Category: Boat Life Hacks
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How Not to Drag Anchor: Lessons Learned from Ten Years Living Aboard
The internet (along with every dock-tail party and cruiser potluck) is chock full of anchoring advice. Most of it centers around one anchor being better than another. Curiously, nearly all participants believe that their anchor is the best choice. Sounds like confirmation bias, doesn’t it? We’ve spent most nights at anchor since we started living…
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Navigation Notes: Picking an Anchorage
How do you choose an anchorage? At first, it seems an easy question, but experienced boaters will tell you that it’s one of the most complex skills you’ll have to learn during your first year of cruising. Day boaters seldom anchor; if they do, it’s for a “lunch hook” and not for sound sleep or…
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Thoughts on Fire Prevention and Safety for Boaters
When you hear about something crazy happening in the boating world, some accident, tragedy, or close call, what do you do? Do you shake your head and say, “What an idiot, that’ll never happen to me!” Or do you say, “That’s terrible, what steps can I take to make sure that never happens to me?”…
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Navigation Notes — A Guide to US East Coast Inlets
Depending on where you are in the world, inlets have different names. In the Bahamas, they call them cuts. Out West, they refer to the ‘bar crossing’ when coming in and out to sea through the mouth of a river. But on the East Coast, we call them inlets: river mouths or breaks in the…
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Original Gift Ideas for Boaters — 2024 Guide
Boaters can be difficult to shop for. Most have various limitations. For example, their boats may not be able to use certain doohickies or have enough space to store them. However, if they need something, they often buy it, meaning their boats are typically well stocked with the essentials. What follows is a list of…
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5 Boating Apps We Actually Use
There are tons of apps for boaters, but how many are really important to everyday life? If Dockwa wrote this article, we’d include Dockwa on this list; if BoatUS made it, we’d include their app. But this article isn’t written by anyone but a cruising boater, and while I have those apps on my phone,…
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How To Properly Tie to a Mooring Ball
In life, sometimes you get too much instruction, and sometimes you get too little. We find this is the case with moorings balls — boaters are more or less left on their own to figure it out. If they’re new, the results can be stressful. Cruisers on the ICW are often new, and even if…
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Is It Safe to Drink Boat Tank Water? — The Complicated Matter of Drinking Water on a Boat
Many boaters are concerned with the water quality coming from their boat water tanks, and with good reason. Getting a waterborne illness on a boat is too easy, and questionable water is everywhere. It’s hard to have confidence in a system with many challenges: questionable water sources, dock pipes that are not properly pressurized, using…
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Boaters, Don’t Run A-Foul of Fishing Gear
Here’s a topic that we’ve had to learn about through trial and error. While I have some fishing experience, the different gear we’ve encountered along the US East Coast has been shrouded in mystery. Navigating a cruising boat means sharing space with fishermen and their gear. Sometimes, a cruising guide will note to be careful…
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Provisioning Your Boat Pantry — What To Buy So You Can Cook (Nearly) Anything (Nearly) Anywhere
Living on a boat and being a cook, I have become a master at recipe substitutions. Back when I lived land life, I’d find a recipe I wanted to make, hop in the car, drive to the supermarket, buy every item on the list, then make the recipe precisely as instructed. Living on a boat…