Can I drop in lithium batteries? Dear Boat Doctor, I’d like to change my house batteries to lithium. The capacity and efficiency of charging is really compelling, but I don’t want to have to r

Our Passport 42, a double-ender, features a cavernous, V-shaped storage beneath the cockpit. When we first started cruising, we layered lines, dinghy supplies, storm sails, paddles, buckets of spares.

Replacing deck hardware or mounting new deck hardware might seem like an easy project, but doing it incorrectly is a recipe for long-term problems that are not an easy fix. It’s worth taking the tim

This being the New Boat issue, and since I’ve owned more new boats than the U.S. Navy, I have (he said modestly) a wealth of wisdom to share. I’m here to offer the Caswellian Boat Survey Tips, wh

When the book I’m reading bogs down to a boring grind, or takes a ridiculous turn, or irritates me by revealing the author’s ignorance of a well known fact, I turn to my old friend Jack Aubrey. J

Emirates Team New Zealand AC37 Lego Yacht When the gift recipient lands in the crossover of the Venn diagram of sailors and Lego enthusiasts, you know there’s only one must-have gift: the Emira

For this review, I should save the surprise for the end, but why make you wait? About a month ago, around midnight, depending on the version of the story, I rolled out of bed and fractured my bac

Nautor says, “The first Swan 51 represented a landmark in the inspirational evolution of the Nautor Swan brand.  Launched in 1981, the model marked the first collaboration between Swan and the

Features  New Boats for 2025 From foilers to flagships, there is a new boat to suit every type of sailor New Joys, Old Haunts A sailing family revisits a father’s old stomping grounds t

It will be fun to see what happens when we compare two catamarans with similar L/Ds using both hulls, and similar L/Ds using each hull individually, while reducing LOA by 9.62 feet.  The 48 Open

Why won’t my holding tank pump out? Dear Boat Doctor, I am having trouble pumping out my holding tank. The dockside pumps just don’t seem to work very well. I eventually get it pumped, but it ta

We couldn’t resist French Polynesia. Where else can sailors get a two-year visa to explore the very different landscapes of three archipelagos within the same country? In our first nine months we ha

 Gazing at the azure waters of Pirates Bight, where yachts gently bobbed and red battle flags smacked in the breeze, I watched as a small armada of dinghies approached the shore. Their crews alig

There’s no denying the convenience of furling sails for cruising. Code 0s and, more recently, structured luff top-down furling sails with better downwind performance than a code 0 can be game change

The Catana Group is launching its 14th Bali catamaran model, the 5.8, in conjunction with the 10th anniversary of the line. The promo blurb says “always bigger,” and I’m not going to argue with

Sailors have crossed the Atlantic from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean following the trade winds since Christopher Columbus first made land fall. The Atlantic Rally for Cruisers’ Las Palmas to S

No one is more passionate about their version of sailing than a multihull sailor. It is as if they know something that the rest of us are missing. One avid friend has introduced hundreds of guests to

For the better part of the hour before our start in the Chicago Mackinac race, we maneuvered around the starting area with a 200-pound weight at the top of the mast. That weight was a young bow man w