# Zartman Cruising

> A Small Boat, A Growing Family, A Big Dream


## Posts

- [Putting the Rudder Before the Boat.](https://zartmancruising.com/putting-the-rudder-before-the-boat/): Returning to the normal flow of the blog after the last post’s digression through the Northwest Passage, I’ll pick up the thread as we returned home from the cross-country road trip, whose second half turned out every bit as awesome as the first.  We picked up seven new shops as dealers, with several others eager to make orders in the spring, when mountain shops shift from winter fun to summer cragging mode.  Glad to be back, we were nonetheless a little sorry it was over, and may just go on another tour again sometime.  If only the Midwest weren’t so […]
- [A Tale of the Northwest Passage, in memory of Print Media](https://zartmancruising.com/a-tale-of-the-northwest-passage-in-memory-of-print-media/): For more than twenty years, ever since Cruising World magazine first published an article I wrote, I’ve fancied myself something of a writer.  While I only made my entire living from writing for a very short time, it was a rare month that some magazine or other didn’t run a piece of mine while we were cruising.  And even once moved ashore, occasional writing opportunities still cropped up from time to time, to keep my hand in with.  As the years passed, though, my writing shifted almost entirely to this blog, which doesn’t pay, but has the benefit of complete […]
- [Two Very Different Things, or Not a Bad Way to Start](https://zartmancruising.com/two-very-different-things-or-not-a-bad-way-to-start/): It was all the way back in the spring that I last blogged about Antigone’s boat build.  An incredibly busy summer of boat captaining and rigging has come and gone, leaving us slightly breathless, but with some progress to report on the build.  We last left off as we were putting longitudinal stingers, kind of like purlins, along the hull, at decent intervals to support the core foam we wanted to fiberglass over. Looking back, it might have been worthwhile buying nicer wood than simply furring strips to use, which had knots and checks and other blemishes, but then, that […]
- [The Backyard Warrior Returns](https://zartmancruising.com/the-backyard-warrior-returns/): Antigone, our oldest daughter, was about two years old when we began building Ganymede in the yard of our house in the Sierra Nevada foothills.  Her earliest memories, probably, are of me declaring, “boats don’t build themselves,” as I headed out to glass in another bulkhead or laminate a side deck.  The statement was as much a reminder for me that progress depended on my advancing of it—nothing would happen if we didn’t do it, and everything put off for cooler weather or better conditions would still need doing eventually. I had a column in Cruising World magazine back then—the […]
- [On haulouts, heating, and other muses.](https://zartmancruising.com/on-haulouts-heating-and-other-muses/): Since her launch fifteen or so years ago, we’ve had Ganymede on a pretty irregular haulout schedule.  Her first haulout happened in Cartagena, Colombia, just a year after we first sailed from California.  There had only been two coats of bottom paint over the bare gelcoat, and I’d nearly scrubbed all that off trying to keep the bottom clean in the warm tropical waters of the Pacific and southern Caribbean. A couple coats of SeaHawk paint in Cartagena lasted her just over two years, sailing in colder waters as we went north.  After that, it was random: some years we’d […]
- [An Accidental Enterprise](https://zartmancruising.com/an-accidental-enterprise/): One of the things that keeps life interesting is trying new things: a new adventure; the beginning of something different.  Sometimes that new beginning is abrupt.  You decide there needs to be a change of scenery, and you cast off and head toward a new horizon.  Other times, you just drift into it as circumstances evolve, and before you know it you’re neck deep in something that wasn’t really on your to-do list. It was like that with the webstore we’ve just launched on this site.  I hadn’t imagined, even when rockclimbing full time in Yosemite in the 90s, that […]
- [A Foray into the Fast Unknown](https://zartmancruising.com/a-foray-into-the-fast-unknown/): It has probably become obvious to the alert reader that I’m partial to full-keel, heavy, gaff-rigged boats.  After all, my own boat Ganymede epitomizes that design; I’ve captained a 37-ton steel schooner; I’m rigging a 97-ton tall ship at the moment—most of my seafaring has been done in that sort of boat.  So it was a bit of a departure from my comfort zone to go on a voyage in a racy sport boat recently.  The boat was a Pogo 40;  French-built sort of thing, with a wide flat stern, an hydraulic swing keel, and a tall carbon fiber mast. […]
- [A Synthetic Rigging Upgrade: Vectran to Dyneema](https://zartmancruising.com/a-synthetic-rigging-upgrade-vectran-to-dyneema/): When we first rigged Ganymede’s light-pole mast back in 2009, we used Vectran-cored rope for standing rigging.  Of the other options, Kevlar was too curmudgeonly, PBO was too expensive and short-lived, and Dyneema as a standing rigging fiber was still in its infancy.  The Vectran was easy to work with, affordable, and most of all, stable: in twelve years of hard sailing we never had issues with the molecular creep common to dyneema. The big downside to Vectran, though, is that it suffers significant UV degradation, even inside of a polyester cover.  After a decade in the sun, the old […]
- [Refit and Relaunch](https://zartmancruising.com/refit-and-relaunch/): The surest way to get any project over with quickly, I’ve found, is to attack it with singleness of purpose, disallowing all but the most pressing distractions.  That’s how we got Ganymede originally from bare hull to launched in just over three years, and cruising a couple months after that.  Not so with our latest refit, which had her out almost as long as the original build, for far less work.  You see, having cruised and sailed her for twelve years by then, we were distracted by other projects: a tiny schooner to fix up and sail while we did […]
- [Believe in the Method](https://zartmancruising.com/believe-in-the-method/): And if I haven’t had time to update this blog lately, dear Reader: be comforted!  It’s because I’ve been so busy doing things to blog about now.  You remember the fairing that was going on in the last blog post; you’ll be glad to hear that by now it’s mostly done, by dint of chipping away at the project all winter as time and weather allowed. It’s soul-wearying work, especially as every time you’re just having a last go with the sander before primer a new spot to fix will turn up, but at last we sloshed on a coat […]
- [Winterin'](https://zartmancruising.com/winterin/): For the enthusiastic boater, that last little bit of autumn when the daytime temperature still gets above fifty degrees is always a rush.  As long as paint, resin, varnish, or fairing compound will cure, it’s a great time to get a head start on things so that next spring the launch can be earlier, or at least less frantic.  I mentioned, last post, the stay’sl chainplates I made; what I didn’t mention was that while I was carving up the topsides to put those in, it seemed a good time to chase out some hairline cracks in the finish here […]
