I have a lovely old instrument at home which belonged to my grandfather; using dials on concentric circles you can set the direction of the wind, barometer reading and trend,…
Yachting World
The life of Tom Perkins 1932-2016 – entrepreneur, innovator and mastermind of Maltese Falcon
Tomas J. Perkins 1932-2016 Tom Perkins, who has died aged 84, was one of Silicon Valley’s most successful venture capitalists and a prolific superyacht owner whose innovative thinking led to…
Paul Larsen, world speed record holder, advises on how to avoid a pitchpole
I can see the boat has a reef in and the daggerboards slightly raised, so it is obviously windy. Judging by the lazy sheet, the gennaker is still furled so…
French sailor on a world tour via the North West Passage with a red hen
Guirec Soudée met Monique during a stopover in the Canary Islands when she joined him on what had been up to then a solo transatlantic voyage. The 24-year-old Breton was…
How to be a good crew member on a long ocean passage
Matching skippers and crew can be a difficult process and while there are characteristics we can identify in a good skipper, there are also some points that need to be…
A skiff with stabilisers? Meet ep0h, a skiff that anyone can sail
This is a skiff with big ambition: ep0h stands for ‘exponential pleasure, zero hassle’. The goal was to create a skiff that anyone can sail even if they are not…
Skip Novak: something should be done about the number of rescues in major ocean races
Describing grand-prix offshore sailors as ‘idiots’ continually in need of rescue (as someone did in a letter to Yachting World recently) is a tad strong in the language. Nevertheless I…
Bras d’Or lake in Nova Scotia is an oasis of calm
Our Mason 44, Frances B, on the run from ever-colder climes farther north, swept by Cape Anguille at the tip of St George Bay on the south-west coast of Newfoundland.…
5 tips on developing your polar diagrams to improve your boat speed
Sails are fresh, the bottom is clean, there’s a good crew, but you’ve been losing out to similar boats on the downwind legs. The helmsman is sailing as close as…
Get out of that! Dismasting – Mike Golding explains what to do as soon as it happens
Although it is difficult to understand exactly what went wrong, we can deduce the following: prior to the dismasting the boat was on starboard and probably footing or reaching under…
Reinventing Barbados – the Caribbean island works to welcome back cruisers
Barbados is one of the most popular tropical islands on the planet, especially with Britons, who flock to its pristine sandy beaches to relax and enjoy the hot Caribbean sun.…
Extraordinary boats: MACIF, an Ultime for the ultimate solo round the world race
With the ORMA 60 and MOD70 trimaran classes successfully killed off, you would have thought that French multihull sailors might do the sensible thing and consolidate their efforts in a…
Chris Tibbs weather briefing: how temperature affects wind
As a group of islands the UK has a maritime climate to match our maritime history. Being surrounded by the ocean does mean that our weather is significantly influenced by…
A late summer cruise on the wild west coast of Ireland
lt’s the last sail of the season. The harbours are empty save for a few stragglers in denial of a season that never was, hoping to catch a final magical…
Skip Novak: want a larger yacht? Sometimes smaller is better for exploratory cruising
Some years ago I piloted a 170ft superyacht down the coast of Chile. It was the owner’s 12th sailing boat, each one progressively larger than his original 40-footer. I assume…
World ARC crews talk to us in Colombia, first stop on their circumnavigation
Thirty-three yachts are in the early stages of a 26,000-mile circumnavigation with the sixth World ARC. It’s a 15-month cruise in company from Saint Lucia and the first stop was…
A brief affair with Graham Greene – a double-ender lists the author as an owner
Graham Greene is not noted for being a great sailor. The author of Brighton Rock, The End of the Affair and other popular novels from the 1930s onwards is better…
5 tips: the port and starboard cross – the simplest rule?
With the wind slowly clocking right your original decision that the pin end was the best place to start may be in doubt, so if a half decent result is…
Green flash: fact or fantasy? Weather man Chris Tibbs explains the science
Caribbean cruising is not complete without sundowners on a beach watching the sun slowly dip below the horizon. Invariably the conversation will turn to the ‘green flash’ and the group…
Ronstan Shock Sheaveless Block
These neat and compact aluminium, low-friction, sheaveless blocks have a multitude of uses. The smallest, weighing just 2g, will take lines of up to 5mm and has a breaking load…