Blog

On numerous occasions our Pacific Yachting charter customers & students say: “Do you think the wind is even going to come up?” The answer is yes! If it looks dead out there, please realize that Mother Nature is just taking a breather first thing in the morning. That gives you time to pull the mainsail up at the dock and put a single or double reef in. Practice this with your crew. It sometimes takes a bit of adjusting to get the new tack and clew right. The most common mistake I see people doing is: 1. The main sheet is not released enough. 2. The main halyard is not released enough. Look at the leech of the sail. If it looks tight, let the halyard down more. 3. The boom vang is cleated or pulled too tight. 4. Head…

Capitola Village Capitola is one of our favorite destinations for a day sail or overnight. You can reserve a mooring by calling- 831-462-2208. If you are sailing in, you can call the Capitola Wharf on your vhf on channel 11. They have a shuttle boat that will take you ashore. Capitola is a picture perfect village in a protected cove that has a wonderful ambiance to it. There are some excellent restaurants, a theater, and many shops that will especially please the non-sailor type crowd. With our normal North West winds, Capitola is very protected. Thus, the temperature can be almost 5-10 degrees warmer than at the mile buoy. This serves as a great place for a lunch break. Santa Cruz Wharf Another good lunch anchorage is North of the Santa Cruz Harbor at the Santa Cruz Municipal Wharf. The…

There are times when the harbor entrance can have plenty of depth from the continual winter dredging, though we still can get fairly large swells at the harbor entrance. First, there’s a live web cam showing the harbor entrance, 3 weather prediction sites, tides, and swell height prediction. Please do your homework before coming over to…

Just a reminder-when you secure the boat to the dock, please tie the spring lines around the base of the chain plates, not the stanchions. The stanchions are not meant to sustain the type of lateral loads imposed by the fore and aft movement of the boat. Typing spring lines to the stanchions will cause the base to work loose and water to seep into the deck core (that’s a bad thing). Oh, anybody know the proper knot to tie around the chain plate? (Answer: round turn and two half hitches). Here’s a great resource for all knots…in animation! http://www.animatedknots.com/roundturn/index.php

“To follow the road to Nirvana, it is analogous to climbing up many steep, narrow, and jagged mountain ridges while it’s storming. You wind back and forth and at times it may seem like you will never get to where you are heading, continually getting knocked down along the way. If, when following this road,…

ASA is a nationally recognized sailing certification and accreditation program. These organizations, which include sailing schools, charter companies, sailing instructors and sailors, set competency standards for both sailing knowledge and on-the-water skills for sailors and instructors from basic to offshore sailing levels. Certification simply means a person has demonstrated a standard of proficiency by passing both…

Marine debris has been defined by NOAA as any persistent solid material that is manufactured or processed and directly or indirectly, intentionally or unintentionally, disposed of or abandoned into the marine environment or the Great Lakes. In layman’s term marine debris is trash or litter that ends up in our rivers or oceans. It is found throughout…

There is an area in the North Pacific Ocean between California, Hawaii and Japan that is accumulating garbage at an alarming rate. This area, commonly known as the North Pacific Gyre, has been transformed into something that resembles a plastic soup. It is the result of our “disposable lifestyle” and it’s only getting worse. It is becoming clear…

Remember the classic scene in the movie, “The Graduate” at Benjamin Braddock’s (Dustin Hoffman) college graduation party? One of his father’s friends came up to him and said: “One word son- PLASTICS!” I have occasionally thought to myself, yes, I should have listened to that line and pursued a career manufacturing anything plastic, becoming a multi-billionaire, until now. I’m quite content running a sailing school, working on ways to clean up all of that plastic I could have become rich off of. All Pacific Yachting boats will have fishing net on all of our boats located in the outside lazarette for netting trash and plastic on our marine sanctuary. Please do your part in helping the marine environment.