- [Returning to Normal?](https://zartmancruising.com/returning-to-normal/): I wondered, as Polar Sun rolled downwind across the Beaufort Sea along the cold, cold northern coast of Alaska, whether integrating back into normal life after the Northwest Passage would be easy.  I could see it both ways: perhaps just to arrive, unpack, fire up the truck and head off to the boatyard to rustle up some work, as if I’d never left.  Or maybe it would be surpassingly strange, after 112 days away from busy roads and traffic lights and almost no people anywhere, to see a streaming freeway, a crowded parking lot, and something—anything—other than gray sea, brown […]
- [The Final Push is Half the Battle.](https://zartmancruising.com/the-final-push-is-half-the-battle/): It was as if the world had run out of interesting, that week or two after we got out of the ice at Pasley Bay, and tied Polar Sun up inside the harbor of Gjoa Haven, a little sandy inlet in the greater sandbar that is King William Island.  We now had to do some serious reassessment: those nine days trapped in ice in Pasley Bay had really set us back, and to get to the northernmost point in Alaska before the season ended was looking unlikely. As soon as we were out of Pasley, Mark had worked out the […]
- [A Farewell to Ice](https://zartmancruising.com/a-farewell-to-ice/): We weren’t expecting to get out of Pasley Bay on our last day there, and we very nearly didn’t.  The wind had died in the night, and the small bits of open sea between the floes were skinned over with ice.  The air was warm though, with strong sunshine.  By a stroke of luck we had retrieved our anchor the day before with much hard labor, and were tied up, with Taya alongside, to some grounded floes that had proved immobile for some time.  I was amusing myself by pushing little pans of ice about with an ice pole, seeing […]
- [Foolish, Careless, or Unlucky?](https://zartmancruising.com/foolish-careless-or-unlucky/): “Well,” we thought.  “Here we are again!” I’m talking, of course, about the south arm of Pasley Bay, where the pack ice closing up in the last blog post had herded us as neatly as if it had been planned.  There was nothing to worry about, really; the pack was busy filling up the northwest arm, and from the snug anchorage we’d just returned to it was just a distant line of white.  Next morning it was still distant, but having filled one arm, was sort of overflowing down into the others.  With baleful eyes we watched the pack edge […]
- [Farthest North](https://zartmancruising.com/farthest-north/): It was cold as Polar Sun motored at length into the spacious bay behind Beechey Island, and we were grateful there was no wind to further chill the person who ventured out of the enclosure to drop anchor a couple hundred yards from shore.  The coolness was no wonder: we were above 74 degrees of north latitude—the northernmost point of this voyage—and even though it was the warmest time of summer, with the sun of midnight bathing the majestic cliffs that surround Erebus and Terror Bay, the cold was deep and abiding. We were here, even though it’s a little […]
- [Managed Expectations](https://zartmancruising.com/managed-expectations/): The tricky thing about expectations is that no matter how well you lay them out with the best information at hand, they rarely resemble the reality you’re ultimately confronted with.  We had arrived in Ilulissat fully expecting the Baffin Bay ice pack to dissipate by early August so we could casually sail over to the Sam Ford Fjord and rendezvous with a kayaking team that was shooting rapids on Baffin Island.  Well, not only had the ice pack not dissipated, it was 9/10ths coverage in a long tongue all the way up to nearly 74 degrees North—the latitude of the […]
- [The Treasures of the Snow](https://zartmancruising.com/the-treasures-of-the-snow/): We didn’t spend a whole lot of time in Aasiaat.  To begin with, it wasn’t nearly as charming as Sisimiut, and we had a few stops to make in Disko Bay before settling the boat into Ilulissat for a two-week stopover.  Then of course Rudy and Renan, the camera guys, were keen on getting some iceberg photos, while Mark wanted to check out some places of historical interest, where Polar Sun’s trail would cross and join that of arctic expeditions long past. In an Old Testament book whose name I can’t remember, God famously asks Job: “Hast thou entered into […]
- [Into the Arctic](https://zartmancruising.com/into-the-arctic/): Nothing I had ever read or heard had led me to believe that the weather in Nuuk, Greenland, would be pleasant.  Yet even with lowered expectations, the decided harshness of the weather was astonishing.  During the entire week of our stay, it was seaboots and foulies nearly any time we were outdoors, and if you weren’t wearing a heavy waterproof jacket, you were carrying it just in case.  Still, it’s something to be in the rough-and-tumble sort of town where wearing bibs and seaboots in the bank, the hotel lobby, or the nicest restaurant is not considered out of place. […]
- [Late Nights and Big Crossings](https://zartmancruising.com/late-nights-and-big-crossings/): It was supposed to be an easy run from Flowers Cove, Newfoundland, to Chateau Bay, Labrador: gentle southwest wind and a fair tide, even if we did have to get up at two AM to catch it.  And the wind was, at least, gentle, even though it was from the opposite quarter than predicted.  No matter—Polar Sun can motor against ten knots of headwind with no difficulty.  With the ebb to help her along—what the Newfies call the “down tide,” we were making pretty good time up the Strait of Belle Isle.  Just a few hours out, though, a re-check […]
- [Leaving with Regret](https://zartmancruising.com/3187/): There have been, in the nearly thirty years that I’ve been cruising, certain places that I leave with regret and remember with affection.  Like peaks that rise above the rest of a mountain range, these destinations stand out in memory as highlights of the cruising experience, and places that I would love to revisit.  None, however, stands out as high as Newfoundland.  Since our family cruised there nine years ago, which you can read about if you go back to the very beginning of this blog, I’ve been dying for an opportunity to return. I was pretty excited, then, when […]
- [Sailing for Greenland](https://zartmancruising.com/sailing-for-greenland/): For nearly a year before this trip began, neither Mark nor I could bring ourselves to tell people of the plan.  Whether from a reluctance to seem too cocky, or a superstitious fear of jinxing the precarious structure of circumstances that all had to come together for the venture to even get started, we forbore from telling anyone who didn’t need to know what we were about.  “Sailing to Greenland,” was all we could commit to—and after all, that’s big enough! I admit to being skeptical when Mark first called to float the idea past me of taking his 1980s-vintage […]
