Dear Boat Doctor, There are some deep gouges in the bottom of my boat that I need to fill when I pull the boat out. I have used epoxy in the past, but it was a pain to thicken and to

 Dear Boat Doctor, I want to install two solar panels on top of my bimini and I am a little confused about how to hook them up. Each panel has two black plugs on it and my charg

My Jeanneau Sun Odyssey 40 came with running rigging lines that all seemed needlessly long. The extra line adds to the difficulty of housekeeping, and in rough going sometimes creates a mess under foot that creates what I would call a hazard.  After a few years, I cut all lines to their longest useful length.I have two friends with similar-sized boats, and they have many feet of extra line that ends up piled on the cabintop. They are resistant, saying “You never know when you will need it,” or “The rigger left it for a reason.”  How do you see it?

Dear Boat Doctor, I need to replace the batteries in my house bank. They are about 6 years old and just don’t seem to hold a charge as long as they used to. But how do I know what type to buy? 

Dear Boat Doctor, I sometimes get a little lazy when sailing my Catalina 36 and just use the roller furling genoa. I endure a bit of ribbing on the dock for this, but I’ve also been told that I’

Dear Boat Doctor, I installed a new engine in my boat a few years back, but the control panel often stops working. I suspect this has more to do with the amount of water in the cockpit than the cont

 I just bought a new-to-me Baba 40. I love the boat and have spent lots of time cleaning it up and just making it mine. It came with a nice Bruce anchor, one of the original well-built ones. I really like the anchor but it could look better, it’s pretty rusty. Can I have it galvanized or can I paint it?

Dear Boat Doctor, The teak decks on my boat are failing. I love them but they are washboarded and thin enough in places that the caulking is just falling out. I need to do something about them but I am not quite sure what. What are my options? 

Dear Boat Doctor,  I was looking around my bilge and saw that the seacock on my shower drain looked odd. I grabbed it and the threaded portion of the through-hull broke off! 

The water on my boat is really hot. How do I keep it from overheating?

Dear Boat Doctor,  What size filter element should I use in my Racor fuel filter? I’ve been told both a two-micron and a 10-micron filter.  Ned Bittner Tacoma, 

Dear Boat Doctor,  I am having a problem with the batteries in my boat. I can charge the house bank up to 12.75 volts or so, but once I am away from the dock, the batteries quic

Dear Boat Doctor, I have a 1974 Cal T2-27 with a Yanmar 1GM10. My prop is a twin-blade 12RH10 and my prop walk to port when in reverse is pretty significant. My slip situation calls

 Dear Boat Doctor, The refrigerator on my boat keeps getting a lot of ice build-up, and both the top and front doors are sweating around the openings. A friend of mine told me I

 Dear Boat Doctor, I sail a Catalina 380 on Lake Michigan and it has a freshwater-cooled Westerbeke 42 engine. I use the engine basically to get in and out of the slip so I don�

 A few stanchions on my boat were damaged in a recent docking mishap. Some of them are bent beyond the point of straightening. What are my options for fixing them? I’d like to get stronger stan

 Dear Boat Doctor,I use an invertor to charge the house batteries at the dock and the engine alternator to charge them away from the dock. The inverter seems to charge just fine, but the alternat