On the Water
The craft of moving a boat under sail and living aboard one: the knots that come undone when you need them to, sail trim by one variable instead of eight names, the words that get confused, and the paperwork — logbooks, certificates — and the budgets that people get wrong in the same handful of ways.
7 guides
Start here
Two hundred terms A–Z, with the pairs that get confused set side by side.
Read the guideEvery 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
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
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
Every sailing and boating term you are likely to meet on a charter, in a pilot book or in a forecast — defined in one or two sentences, A to Z. Plus the table that matters most: the dozen near-identical pairs sailors mix up, from port and windward to rope, line, rode and warp, and why each distinction changes what you actually do.
July 27, 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
"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
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