- [When Time is Short](https://zartmancruising.com/when-time-is-short/): When only a few weeks were left before my departure for a long summer voyage, time management became a priority.  May had arrived with still too many things to do before leaving, and I had to put some things aside in order to fast-track the really important ones.  Those were, of course, getting Pshrimp and the little breadboats launched and ready for the family to use while I’m away, and spending a good deal of time with the family while doing it. The breadboats are too big and heavy to fit in the back of my little pickup truck, so […]
- [Preparing for the Unknown](https://zartmancruising.com/preparing-for-the-unknown/): If you asked me to fit out a boat for a cruise to the tropics, and to put together a list of necessary things, I could do it with ease: I’ve been doing voyages like that for close to thirty years.  Likewise if you wanted to know what’s necessary for a two-week ocean passage, or what not to bring when chicken-bussing around Central America.  These are all within my scope of experience.  But trying to prepare for something about which I have no clue adds a whole new level of interest. I’m trying to prepare for just such a thing […]
- [Winter's Final Bite](https://zartmancruising.com/winters-final-bite/): I mentioned, a few posts back, the ill-fated bow shed I’d built over Ganymede, the Cape George 31 cutter we have sitting in the yard, to keep the weather out.  The alert reader will remember that we last left it tied up with string until we could get to bracing it better.  I’m rather devastated to have to report that before I could get in there and really steady it up, another winter storm, this time of snow so wet it was heavy as lead, dealt the final and fatal blow.  Having been made unable to lean again to either […]
- [Invention's Other Mother](https://zartmancruising.com/inventions-other-mother/): One of the reasons that the old saw about necessity being the mother of invention is still around is because it’s pretty much true.  In times of need I have often invented, adapted, jury-rigged, and re-purposed whatever was at hand to get the crisis past.  Most of humankind’s greatest achievements have come about for this purpose.  Gruk needed a better way to smack Thuk and take his woman, and so the club was invented. But what about inventions for which there is no need?  Somehow, I’ve spent the last several years cooking up things that mankind has already moved past, […]
- [Catching up Some More](https://zartmancruising.com/catching-up-some-more/): In a huge departure from my normal practice of letting everyone forget I even have a blog in between posts, I’m posting a second one hard on the heels of the last, with apologies to those who feel that two updates a year is already more of me than they want to hear.  The thing is, being too busy to blog means I have a backlog, or “backblog,” if you will, of material to write about. The alert reader will remember Ganymede, the 31’ Cape George Cutter that this blog was originally about.  For the past year or so, Ganymede […]
- [Catching Up](https://zartmancruising.com/catching-up/): A half dozen or so blog posts back, before getting distracted by the tiny schooner Pshrimp, I hinted at a couple of other projects that were in the works.  Now that Pshrimp is hauled out on her trailer, wrapped, winterized, and parked behind the house, let’s devote some spare brain cells to those other things. It’s been since before Pshrimp arrived on the scene that I’ve been working on the children’s breadboats—the 12-foot sailing dinghies we designed in our heads while we were still out cruising.  If you care to read back you’ll find reference to them in a long-forgotten […]
- [All You Can Really Want](https://zartmancruising.com/can-really-want/): For about a week after the first failed launch of Pshrimp that I told you about in the last post, we turned our hands to other things: a quick weekend to New Hampshire, some work around the house—but the problem of giving Pshimp time to take up and stop sinking was always in our minds.  There was only one thing to do: put her in and keep someone aboard to pump every so often until she stopped taking on water so fast.  But I couldn’t break away from work for that long, and she’s too small for the whole family […]
- [The "P" is Psilent](https://zartmancruising.com/the-p-is-psilent/): It happens, from time to time, that an alert reader or acquaintance will express wonder at the variety and amount of catchy phrases and witty material that emerge in my speech and writing.  It’s tempting to nod sagely and let them think it all comes to me while meditating crosslegged on the head of a pin.  The truth is, though, none of the material is original.  My mind, which cannot remember the children’s birthdays nor any anniversaries, latches on to random things I read, and fetches them out later at unexpected times.   All the names of everything I’ve ever named […]
- [A Paper Trail for a Plywood Boat](https://zartmancruising.com/paper-trail-plywood-boat/): Spring, where we live, always comes in fits and starts.  Last month I wore shorts to work; two days later it was back to flannel-lined trousers.  The day after we went canoeing for the first time, I numbed my fingers in the breeze at the top of a mast.   The urgency to get boats ready for the season on fine days is tempered by the realization, on cool days, that it doesn’t really get warm until June. Still, June is approaching fast, and the wise New Englander knows that to seize a good day to get some boat prep done […]
- [A Season for Not Much](https://zartmancruising.com/season-not-much/): When King Solomon famously said that there is a season for everything, he obviously had not been to New England in February.  During autumn, the season devoted to preparing for winter, I had made some attempts at insulating my shop so that winter could be more productive.  But having found neither time nor resources to really get some good insulation in, my half-hearted efforts yielded predictable results: in short, it’s cold out there, and there’s a limit to how long I can stand on freezing concrete slab, and to what things I can even do. Luckily, the warm house is […]
- [A Man's Home is His Boatyard](https://zartmancruising.com/mans-home-boatyard/): Of all the advantages of owning a decent-sized property rather than renting an apartment, the greatest for me is being able to put anything wherever I want.  There is a certain wild freedom in being able to leave my car in whichever corner I happened to use it last, without regard to assigned parking spaces; or to setting up sawhorses and sawing wood just where it’s most convenient, and then not having to clean up the shavings.  That freedom is circumscribed somewhat by the rocky, broken nature of most of the lot, and by the heavy forest that prevails throughout, […]
- [Feeling Technical](https://zartmancruising.com/feeling-technical/): When I pitched the idea of a series of boatbuilding articles to Cruising World magazine fourteen years ago, I sent several samples and asked if they’d rather a slant toward technical details or if I should lean more in the direction of thoughts, dreams, and aspirations. “Dreams and aspirations, definitely,” they said, and since then, while framed around real events, I’ve written more about how I felt about those things than the things themselves. It’s worked out well, I guess, but what I’m leading up to is that it’s time to put aside the way I think and feel for […]
