serena
Around here, there are always a few sailing books open at any given time. After finishing The Essential Liveaboard Handbook, I’ve paired How to Buy the Best Sailboat by Chuck Gustafson with Know Your Boat by David Kroenke for my reading pleasure. Know Your Boat is a guide to “everything that makes your boat work.” Jim Sollers, provides clear illustrations to make sense of the maze of parts and systems.
In How to Buy the Best Sailboat, Chuck Gustafson walks you through the process of defining your sailboat requirements and describes the basic types of hulls and rigging configurations before moving on to the self survey criteria for various parts of the boat (note, the self-survey is just the initial look-through, he recommends getting a professional surveyor for the final inspection).
The two books work really well together. After reading a chapter on the mast and rigging in Know Your Boat, for example, I can turn to How to Buy the Best Sailboat’s chapter on “Self Survey Criteria for the Rig” and get a general sense of what to look for.
Meanwhile, Tig is furiously dog-earing the pages to his Field Guide to Sailboats of North America.
What are you reading lately?