Goodbye 2009 and welcome 2010.  I am looking forward to being out on the water - hopefully this weekend.  I am leaving you with an interesting story about an expedition that will be sailing from San Francisco, CA and ending in Sydney Australia named Plastiki.  They are trying to raise environmental awareness about the growing mounds of plastic accumulating in our oceans.  There are reported areas of plastic trash floating in the Pacific Ocean that cover areas twice the size of Texas.  The sailboat they will be traveling on is constructed from recycled plastic materials.  They have a nice website that will keep you up to date on their whereabouts as well as information about the construction techniques used.

As we head into 2010 I wish all a happy new year and decade!  Let's make sure that we keep our selves healthy and renew our commitment to keeping our planet a healthy place to live for ourselves and our loved ones.  Good sailing!

Everyone has experienced a leaking hatch at one time or another on a sailboat and with the summer rains we have in Florida this is a handy maintenance tip for you.

A handy method to test the seal of a hatch gasket is to test by chalking the knife edge all the way around the hatch and then close and latch it.

Photo by Walkabout Wolf

Open the hatch and check the gasket. If the seal is good it should show an unbroken chalk line all the way around.  And if not? Then you may have to do one or more of the following:

1. Check the edge that the gasket comes up against. Is it straight and square to the gasket? Look for knife edges that are bent, concaved, convexed, or wavy. If any of these are an issue then there is no way that a good gasket could get a water tight seal on those edges.
2. To fix misaligned edges you may have to file, hammer, or force the bent edges into alignment.  Other less obvious repairs may need to be made by adjusting hinges and/or latches, rebedding the hatch or replacing the whole unit.

Using the chalk test on your gaskets seasonally is good preventive maintenance. Where can you get chalk? From your kid's art supplies, department stores or your friend that's a teacher.

I thought this was a great video about adjusting the backstay.  In case you were wondering what the backstay is, it is a piece of standing rigging that runs from the transom to the top of the mast.  On many boats this piece of equipment can be adjusted while sailing.  If you have hung out at Sailnet's forum you will find the author involved in many conversations and is well respected.  This is a nice basic overview of tensioning the backstay and how this affects the handling of a sailboat.

You should come away from this video with the following points:

• identify where the backstay is located
• how this affects the shape of the mast and sail
• when you might want to add tension to the backstay