- [Casting Bread on the Waters](https://zartmancruising.com/casting-bread-waters/): What goes around comes around, they say.  I little imagined, when I gave away my first cruising boat more than fifteen years ago, that the bread I cast upon the waters then would return in the form of another boat.  What I mean is, that first boat, Capella—a 27-foot Irwin sloop my wife and I had sailed to South America and back—had languished unbought at a broker’s on the other side of the country for longer than we could afford, and I considered it a favor to me when a friend took her off my hands.  It involved a bit […]
- [Post in the Time of Pandemic](https://zartmancruising.com/post-in-the-time-of-pandemic/): I had hoped, while writing the last blog post, that by the time I wrote this next one the whole corona crisis would be over, and we would be looking back on it as simply a wrinkle in our springtime.  Perhaps we still will, one day, though more as a wrinkle in an entire season, if not year.  In the meantime, while the landscape of lockdowns and restrictions ebbs and flows around us, our little family has at least found ways to not be idle. The new house I mentioned in passing is on a decent-sized wooded lot, and long […]
- [Nothing to Blog About](https://zartmancruising.com/nothing-to-blog-about/): For the last, oh, more than a year now, the realization has been growing that it’s been a long time since I wrote a blog post.  And for the past few months I’ve been meaning to sit down and write one, and even while at work muttered punch lines to myself under my breath—you know, that final sentence that ties the whole piece together and leaves the reader looking expectantly for the next post.  Then in the last few days several of my readers have emailed to wonder if I’m ever going to write again, and have I died or […]
- [A Seafaring State of Mind](https://zartmancruising.com/a-seafaring-state-of-mind/): Life—at least mine—seems to come in phases.  There are seasons when it feels like all I do is grind itchy fiberglass and slosh paint around—both at work and after; there are seasons where all I can remember is washing heaps of cloth diapers in plastic tubs in our boat’s cockpit.  There have also been times when life was marked mostly by picking heavy things up and putting them down again. Lately, by which I mean since this spring, when as I mention in my last post I sailed a little schooner called Magic from Nassau to Rhode Island, my life […]
- [A Navigation Experiment](https://zartmancruising.com/a-navigation-experiment/): After spending only half the winter grinding fiberglass in the boat shop I mentioned in my last post, my full-time captain’s job at Clean the Bay came calling unexpectedly early. It seems the project that was suspended just before Christmas was ready to start up again, even though it was still the dead of winter, and I had to crash the work boat though a good bit of sheet ice to get down the bay and into position. I guess it was nice, for a while, to be working outside after palely loitering in a building all day for so […]
- [Always Just a Little More](https://zartmancruising.com/always-just-a-little-more/): And if I haven’t blogged all winter, it’s mostly because, unlike last winter when I had plenty of time to build dinghy molds and dinghies and re-do Ganymede’s cockpit, this winter I’ve done little of interest save for one or two side projects that I’ll get to in a bit.  It’s not that I didn’t want to have a winter full of making interesting things—it’s just that having the opportunity to work full-time, indoors, in the slow winter months is not to be despised. Of course the work was interesting enough—a 21’ Maine Cat folding catamaran needed a full refit, […]
- [Will There Be A Mad Cow?](https://zartmancruising.com/will-there-be-a-mad-cow/): My wife Danielle and I have been married for quite some time.  How long exactly I can’t say—no doubt my mother has it written down somewhere—it seems that a couple times a year we get a congratulatory note from her on making it thus far.  But believe me when I testify that it’s been a while.  And in all those long years, almost every scheme I’ve cooked up has met with Danielle’s support and enthusiasm.  Whether the idea was to explore a road in Baja marked only by a dotted line (I’ve carefully avoided unpaved roads since then) or to […]
- [A Sailing Bonanza](https://zartmancruising.com/a-sailing-bonanza/): Every once in a while, the changing tides of life and work leave me not with a mountain of things to attend to, but with a couple of weeks of nothing to do.  While from an economic standpoint this is rather less than desirable, from a seafaring point of view it can be a bonanza.  After all, I’m usually too busy trying to keep body and soul together to do much more than some afternoon sailing after work.  But late this summer, when a gap between projects at my full-time job left me at a loose end, I was just […]
- [Ready for Summer in Time for Fall](https://zartmancruising.com/ready-for-summer-in-time-for-fall/): With the coming of summer, and having the dinghy project wrapped up, I was finally free to turn to a few other bits and pieces that had been pushed off the edge of the winter’s to-do list in favor of more important things. Of course, with summer underway I had plenty of other things to push them further back—a hefty load of rigging work, regular work, and taking Ganymede sailing has kept me pretty busy, but in the nooks and crannies I’ve still managed to chip away at a couple of other things.   The first is Ganymede’s sculling oar, […]
- [Working Outside Again](https://zartmancruising.com/working-outside-again/): Of all the benefits of warm weather, being able to work outside is one of the finest—having the dinghy twenty feet from my front door really sped up the process of getting it done. Not only did it no longer take 45 minutes of driving ‘round trip to get to it and back, but all my tools were in one place: no need to gather everything up each time only to forget a critical bit and have to go back or change plans.  Sure, it’s all stuffed into two tiny garage units that have become proper midshipmen’s lockers: everything on […]
- [A Little Breather....Cloth](https://zartmancruising.com/a-little-breather-cloth/): While I was willing, as the last blog post illustrates, to paint in almost all conditions in order to get Ganymede finished in time, even I had to draw the line at rain. On rainy days—of which there were plenty—I tried to get some work done on the dinghy project. We last left the new mold empty of the plug and ready for quick localized repairs followed by buffing and coating with with Axel mold release agent. After that, there was nothing to stop the beginning of work on the dinghy itself. My primary purpose in the dinghy project was […]
- [The Most Pessimistic Painter](https://zartmancruising.com/the-most-pessimistic-painter/): There was a delay of some weeks in working further on the dinghy, since Ganymede needed to be finished and got out of the marina by a certain date.  It was a desperate time, with Danielle and the girls going out and sanding whenever the weather allowed, then me sanding some more after work, then scraping on a bit of filler to sand off again next day.  She needed two coats of primer before the four-stage process of topcoat, and of course all the best hours of the day were taken up with working at my full-time job or tending […]
