For weekender and world cruiser alike, here is a wide-ranging compendium of hints, tips, and projects for boatowners, all of which aim to ease everyday life afloat. Readers will learn how to: set up, organize, and stock the galley for cruises of any length; catch and prepare fish and shellfish; grow herbs and sprouts; solve the storage puzzle: convert unused space to handy nooks and crannies; clean anything the fastest and easiest way; take care of your engine and electronics; heat, cool, and move air; modify the exterior for easier access, greater comfort, and better efficiency; streamline anchoring, moorage, and dockage; catch, carry, and conserve fresh water; paint, varnish, and work with fiberglass; keep the crew fit and healthy; keep pets secure and happy at sea; get rid of crawling, flying, and scampering pests; care for rigging and sails; get children involved in boating; handle mail, keep watch, stow trash, deal with laundry, and much more.

Good Boatkeeping

Engineering & Transportation

Aiken, Zora

Aiken, David

Transportation

International Marine/Ragged Mountain Press

Cruising Fundamentals provides the tools necessary to make the transition from basic sailing to competent coastal cruising. Sailors interested in learning how to sail and live aboard a 30 foot to 50 foot auxiliary-powered sailboat will find a wealth of practical skills in this book, from simple instruction on plumbing, electrical, and mechanical systems to navigation, weather prediction, and anchoring techniques. 
Cruising Fundamentals is the official American Sailing Association guide to intermediate coastal cruising and bareboat chartering. Sailing schools, yacht clubs, and other educational institutions throughout North America use this book as a text and indispensable resource in their teaching. Unlike other books on similar subjects, Cruising Fundamentals presents material in a chronology that has proven effective with thousands of developing sailors. Readers progress from "Getting Acquainted" to "Getting Familiar," "The Voyage," "Arrival and Living Aboard," and finally "Emergencies and Trouble Shooting." Each of the first four sections has review questions to help sailors evaluate their comprehension. Cruising Fundamentals is more than a book; it is a complete course that can benefit any sailor who desires to enter the exciting world of sailboat cruising.

Cruising Fundamentals

Sports & Outdoors

Harry Munns

Water Sports

Multihull Cruising Fundamentals taps into the essence of multihull sailing and gives readers a clear and concise analysis of these largely unfamiliar boats. The book's eight chapters explore two distinctly different, yet similar types of boats. Chapters one through four provide the skills sailors need to get trailerable multihulls safely into the water, rigged and sailing. Larger, cruising catamarans and their unique sailing and handling needs are addressed in chapters five through eight.The material in this book was developed by the American Sailing Association's Multihull Committee for use in classes throughout North America. Students will learn quickly and efficiently from Multihull Cruising Fundamentals "no nonsense," step-by-step format. The knowledge and skills found in this text will prepare sailors to more fully enjoy the most forward-looking boats on today's pleasure boat market.

Multihull Cruising Fundamentals: The Official American Sailing Association Guide to Cruising Multihulls

White, Rick

The American Sailing Association

Getting Started in Powerboating is a friendly beginner's guide that concentrates on what you need to know when you first take the helm. This second edition includes a revised gallery of good powerboats, new material on basic safety, preparations to go offshore, and improved illustrations of tricky maneuvers. Getting Started in Powerboating covers all powerboats--big and small; single-engine, twin-engine, outboard, and sterndrive; trailerable and non-trailerable; fast planing hulls and slow but seaworthy displacement hulls; and everything in between. It can help you decide what kind of boat is right for you, and it describes fully the characteristic handling and behavior of each type. Bob Armstrong tells you how to dock any boat under any conditions of wind, current, and crowding, and how to leave a slip with a minimum of fuss. He explains how to handle docklines, how to execute close-quarters maneuvers, how to anchor, run inlets, adjust trim for a better ride, and cope with heavy weather. He offers hints for judging the quality of a boat, tips for quick mastery of a boat you've never handled before, and an expert's views on the types of powerboats available--from runabouts to motoryachts to houseboats, jetboats, and catamarans--and what to expect from each.

Getting Started in Powerboating

Armstrong, Bob

Loran and GPS notwithstanding, there will always be a place for the sextant aboard any blue-water boat, if for no other reason than the thrill and mystery of finding one's position on earth by gazing at the heavens. Here is the indispensable reference that should accompany the instrument aboard. Cmdr. Bruce Bauer, a professional navigator and master mariner with the U.S. Merchant Marine, has distilled years of hands-on experience into an eminently readable guide to buying, adjusting, using, and repairing sextants. 
The Sextant Handbook is dedicated to the premise that electronic navigation devices, while too convenient to disregard, are too vulnerable to rely on exclusively. The book is designed to make beginner and expert alike conversant with this most beautiful and functional of the navigator's tools. Topics include: 
<ul>
<li>Assembly and Disassembly </li>
<li>Vital Adjustments </li>
<li>Avoiding Problems </li>
<li>Rough Weather Sightings </li>
<li>Oiling and Cleaning </li>
<li>Immersion Baths </li>
<li>Emergency Silvering </li>
<li>Finding and Buying Used Sextants </li>
<li>And Much More </li>
</ul>
You'll also find a list of distributors, manufacturers, and dealers worldwide, a discussion of future trends, and numerous helpful hints, including sighting with eyeglasses and using a Rude starfinder. All in a thoroughly revised edition of a book acclaimed by navigation professionals.

