wind

Marc, I wanted to thank you for helping us get everything set up for our trip to Baja, Mexico. The trip was excellent, it had a really nice blend of adventure and relaxation. The sailing was pretty good, the wind tended to blow in the morning and then drop off around 1 or 2 pretty quickly…

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” —Mark Twain Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them. —John Updike (b. 1932), U.S. author, critic. Self-Consciousness “What is liberty? We say of a boat skimming the water with light foot, ‘How free she runs,’ when we mean, how perfectly she is adjusted to the force of the wind, how perfectly she obeys the great breath out of the heavens that fills her sails. Throw her head into the wind and see how she will halt and stagger, how every sheet will shiver and her whole frame be shaken, how…

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…

“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,…