- [No Regard For Tradition](https://zartmancruising.com/no-regard-for-tradition/): With the buffing to shiny of the dinghy plug, which is where the last blog post left her, things could really begin to get moving.  The traditional procedure would have been to apply eight or ten coats of mold release wax, followed a few more for good measure.  Luckily, I have no regard for tradition, and the choice to modernize was easy—especially since I’ve spent far more of my life waxing than is decent. There are various alternatives to the usual paste wax—all of them very expensive liquids that you wipe on and let dry, without having to put in […]
- [A Red-Letter Occasion?](https://zartmancruising.com/a-red-letter-occasion/): It is telling, perhaps, of how uninteresting sanding is, that every time you get to move from one grit to the next finer is a red-letter occasion.  Imagine, if you’re still reading this after that first sentence, getting to skip straight from 36-grit to 220!  It happened like this: after leaving the dinghy faired and primed at the end of the last blog post, I did some light filling of pinholes with Bondo, scuffed the entire surface again with 220-grit, and laid on two heavy coats of high-build Duratek primer.  In contrast to the black surfacing primer I’d been using, […]
- [A Sandwich of Affliction](https://zartmancruising.com/a-sandwich-of-affliction/): There seem to be three choices open to the person who finds he keeps needing to do something completely repugnant. He can do it halfheartedly, and not worry about how it turns out; he can suffer agonies doing it little by little so it can be bearable, or he can become really good at it so that it goes quickly. If you haven’t yet guessed, I’m talking about the most onerous, backbreaking, discouraging task of the boatbuilder—I’m talking about fairing. I’m solidly stuck on the second choice, but tempted to backslide into choice #1 nearly every day. I’d like to […]
- [Late to Supper](https://zartmancruising.com/late-to-supper/): Given the severity of the last several winters, I had never imagined that it would be possible to do fiberglass work in January under no other shelter than a plastic canopy.  I had resigned myself to the idea of waiting until late March to glass the new coamings onto Ganymede, then having to rush through the fairing and painting and possibly having to apply the final coat of paint after moving out to the mooring.  I may still have to, but it’s less likely now that I took advantage of a couple of truly mild days to get the new […]
- [A Whole Lotta Boat Building](https://zartmancruising.com/a-whole-lotta-boat-building/): It was pretty agonizing, trying to decide whether to make any modifications to Ganymede’s cockpit geometry.  I mean, since I’m re-doing it entirely this winter, there’s no better time to make the coaming tops bigger or smaller or change them around entirely.  We went over and over it, while sailing the last couple of summers: should the mainsheet attachment move to here? or here? What about the winches? the running backstays?  There was the haunting notion that somehow the most perfectly perfect arrangement was lurking just out of mental reach and our imaginations were falling short of it.  In the […]
- [Interesting Times?](https://zartmancruising.com/interesting-times/): It’s the dead of winter again, and with all my rigging projects wrapped up till spring comissioning time, I have a few brief weeks to work on projects of my own.  I’ve chosen two principal tasks for this winter, both more ambitious than I can possibly manage, but both so pressing I couldn’t select one over the other. The first one is Ganymede’s cockpit.  After Cockpit, Mark I, didn’t work out so well, I had re-done it during a haulout in Colombia, which improved it immesely.  But, things being what they were, I hadn’t managed to do a fabulous job […]
- [Never Say Never](https://zartmancruising.com/never-say-never/): Some years ago, when nearing the completion of our home-finished boat, I testified in a magazine article that once I was done building Ganymede I never wanted to build a boat again.  I think I may have meant it, too.  The itch of grinding fiberglass, the sticky, stinky, messy process of laying it up, the wearisome work of fairing and finishing: for three years I had overdosed on it, working mostly by myself under the murderous California sun.  By the time the boat launched I was ready for a serious break.     Happily, I got my break, and an […]
- [Too Hot to Think](https://zartmancruising.com/too-hot-to-think/): I’d like to say (and think) that the reason I haven’t written a blog post all summer is because I was keeping so busy.  Too much to do! No time to sit down and write!  And while for sure I have been quite industrious (as I’ll get to later), I’m afraid the real reason I haven’t written much is because of the heat.  I mean, it was in the 90’s and muggy as anything for unendurable weeks stacked end-for-end!  Too hot to think, or even to think about thinking.  But it has begun to cool down now, and my steaming […]
- [A Good Job to Have](https://zartmancruising.com/a-good-job-to-have/): When I became captain  of an 80-foot sailing schooner roughly one year ago, I really didn’t want too much more out of life.  To spend day after day sailing, and to have that actually be my job, seemed about all anyone’s heart could desire, employment-wise.  Of course the position has its difficulties: dealing with still-unseamanlike crew early in the season; dealing with 250 tourists a day all season; the frightful boat traffic on weekends, especially the clueless racing sailors who always seem determined to crush themselves to flinders under the schooner’s inexorable steel bows.  Still, all those things are manageable, […]
- [Plumbing Implausible](https://zartmancruising.com/plumbing-implausible/): A couple of blog postings ago I promised you, my readers, details on Ganymede’s new plumbing setup.  This will probably be of supreme disinterest to those who have not lived the joys of marine plumbing and can therefore not sympathise or better yet, smugly nod and say: “better you than me, fool.”  But maybe some will watch with interest to see whether it winds up actually working.  Which is, of course, my sincerest hope right now. Having a horror of traditional bronze through-hull fittings, with seacocks and hose clamps under the waterline (!!!!????), I had determined, ages ago, never to […]
- [Taking Time to Tinker](https://zartmancruising.com/taking-time-to-tinker/): One of the things I almost regretted giving up when we went cruising was a workshop—a place to fiddle about with building this and that; a place with tools and a workbench and room to make things.  Part of the reason I didn’t really miss it was because for six years I’d been building this and that like crazy: fifteen dinghies, three molds, sailing kits, furniture—not to mention our cruising boat—all of which involved a lot of time and effort going up blind alleys, altering some things and re-doing others completely.  In short, I was exhausted of building and fiddling […]
