Sailing really is a simple sport, just you and the wind and waves. And the boat, an infernal contraption made of twisted ropes, slipping cleats and flapping sails. Ok, so sailing is simple when you tame Hydra’s nest and get all the ropey bits correct.
All it takes is a SIONYX night vision camera and an iPad or Android tablet (or phone) and you can be streaming full color night vision back to your helm station. In just a few seconds, you can mount the SIONYX camera anywhere on your boat and wirelessly stream back to your iPad at the helm.
Even after 30 years in the business, I still love thumbing through the pages of Canadian Yachting magazine – the beautiful new boats, the latest electronics or sailing gear. I particularly like reading the advertisements describing something that I may or not know anything about. “Lighter, faster, stronger, brighter”.
Nodus factory, the French developer of revolutionary soft fittings for a wide variety of purposes, is finally available in Canada. Thanks to their in-depth research in modern textile fibers, Nodus factory is at the leading edge of this exciting revolution in rigging hardware fittings.
It’s one of the best things about sailors: we hate to give up on our equipment. But if you’re like a lot of owners of boats with vintage integral hydraulic backstay units, you’ve been putting up with seepage and slippage for too long. We’ve introduced our new integral hydraulic unit to convince you it’s finally time to pull the pins on that leaker and start anew.
The Allen brothers, Tony and Glenn, started their business back in 1956 with a vision of producing performance sailing hardware driven by their passion for sailing and their love of engineering, innovation and technology.
Remember your best race? Everything clicked, you were in a different gear, pointing higher off the start and faster than your competition. The following day you tried to repeat it all, and you just couldn’t find the same pace.
Many sailors get their sails into the sail loft for inspection at the end of the sailing season for a professional inspection, recuts and repairs. The sailmakers can quickly assess the condition, get the sail hung up on their pulling rig, check the shape of the sail, and easily take care of damaged stitching.
Gori Propeller A/S is expanding its line of 3-blade folding propellers to include a model specifically for saildrive units. The new propeller has been introduced to suit the ZF SD15 saildrive.
The Weeknight Grand Prix! There are more keelboats racing using a performance handicapping system like PHRF on any given night than all One Design fleets put together. There are some excellent measurement rule systems as well to get a performance handicap, but none are as easy to implement at the club level as PHRF.
Over the last month we have been busy in the loft getting customers sails recut for the next sailing season. Two of the projects were interesting recut jobs. One involved an Asymmetric Spinnaker that wasn’t asymmetric enough to qualify for racing, and the other was a modern offshore one design boat from Europe with a Furling Asymmetric Spinnaker.
With the massive increase in boat sales through the pandemic, people are getting back on the water. What do you do if you find the perfect boat, but it draws 12”-18” too much? Or is the boat a little too tender?
Do you really need a spinnaker for your cruising sailboat? Probably not, unless you are prepared to put it up some of the time. Half of cruising customers will never sail with a spinnaker, and that is fine.
Yanmar Marine has announced the market launch of custom solutions to pair with the new SD15 saildrive by ZF, strengthening its comprehensive range of products for the sailing sector.
Over the last decade, sailcloth weaving equipment has evolved and allowed the production of low crimp warp oriented woven cloth of medium to heavy weights. We have had light weight warp wovens of 200g/m2 (4oz) or lighter for much longer than that, but the finer denier weaves of light sailcloth allowed that with older looms and setups.
Last issue we covered types of headsail UV protective covers. All of these covers can be made of many different cover cloths, and I will give you the low down on how to choose what material is best for your application.
