Our Custom Mainsail Reefing System: How It All Works A lot of reefing complaints come down to the same root cause: an undersized system trying to do a job it was never built for. Small 24mm track with basic sliders jams under real load, sails get hard to hoist, reefing downwind becomes genuinely difficult — […]
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A Winch Override Trick, Wing Foiling Barbuda, and Everything We’ve Broken So Far Some passages are about getting somewhere. This one, from Antigua to Barbuda, ended up being about a lot more than that — a genuinely useful winch fix, an afternoon of wing foiling with an unexpected turtle cameo, and a moment of total
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Rudder Hunt: Sailing a One-Rudder Catamaran Around Antigua October 2022 We’d been in Antigua for two months on one rudder. The hull inspection in St Lucia had confirmed what we suspected — the port stock was gone and wasn’t coming back. We needed a replacement blade, and we needed it before we could think about
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Antigua Downwind Blast: Racing the Clock and Losing a Spinnaker Some passages get planned weeks in advance. This one got planned around a party invitation and a six-hour weather window — get from Green Island, on the easternmost tip of Antigua, all the way around to Jolly Harbour on the western side, with enough time
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How to Sail Upwind in Your Catamaran Catamarans have a reputation for sailing upwind badly, and daggerboards get blamed for most of it — either credited as the magic fix or dismissed as pointless clutter in the saloon. Neither view is quite right. Daggerboards genuinely do provide extra grip compared to the keeled hulls on
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Navigation Systems Onboard Paikea Sailing offshore takes more than a phone with a local SIM card and hoping for the best. Out past the range of any cell network, communication and navigation both run through one piece of equipment: an IridiumGo satellite unit and its dedicated aerial, which Shayne built and mounted using a custom
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