- [In short, what winter ought to be like.](https://zartmancruising.com/in-short-what-winter-ought-to-be-like/): After the dreadful hue and cry of the past three winters, each marked by some extraordinary extreme—whether violent gales, or record snowfalls, or simply longlasting endlessness, this winter has so far proved exceptionally comfortable.  Sure, there’s been the coldest day I ever saw—minus 10 degrees F—but the next day it went into the forties, and there’s only been two significant snow events, and no weeks-on-end-of-mind-numbing-cold.  In short, what winter ought to be like. While everything necessarily slows down dramatically, project-wise, there’s still some amount of activity on days off and evenings.  Some if it involves the gathering of materials for […]
- [Activity is a Virtue](https://zartmancruising.com/activity-is-a-virtue/): I had reproached myself on more than one occasion last winter for leaving Ganymede in the water rather than hauling her out like she deserves, especially when friends helpfully sent videos of her bucking and plunging in the horrible SW gales that racked New England five or six times.  But we were just moving ashore, and money was needed elsewhere.  In the end she came though unscathed, though with her docklines in rough shape. This winter, though, we’d put by enough to have her hauled out—for the first time since we were preparing to sail to Newfoundland—and give her a […]
- [Keep On Sailing](https://zartmancruising.com/keep-on-sailing/): Ever since our move ashore, the care and upkeep of Ganymede has been necessarily pushed to the back burner.  It was just one year ago that we moved off of her into the rental apartment we now call home, and though we have by no means neglected our dear little boat, there’s been a lot of other things to use up our spare time.  Since we didn’t own a stick of furniture when we moved in, much of this year was spent building bunk beds and shelves and desks and picture frames.  Now Apple Blossom Cottage is pretty well furnished—everything […]
- [The Zartman Nautical Depository](https://zartmancruising.com/the-zartman-nautical-depository/): One of the best parts of preparing for a cruise on Ganymede (and on Capella before her), was the day the charts would arrive in the mail and we could begin to inspect and organize them.  It has usually been a pretty big project, since we try to buy in bulk and get discounts that way.  Even so, the temptation to open up one chart after another and scrutinize it for possible anchorages and sweet cruising grounds is always irresistible.  Even after hours of carefully folding and labelling several scores of charts, one with a name like “Barra de Catarasca […]
- [In For a Penny, In For a Pound](https://zartmancruising.com/penny-pound/): One of the advantages of living and working in a boatbuilding town is that you’re surrounded by boatbuilders, and boatbuilding suppliers, and boatbuilding surplus.  Riches I had only dreamed of, when living in the faraway mountains of California and building Ganymede, are here at my very fingertips.  Not only do we have five or six boat hardware stores like West Marine within easy driving distance, there’s as many consignment and used marine goods stores, not to mention the major wholesale distributors of fiberglass, resins, and all other composite construction supplies.  While building Ganymede most of my supplies came by mail […]
- [Captains Outrageous](https://zartmancruising.com/captains-outrageous/): Sailing season has returned to New England again, and is quickly going into full swing.  There’s nothing like the strong blustery winds of May to blow the cobwebs out, shake down everything that’s likely to break, and remind incautious sailors to reef early and keep an eye to weather for sudden gusts.  This spring brings an extra note of interest for me, since I’ve been promoted to Captain of the Aquidneck, and now have 37 tons of schoonerific pulchritude under my command for exactly half the days of the summer. I had expected to end up at the helm of […]
- [Improving, Maintaining, Re-inventing](https://zartmancruising.com/improving-maintaining-re-inventing/): It seems pretty cliché to say that winter seemed long—no doubt every winter in every generation has seemed long, especially in New England—but this one in particular has struck me as exceptional.  Even so, months and months of endless snow and wind notwithstanding, it hasn’t been so long that I got all my list of projects for Ganymede completed.  Thuth be told, partly because in the fall we were busy moving into a house, and partly because the weather went abominably cold very early and stayed that way until about yesterday, I did exactly none of the ambitious projects I […]
- [Throwing Caution to the Winds](https://zartmancruising.com/throwing-caution-winds/): It is, by all appearances, the dead of winter.  There’s piles of snow all around—not as big as when we had the big blizzard two winters ago,but these piles have been around for longer now than those were, and keep getting added to a couple times a week.  Nor is it as long a winter yet as last year, which dragged on far beyond the bounds of decency.  Nevertheless, it’s bitterly cold, and often very windy, and nothing could be farther from most people’s minds than going out seafaring in weather like this.   Which made it all the more […]
- [Precautionary Maintenance and General Purging](https://zartmancruising.com/precautionary-maintenance-general-purging/): There are few things more satisfying to my seafaring soul than periodically emptying the boat of EVERYTHING and giving her a good scrub and sorting and maybe a few coats of paint and varnish. Only one other time, in faraway Cartagena, Colombia, have we had the opportunity to do that to Ganymede, and after a year of living aboard with three tiny children and cruising hard in some dirty places, it was most desperately needed.  That time, as I staggered through the lounge in the boatyard with armload after armload of stuff to be cleaned and sorted, I received ever […]
- [Abednego Marine](https://zartmancruising.com/abednego-marine/): One of the pitfalls of reading too many books in your youth is that you’ll go into situations with preconceived ideas of what things should be like.  Having read an inordinate amount about old time sailing, and whaleships, and cannons and such, I had some pretty strong ideas about New England schooner captains; their demeanor, comportment, habits, and behavior.  So as soon as I was holding a captain’s ticket, and working on a schooner in New England (no matter that I wasn’t actually captain of that schooner: I was a captain, I was on a schooner, it was New England) […]
- [The Day of Small Beginnings](https://zartmancruising.com/day-small-beginnings/): One of the hardest things about setting out cruising five years ago was closing down the business I had created, selling off all my shop tools, and knowing that there would be no more time, money or space for projects not immediately involved with boat maintenance.  Not that that was huge cause for regret—after all, the business, the tools, the hillside shop in the side yard had all been calculated to speed along the process of building Ganymede and getting back to sea.  But the Ganymede project  had been fun—so many things to improvise, to design, to invent, and I’d […]
