At some point in its life, every boat will need a deck fitting replaced or will develop a leak that must be corrected. And while replacing deck hardware is not a complicated operation, doing it incorrectly can cause serious damage down the road.

Our editors choose the best sailorly gifts to give and get this season.

 Hubbell Marine's new 30A/125V Twist-Lock Circuit Tester takes the guesswork out of shore power when coming in to port.  This new handy device plugs in to any 30A/125V locking receptac

 Ronstan Clear Start watches have been a “must have” for racers for several years. The easy-to-read displays, intuitive countdown mode, and one button synchronization are some of the reasons

T. Craig Ligibel When the Marquis de Lafayette arrived in America aboard the French frigate L’Hermione in 1780, he brought the good news that the French were sending troops and material to help

Installing solar and wind power is easily than ever and gives you greater freedom to take your boat off the grid.

 Although, our family sailed on Pelagic, our 54-footer built specifically for high-latitude expedition sailing, in the channels of Tierra del Fuego in 2008, sailing to Antarctica for an extended cruise over the long Christmas holiday was the opportunity for my daughter Lara and son Luca to finally realize why Dad goes south every year. 

The Novak family knows how to cruise, as they prove with a holiday trip to Antarctica aboard Pelagic to study penguins, bash through brash ice and just have a good time. 

When 27 sailboats joined the largest attempt to survey the plastic floating in the Pacific Ocean this summer, their crews might have expected to find large pieces of plastic floating on the surface. Instead, what they found by using specially designed trawls is much more sinister: The ocean is filled with masses of microscopic bits of plastic. 

November table of contents

Gracious Grenadines A charter cruise to some of the Caribbean’s most idyllic islands is a trip back in time Laid back and loving it A charter cruise along Florida’s pr

The decision on whether to carry a life raft and what kind of life raft that should be can be a challenge for sailors. New six-person, non-commercial life rafts cost at least $1,700. Used life rafts can be a relative bargain, but all rafts need periodic maintenance. The decision on what is right for a boat can hinge on factors as varied as budget to the kind of sailing you do.

 We’ve been to plenty of concerts but never by sailboat, so when our friends in Florida called to ask if we wanted to join them to see the Dave Matthews Band via boat, we grabbed our bags and headed for the airport. 

 In the winter of 1956-1957, my grandfather commissioned a small sailing craft and named her for the young girl in Charlotte’s Web. He had been dreaming about small boats for some time and the popularity of his second children’s book made the project possible. He had owned other boats, including, a 30-foot double-ended cutter called Astrid, but Fern would be the first boat built for him. 

The sailing world is flush with professional races that operate like finely tuned machinery. So when a truly grassroots competition arrives on the scene, it’s a breath of fresh air among intrepid pull-ourselves-up-by-our-bootstraps adventurers who make up for their lack of deep pockets with their courage, persistence and irrepressible good humor.

Jimmy Buffett's newest boat is a cruiser created by a designer known for classic lines and inspired by paddleboarding and surfing.

 The sailing world has seen a lot of winch handles and continual efforts to improve on the basic design. First, they were made lighter (and less lightly to cause a concussion if pulled out of a w

It was hazy, hot and the air was still and the seas were calm; certainly not the conditions we were expecting as we motored down the narrow channel toward the northern city of St. Petersburg on the eastern edge of the Baltic that so many of us had traveled so far to visit. But the uncharacteristically warm and sunny weather was only the first salvo of what proved to be a barrage of sensory overload that no reasonable expectations could live up to.