Dear Boat Doctor, I am interested in improving my onboard emergency gear. I have carried a personal EPIRB for years, but it feels inadequate. I have been looking at shipboard EPIRBs, but maybe I shou

Dear Boat Doctor, I am struggling with the fuel system on my Hylas 51, which seems to have a lot of small issues that add up to a bigger annoyance. First, I don’t have enough tankage and no good wa

Sail selection is key for offshore sailing. You need a combination that provides speed without overburdening the boat and enough flexibility that you don’t have to make frequent sail changes.A fixed

Dear Boat Doctor, I am having some problems with my Yanmar 4JH2DTE, and I’m embarrassed to say I may have created one of the problems myself. I installed a new Balmar alternator and an AltMount ser

Dear Boat Doctor, I am having a problem with my engine, a Yanmar 4JH2DTE.  It has always worked well, but recently I have not been able to get it to run over 2,200 rpm. I checked the Racor and t

Dear Boat Doctor,  I am taking my boat to Grenada and would really like to be able run an air conditioner. I have read about the new efficient air conditioners that you can run from an inverter.

Dear Boat Doctor, I am doing some maintenance on my old electric Barient winches. I have taken down the manual parts of the winches, and I am pretty clear on how to clean and lubricate those parts. I

Dear Boat Doctor, I own a Caliber 40 and have been working my way down the Windward Islands, planning to spend hurricane season in Grenada. The trip has been great, but we’ve been caught a little o

There are times on every boat when you need to send someone aloft. This is almost never convenient, but it’s a necessity and one in which safety needs to be a priority. Fortunately, the days of a pl

Dear Boat Doctor, My Selden boom vang doesn’t seem to hold up my boom any more. It was OK before I installed the main, but now the boom just sags. For now, I have resigned myself to holding up the

Dear Boat Doctor, I have owned my Tartan 37 for more than 25 years, first on freshwater and now in the Chesapeake and the Bahamas. I love saltwater, but it is eating my boat. What can I do to keep th

Spring cleaning is a ritual, but when it comes to boats it’s often a necessity. Before you launch for the season is often the only and best opportunity to get a boat sparkling clean. But that kind o

Dear Boat Doctor, We stored our boat on the hard in Puerto Rico and launched after hurricane season. When we put the boat back in the water, I had a rigger help me re-install the sails. When I went t

Dear Boat Doctor, I recently upgraded the alternator on my Yanmar 4JH2DTE and things aren’t going smoothly. It is a Balmar 100A alternator with a Max Charge alternator. The alternator is working gr

Dear Boat Doctor, I installed a Frigoboat keel-cooled system a few years ago. The system worked amazingly well until last summer when I noticed that it would cool down very nicely if the icebox was w

Upgrading cockpit canvas Canvas can add a lot of creature comfort to a boat. It helps keep sailors warm and dry and provides relief from the beating sun. But that same canvas can be a real bother s

Dear Boat Doctor, Every couple days the shore power breaker on the dock blows when my boat is connected to it. This started happening when the marina replaced the power pedestals. How do I know if th

In about a decade, Dyneema (sometimes called Spectra, both are trade names for the same material) has gone from a gee whiz high-tech marvel to common place on many boats. It started out replacing wire