- [Civilized Yachting, or, The Benefits of Dry Saltines](https://zartmancruising.com/civilized-yachting-benefits-dry-saltines/): One would think that having a job where you spent twelve hours a day sailing would leave you ready to not sail on your days off, but as summer wears on, I find myself as ready as ever to take Ganymede out whenever a day off is not filled with shopping and laundry.  Not that there’s very many of those days; shopping and laundry are just as insistent when not cruising as when you are, but even so we managed to go sailing on Ganymede on three of my last four days off.  It’s a mostly new thing for us, […]
- [The Genie of the Lamps](https://zartmancruising.com/genie-lamps/): Even though it’s happening more and more often, it doesn’t fail to astonish me whenever I get an email from a blog reader in a faraway land—I’m still getting used to the idea that EVERYONE who cares to do a casual Google search with the words “Gaff” or “Ganymede” or “Cruising Family” will stumble across our blog, regardless of what country they live in.   It astonishes me even more when a gentle complaint sent over the ether gets a response: it was a surprise recently when a semi-irate missive to the Newport Maritime Center got them to fix the showers […]
- [Multiplied Exponentially](https://zartmancruising.com/multiplied-exponentially/): Going to captain’s license school is kind of like getting a college degree in English: it’s absolutely useless for any practical purpose, but a necessary evil if you want to do something that requires a certificate stating that you can spell.  Or operate a boat for hire, in the case of the former.  If you go to school to try and learn how to write, it’s probably hopeless already, and if you go to captain’s school to learn seafaring, you already don’t qualify for a ticket.  The reason people go to captain’s school—the reason I went, two nights a week […]
- [Chimney Chronicles](https://zartmancruising.com/chimney-chronicles/): For the nearly five years that we’ve been living full-time aboard Ganymede, our lighting situation has been a never-ending saga.  Being a boat without 12-volt electricity plumbed in, we naturally turned to oil lamps for cabin lighting.  We had saved three already out of our beloved little Capella—the first boat we owned and cruised in—so it was not too bad to buy two more gimballed cabin lamps for a total of four in the salon and one above the berth.  The salon four were from the Den Haan lampmakers in Rotterdam; the one for the berth a smaller one from […]
- [The Root of all Evil](https://zartmancruising.com/root-evil/): Inevitably, the arrival of spring in Newport heralds the arrival of boats—boats by the hundred, flocking to the sailing capital of the East Coast to enjoy one of the most famous, picturesque, and pleasant bays in the world.  And with the arrival of so many boats, the laws of supply and demand being what they are, dockage rates naturally skyrocket.  And so, in the weeks leading up to Memorial Day, all the winter liveaboards vacate the marina and scatter to various anchorages and mooring fields for the summer.  It was extremely pleasant, a few days ago, when we moved Ganymede […]
- [Why is a Schooner?](https://zartmancruising.com/schooner/): For as long as I can remember there has been a story of how the particular sort of boat known as a ‘Schooner’ was named.  When the first one ever built in New England was launched into the harbor, a bystander is supposed to have exclaimed in wonder: “See how she schoons!”  People tend to disregard this tale simply because it seems so unlikely, but no one can offer a better etimolygy for the word, so I say we may as well go with it. But wherever the name came from, there are few nautical things more New England-ish than […]
- [Seamanship Undefined](https://zartmancruising.com/seamanship-undefined/): There’s a lot of talk, in online forums, on blogs, and in magazines, about what exactly constitutes ‘Good Seamanship’.  For some it seems to boil down to having more stuff: good seamanship is about having three or four independent navigation systems in lightning-proof Faraday cages scattered throughout the boat; a second liferaft; AIS; personal and main EPIRBS; Radar; Satphone; Spot tracker; MOB pole; self-inflatable lifejackets with PLBs; a sailplan on file with someone onshore, and watertight tubs of spares and backups for for everything onboard that could possibly fail.  They might also have, in addition to several automatic electric bilge […]
- [Spring into Action](https://zartmancruising.com/spring-sailboat-refit/):  We had begun to despair, some of us, that spring would ever arrive.  As the season advanced into what should have been balmier temps and calmer weather, the onslaught of winter in New England raged on unabated.  “Remember how we thought last winter was bad?” the guys at work kept saying.  “It wasn’t nothing compared to this.”  It was bad enough I suppose, for them—no one finds getting up and driving to work in 15 degrees pleasant, especially with all the snow we had this year—but for us who need good weather to commision boats before a fixed deadline it […]
- [The Perfect Cruising Boat](https://zartmancruising.com/perfect-cruising-boat/): Every so often, an aspiring seafarer will log into an internet sailing forum and ask, “Exactly what is the perfect cruising boat?”  Unless they’re ‘Trolls’ looking for mischief, they usually receive a giant heap of contradictory and subjective answers, since everybody has a different idea based on various levels of experience, competence, and mostly, preference.  Almost every make and model of boat is held forth by someone or other, and the waters only get muddier with each reply. Even more elusive is defining the perfect family boat, which in addition to everything else has to be roomy enough for all […]
- [Building Boats Again](https://zartmancruising.com/building-boats-again/): What do sailors do when they come ashore? Build boats, of course. When Ganymede launched, three years after construction began, and six long years after we had moved ashore to start the boatbuilding process, I had felt like never building a boat ever again.  After all, I had built 15 or so dinghies, as well as the molds for them all, and used up several 55 gallon drums of polyester resin in putting decks, cabin, bulkheads and rudder on Ganymede.  My memory of that time is mostly of endless grinding, sanding, itching, and sanding some more.  There was also lots […]
- [No Metric Equivalent](https://zartmancruising.com/metric-equivalent/): I saw one time, at a museum in Virginia, a curious watch with only ten hours marked on the dial.  It turned out to be a rare relic of a little-known attempt by French horologists to measure time in metric.  It was hubris, perhaps, that made them think they could also cram time into their newly-invented system of measure: the French had, with varying degrees of success, managed to measure a couple of things in centimeters and kilograms, and were raring to convert the whole world to their way of thought. There was one problem, though: while arbitrary values like […]
