alarm radius for a boat pinned to the edge of its circle.
September 26, 2026
Mainland Portugal is 460 miles of Atlantic coast where the Nortada and the swell both run south — and so do you. Its anchorages are rivers behind bars, beaches in the lee of the afternoon wind and a handful of headlands, until the Algarve turns the corner out of the swell. Clearing in and the €70 light dues, the orca zone and what the two governments tell you to do, the Berlengas and Arrábida park rules, the Culatra mooring field, the Azores and Madeira — and why a wind with a timetable makes the afternoon drag this coast's signature failure. Holding data and alarm radii for 61 verified anchorages.
September 10, 2026
Thailand is two seas with opposite calendars — the Andaman sails November to April, the Gulf May to October — so the season is a coast, not a date. Clearing in at Ao Chalong without a cruising permit, the mandatory AIS, the marine-park fees, e-tickets and closures, why no boat enters Maya Bay any more, and what a 2–3 m tide over 4 m anchorages does to your scope and your alarm circle twice a night — with holding data and alarm radii for 31 verified anchorages from Phuket to Koh Tao.
September 6, 2026
Malta is not a coastline — it is a fortress with beaches. You anchor on the beaches and shelter in the fortress, because three named winds close three different coasts and the Grand Harbour is the only place the Knights, the gregale and the swell all agree is safe. The Blue Lagoon's mandatory buoys and free landing pass, the summer swimmers' zones that take the sand and push you into deeper water, the gregale calendar — and holding data with alarm radii for 46 verified anchorages across Malta, Gozo and Comino.
September 4, 2026
The Adriatic doesn't end at the Croatian border — it just empties. Montenegro hides the Med's closest thing to a fjord and asks only for a vignette; Albania sells the last empty coast in the Mediterranean, priced in paperwork rather than euros; Slovenia squeezes a Venetian jewel into 47 km with no all-weather anchorage and says so. Three deals, the bora's two minutes of warning, and 120+ verified anchorages with holding data and alarm radii.
September 3, 2026
The Bahamas is the only country that named an anchoring technique, and the reason is the whole story: on the banks the boat lies to the tide, not the wind, and every cut reverses like a river twice a night. Reading depth by colour, timing the Whale, when two anchors beat one, the fee schedule that changed in April 2026, and the Exuma park where the fish outrank you — with holding data and alarm radii for the Abacos, Exumas and Nassau.
September 1, 2026
Day-by-day cruises with route maps, distances and verified anchorages.
The biggest charter base in the Caribbean, day by day from Le Marin: Sainte-Anne's 400-boat sand, Diamond Rock, the Anses d'Arlet buoy field, Anse Mitan and the ferry to Fort-de-France, Saint-Pierre on its volcanic shelf under Mont Pelée, and back — 77 nm with a route map, which bays are organised mooring zones now and which are still free for 2026–27, online clearance, the sargassum coast to skip, and why on a shelf that ends in 200 m of water the first alarm is the only one.
September 15, 2026
The French Caribbean's charter base, day by day from Pointe-à-Pitre: a reach to Marie-Galante, two nights on the buoys of Les Saintes, the wind shadow of Basse-Terre to the Cousteau Reserve and Deshaies, and back the same way — because the Rivière Salée bridges have not lifted since 2013 and the butterfly has no waist. 124 nm with a route map, the 2026 buoy regimes and fees, online clearance for €3–5, Petite-Terre by reservation, and why a boat in the lee of a volcano needs the whole circle where the Grenadines needed the rim.
September 14, 2026
The Caribbean's other charter ground, day by day from Blue Lagoon: Bequia, Mustique's moorings, Canouan, a night behind Horseshoe Reef in the Tobago Cays, Union Island, a Petit St Vincent lunch and Salt Whistle Bay — 93 nm with a route map, the 2026 park and mooring fees, what Hurricane Beryl changed ashore and what it left alone at sea, and why a boat anchored in a wind that never drops lives on the rim of its circle and needs a tighter alarm, not a wider one.
September 11, 2026
Three volcanic islands, a Roman town on the seabed and the busiest recreational water in Italy — the one cruising ground where you plan around neither the weather nor the rulebook but other boats. The 62 nm circuit out of Baia day by day, with a numbered route map, verified depths, holding and alarm radii, why Capri is lunch rather than a night, and why widening the alarm to stop ferry-wash false triggers is the wrong fix.
August 9, 2026
Seven volcanic islands across forty miles of open Tyrrhenian Sea, one still erupting every twenty minutes — and not a single all-weather anchorage among them. The full 114 nm loop day by day, with a numbered route map, every stop's shelter sector and the move to make when the wind goes the wrong way, verified depths and holding, why the alarm radius climbs from 80 m to 120 m as you sail west, and where you must never anchor on Stromboli.
August 5, 2026
The finest short cruise in Italy, day by day — out of Palau to a park buoy under Caprera, round Punta Rossa to the pink granite of Cala Coticcio, the Maestrale bolthole at Spargi, a beach on Budelli you are forbidden to touch, and a night in the lagoon between three islands — with a numbered route map, the national park's permit and Zone A/B/C rules, the bridge that blocks the Maddalena–Caprera channel, and why the alarm radius on a mooring buoy is 40 metres.
July 29, 2026
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