Blue Water Cruising

Finally some good news. On Sunday and Mon evenings, former commodore Pam Wall gave a nice slide-show presentation on her six year cruise around the world with her family. Much of the Sunday talk was friendly banter with the 25-30 people who attended, padded with sailing 101 stuff, e.g. "connect the halyard to the sail before raising it". Of course, if you're cruising across the Pacific solo and start cranking up a halyard with nothing attached to it, you could be in trouble...

Talking about their cruising equipment, e.g. sewn canvas dodgers (to keep water out of the hatches), mast steps (for climbing the mast), running lights mounted high up by the lifelines, using the whisker pole for wing-on-wing, etc, Pam said: "None of this stuff was our idea. This is all from looking at other boats and seeing what works."

Indeed, much of it is just common sense.

A better source for info on cruising equipment, rigging, safety at sea, and emergency conditions is Royce's Sailing Illustrated. There are lots of books out there on sailing, but Royce's is the only one that's a must-have (see sample page at right—picked especially for Hoofers! :) Known as "the sailor's bible", it puts the U.S. Sailing books (e.g. Basic Keelboat, Bareboat Cruising, etc.) to shame. And those are not bad books.