What is a Slick Line?
Slick lines form on water when a very thin layer of oil spreads out across the water. The oil dampens ripples creating calmer patches. Over…
Find out how to read water
Tag: sailing
A Brief Guide to Overfalls
Whenever the tide turns, water heads from one area to another. This sets up a flow known as tidal currents. Tidal currents moving over a…
What is Fetch?
The definition of the word ‘fetch’ is simple: The distance that wind travels over open water. The first time we come across this word it…
Joshua Slocum and the Birds
My thanks to Pertti Pesonen for reminding me of these passages in Joshua Slocum’s classic, ‘Sailing Alone Around the World’: On the 12th, some hundred…
Where the Rocks Aren’t
I spent a very enjoyable Friday evening at the Hornet Services Sailing Club in Gosport. I was there to listen to a talk being jointly…
The Shape of the Land
The week is already feeling full with the task of collating and writing up observations from the sail north. At the end of the month…
Back from the Arctic
Yesterday I arrived back home after sailing north from Scotland via the Faroe Islands into the Arctic, finishing at Reykjavik. I used the trip to…
Nature and Technology
Following on from my last blog post about the windvane self-steering marvel, comes another wonderful piece of sailing technology. Although this one also works closely…
Windvane Self-Steering
Although microchips have a childlike tendency to steal our attention away from almost anything else, I am not against technology itself. Once we have steeled…