The Sextant Handbook

BAUER

Starting with a simple task, such as a deck box, or even a tool box, this book proceeds to bigger projects so that you can develop the skills you need to build almost anything. This book includes joinery techniques and handy gimmicks. It also provides alternative procedures for several of the projects included herein.

Boat Joinery and Cabinet Making Simplified

Bingham, Fred

This is the manual endorsed by professional guides, instructors, and recreational river runners everywhere. With comprehensive step-by-step coverage starting with the first run, it includes tips from top guides, outfitters, and instructors, plus the most complete guide to Class V rafting techniques ever assembled. This is the completely revised and updated successor to Bennett's best-selling manual, Rafting!.

The Complete Whitewater Rafter

Bennett,Jeff

Based on 25 years of research and Olympic coaching, High Performance Sailing reinvents the strategies of sailboat racing. It presents revolutionary explanations of wind prediction and boat design, a fundamental rethinking of how to sail a boat fast--literally faster than the wind. Bethwaite's theories boosted the average speed of the highest-performance sailboats from two-thirds the windspeed to windspeed or faster. Bethwaite is Australia's most successful Olympic coach, and his family includes three Olympic sailing champions and three world champions. This book will have a revolutionary impact on racing sailboats and the way they are sailed. 
"Essential for any serious racing sailor."--Gary Jobson 
"It represents a breakthrough in the way that it relates the theoretical aspects of wind, seastate and rig shape to the way a crew would sail and handle a boat during a race. It has the potential to be a standard reference work on the subject and will not quickly date. It is a book that my Olympic squad will benefit from."--Rod Carr, British Olympic Sailing Team Manager 
"Frank's book is a treasure chest, full of brilliant insights into the ways of air and water as they flow around our sailing boats. Best of all, he tells us what to do when we go sailing."--Alan Payne, Designer of America's Cup challengers Gretal I and II 
"Allowed only one 'if only' in yacht racing . . . it would have been to have read Frank Bethwaite's High Performance Sailing years ago and to have it available for constant reference. Taking all the advice which he offers from his wide experience would have made championship winning a great deal easier."--Bob Fisher, Journalist, broadcaster and winner of many national and international sailing championships 
"The most significant scientific thinking about sailboat racing to come along in three decades. A brilliant and important book for serious racing sailors."--Ed Adams, US Sailing Team Coach; national, North American, and world champion sailor 
"Bethwaite's grasp of the entire spectrum of sailing speed is unique and formidable."--Gerry Hoyt, Yacht designer, sailing speed innovator

High Performance Sailing

Bethwaite, Frank

There is deep mystery and profound satisfaction in finding your position on earth by reference to the sun, moon, and stars--not to mention profound relief when the GPS receiver stops working in mid-passage. That is why knowledge of celestial navigation is still a rite of initiation, and its practice still a favorite pastime among serious cruisers. 
That this edition of Celestial Navigation for Yachtsmen should appear 44 years after the first British edition and 27 years after its first publication in the U.S. is eloquent testimony to the author's clear, concise explanation of a difficult skill. Through those years, Celestial Navigation for Yachtsmen has been the best-known, best-loved primer on the subject throughout the English-speaking world. It successfully teaches sailors who have been demoralized by bigger books. It remains "the famous little book" on celestial navigation. 
Among other changes, this edition substitutes the Nautical Almanac for the Air Almanac, discusses the "short" tables based on H.O. 211, expands the discussion in a few areas, fine-tunes it in others, and shows how to advance a line of position for a running fix from sun sights. The only mathematics involved are straightforward addition and subtraction. 
Celestial Navigation for Yachtsmen has spawned many imitators over the years, but it's still the best--with this new edition more than ever.

Celestial Navigation for Yachtsmen

Blewitt, Mary

Here are 75 novel and wonderful boats--some strange, some beautiful, all of them paragons of Philip Bolger's form-follows-function design philosophy. A planing microtrawler; a glass-galleried, beachable birdwatching boat; a fully enclosed ocean-cruising rowboat; cruising sailboats that take the ground at low tide; power, sail, and rowing boats from 6 to 95 feet--these are boats as only Bolger's unfettered imagination does them. This is the first collection of Bolger's work in almost 15 years. It is long overdue. 
"Bolger is an eloquent writer and his comments run the gamut from hilarious to profound."--The Ensign 
"Bolger brings a kind of youthful feeling to yacht design--he would rather make precedent than follow it."--WoodenBoat 
"Bolger has a way of seducing even the lay reader into thinking about and beginning to understand boat design."--Cruising World 
"Boat lovers who are used to designers who conceive the same boat over and over, camouflaged with a face-lifting here and there, will be amazed at Phil Bolger's diversity."--Boatbuilder

Boats with an Open Mind: Seventy-Five Unconventional Designs and Concepts

Bolger, Philip C.

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Books by International Marine/Ragged Mountain Press