September 19, 1974, 0400. The 40ft sloop Vela rocked gently, lines creaking with the steady motion of following seas. City lights glowed on the distant horizon like a beacon marking their destination: Suva, the capital of Fiji. After five days of sailing from the tiny island ...read more
An acknowledged expert in the study of drogues and sea anchors (not the same thing, as is clearly explained), Earl Hinz has written a comprehensive and thoroughly enjoyable analysis of drag devices and their practical application.Deploying a drag device to “park” and stabilize ...read more
In this comprehensive collection of short stories and poems, lifelong sailor Bill Harmon reveals how time spent on the water can affect time spent on land. With three decades of sailing experience, he has no shortage of adventures to share. Through Harmon’s original writings on ...read more
In the opening chapter, appropriately titled “Fear,” author George Michelsen Foy makes a compelling point about navigation: “From the start, staying alive has depended on navigation: the art of figuring out our position and in which direction to travel.” In fact, he’s referring ...read more
SKIPPERING A SMALL KEELBOAT Here, author Grant Headifen introduces a new kind of learning style, the hybrid eBook. Scan the QR codes in each chapter and you are taken to online graphics, animations and tutorials that help you grasp the concepts quickly and easily; it’s almost ...read more
The thud of a book landing on a desk is a rare pleasure in this digital age, much more satisfying than the ping of an email or text alert. Kindle has its place, but there’s nothing like paper to get a lasting message across. Good sailing fiction is a rare commodity these ...read more
Armchair Sailor A new book from Vanessa Bird, Dream Cruise Destinations, is sure to keep you dreaming of blue water and gentle breezes, even when the snow is falling and the winter winds are howling. The book outlines 20 cruises that are fully mapped, measured and budgeted, ...read more
Curl Up With Two GReat Books What’s the next best thing to curling up with a copy of SAIL magazine on a snowy winter’s day? Why, curling up with a good book, of course! Holiday shoppers have two gorgeous titles to choose from this year in Ranulf Rayner’s The Story of the ...read more
In SAIL’s June issue, we reviewed 10 of the best apps for navigation (“Navigating the App World”). One thing I emphasized was the importance of an app being able to use data from ActiveCaptain. But what is ActiveCaptain and how does it work?ActiveCaptain is a popular ...read more
There’s nothing like a good book, whether you’re on passage or just hanging out in the cockpit at the marina. For those in search of a summer read, there are a number of great new titles to choose from.Of course, no list of marine titles would be complete without some storms at ...read more
It didn’t take long for America’s Cup fans Diane Swintal, longtime cupinfo.com contributor Robert Kamins and photographer R. Steven Tsuchiya to put together their take on the 34th America’s Cup, and the result—Winging It: Oracle Team USA’s Incredible Comeback to Defend the ...read more
This past year has been unusual in that there have been, by my count, five films released that focus on sailing and the sea. Even better, three are actually worth watching! The best two are a pair of documentaries that were created and released by independent ...read more
As sailors, we’re constantly calling upon our personal repertoire of knots. We master a few common ones and, sometimes, learn knots that are more advanced or serve a more specific purpose. For instance, suppose you need to secure your dinghy to the foredeck. What knot would you ...read more
Paul and Sheryl Shard have been exploring the world under sail together since 1989. Along the way, they decided to use their television backgrounds to create a travel-based series called Distant Shores. The show launched in the late 1990s and today, it airs internationally on The ...read more
Since October of 2012, I’ve been using this space to review smartphone apps for SAIL readers. I’ve looked at the best apps for AIS, anchoring and navigation. I’ve tested new apps for boat logs, knot-tying and chartplotting. And when I wanted to send a postcard of my boat from a ...read more
The Essence of SailTake a break from winter’s chill with renowned sailing photographer Onne Van der Wal in his latest book, Sailing. In this breathtaking volume, Van der Wal captures the essence of the pastime through some 200 images taken around from the world, in places such as ...read more
If you Google HMS Bounty, the now-perished tall ship’s website, tallshipbounty.org, still appears as the fifth search result with a description of the historic vessel underneath. Click on the link though, and you’re led to a blank white page. It’s an eerie reminder of the tragic ...read more
Keep your digital music safe and dry while playing it offshore with Aquatic AV’s new Bluetooth-capable waterproof Digital Media Locker. The locker keeps most any digital music-playing device safe while allowing you to wirelessly select and play music from anywhere on board. ...read more
A Galley Cook’s Bible “The Boat Galley Cookbook” is the most useful, comprehensive sailing cookbook I’ve found. It has 800 recipes specially designed for cooking within the confines of a galley and thorough sections on substitutions (for when you can’t find fancy ingredients), on ...read more
Dewey Lambdin, where have you been all my life? Ever since finishing C.S. Forester’s Hornblower series as a kid, I’ve been in search of another good wooden-ships-and-iron-men fix, but have never managed to find an author who didn’t come up woefully short—until now. Like Patrick ...read more
I’ve always thought people who took their dogs long-distance cruising were more than a little crazy. But after reading Peter Muilenburg’s A Sea Dog’s Tale: The True Story of a Small Dog on a Big Ocean, I’m no longer so sure. Muilenburg’s story concerns Santos, a schipperke who ...read more
Boat Girl: A memoir of youth, love & fiberglass, written by Melanie Neale, is a first-hand account of growing up aboard a cruising sailboat. You may be familiar with Melanie’s father, Tom Neale, who wrote the popular cruising book All in the Same Boat and has been a sailing ...read more
Until recently, when melting ice began opening up the Northwest Passage to more sailors, it was largely considered the “Arctic Grail” of high-latitude cruising. Unchartered and full of “slow-moving, wondrously beautiful silent killers,” it was a passage that less than two dozen ...read more
Coastal Cruising Made Easy was published by the American Sailing Association as a companion book for its Basic Coastal Cruising course (ASA 103). But the guide is an incredible resource for any sailor, whether you’re learning the basics of how a boat works or are already an ...read more