- [Now What?  How to Become Landlubbers Again](https://zartmancruising.com/now-become-landlubbers/): The worst thing for me about taking a break from cruising is having to find a job.  Not the job itself, mind you—just the looking for one.  It seems the most depressing thing on earth to fill out endless reams of applications, wondering, fearing, hoping the phone will ring and dreading it won’t.  I expect it’s the same for all cruisers who are re-integrating.  There’s always a sort of dazedness to coming back on shore, with the million things that need immediate attention.  Address changes to cancel (“Ah, the notorious Zartmans!” said the man at the post office the first […]
- [Not A Day Too Soon](https://zartmancruising.com/day-soon/): As we had struggled up the St Lawrence River and down the canal systems toward the Hudson river, discussion of what to do afterwards had been largely put off.  There was too much to think about in the rush to not get stuck in Quebec for the winter.   The original plan—that is, the plan we’d vaguely sketched while in Newfoundland after giving up on an Atlantic crossing, was to carry on to the Bahamas from New York city.  Subject, of course, to funds and motivation.  But at the mouth of the Hudson, instead of carrying on with a fair tide […]
- [All in a Rush in New York](https://zartmancruising.com/rush-new-york/):   They say that one can get used to almost anything, if done often enough.  I wasn’t so sure of that when we got up at first light to start locking up into the Champlain Canal; however many locks we transit—and we had come through a good deal of them by now—getting safely into the lock chamber is always a bit tense.  A speed which feels agonizingly slow when approaching the lock becomes incredibly fast when the muddy wall of the lock is flying past several inches away and the closed gates at the far end seem to be rushing […]
- [Another Place on the List](https://zartmancruising.com/another-place-list/):   Our last day in Canadian waters began with a bang; a series of bangs actually, as the first grey light of dawn was hailed by duck hunters firing shotguns into the mist.  How they could see what they were shooting at in the thick fog was beyond me: I could barely see as far as Ganymede’s bows.  After a quick peek outside I went back to bed.  There was no hurry today, no need to go blundering about in the mist and get mistaken for a big duck and shot.  We were less than five miles from the border, […]
- [Over The Hump](https://zartmancruising.com/hump/):   “No worries,” I had been telling everyone for the last month—everyone who had pointed out that to go through the Chambly Canal the mast would have to come down—“It’s mounted on a tabernacle; we can get it down at anchor, if we have to.” Little known to us, we WOULD have to lower it at anchor—the two marinas in Sorel-Tracy, when we got up in the chilly dawn, appeared to be closed down.  One of them was obviously getting dredged, and not a mast or a boat was to be seen over the breakwaters of the other one.  There […]
- [Almost There: Home Stretch on the Unrelenting River](https://zartmancruising.com/almost-home-stretch-unrelenting-river/):   The charts we bought in Newfoundland for the St Lawrence River have a neat feature: a letter inside a little diamond leads you to a table in the margin that tells you what the current will be doing just there at each stage of the tide.  It was hopelessly confusing for me to figure out, but Danielle seemed to think it made sense, and told me at what times we had to cross over each diamond to catch a favorable current.  Some of the diamonds weren’t even a mile apart, but the difference in current was significant.  What it […]
- [Hope Deferred, and Hope Again](https://zartmancruising.com/hope-deferred-hope/): Matane, Quebec, is on the south shore of the St Lawrence River just at the edge of where it narrows enough to be called a river and not an open gulf.  It’s a pretty big town, and the artificial harbor was created for ferries—car and passenger mostly, but there’s also one that takes train cars across to the north shore.  It was a bit of a shocking re-introduction to civilization to walk along the narrow berm of a four-lane highway with cars whizzing by, and having to squeeze into the tall grasses when a particularly large trailer full of logs […]
- [Aurora Borealis Cruising](https://zartmancruising.com/aurora-borealis-cruising/): I’ve never been good at reading tide tables—not because I can’t muddle out an answer from them, but because my answer is usually wrong.  So digging out the tide table book we’d procured in St. Anthony, I handed it to Danielle, who delights in tweaky mathematical calculations.  Soon the cabin was littered with tiny bits of paper covered with even tinier writing, which boiled down to our needing to leave Havre-St-Pierre early in the morning for a quick run to Mingan.  After a few hours there we would leave with a fair tide to cross the Strait of Jacques Cartier, […]
- [Looking Back](https://zartmancruising.com/reminiscence/): It seems a shame to break the flow of narrative as succesive blog postings take you with us from faraway Newfoundland back to the safety of home waters again, and I apologise for doing so with this posting stuck edgewise, as it were, into the story.  But I would be remiss if I failed to mark a major milestone—an anniversary which though modest in the greater scheme of things should not go by unnoticed. Today (if you’re reading this on November second), marks the fourth anniversary of the beginning of Ganymede’s voyage.  It was on this day in 2009 that […]
- [The Race Begins at the End of the Road](https://zartmancruising.com/havre-st-pierre/): Natashquan, Quebec, was until very recently the literal end of the road.  Though it now goes a few miles further to Kegaska, for many years the highway connecting that part of the coast to the rest of the world stopped there, making a very obvious demarcation between between French-speaking Quebec and it’s English-speaking outports.  While cruising among the scattered settlements, we had met only one person who didn’t speak exclusively English—all the people on that inaccessible coast are essentially Newfoundlanders: same ancestors, same accent, same outlook on life.  I had expected a gradual ease, then, into French-speaking waters, and was […]
- [Milestones and Obstacles](https://zartmancruising.com/milestones-obstacles/): There was ice on Ganymede’s decks the morning we left Harrington Harbor.  No surprise—it had been chilly enough to have a roaring fire in our little wood stove the night before.  Still, it added urgency to our already ardent desire to push south and west.  Happily the wind was fair, if a little strong, and we made better than six knots all morning with two reefs in the mainsail, past all the “Bailout Options” I had noted on the chart—possible anchorages should the weather turn bad—through a maze of submerged rocks, around this island and that, on and on.  It […]
- [Living History in La Tabatiere](https://zartmancruising.com/living-history-la-tabatiere/): La Tabatiere, which evidently comes from a French word meaning “The Tabatiere,” is the hub of the outport settlements between Cape Whittle and Blanc Sablon.  Though the unassuming harbor is completely open to the northeast, a gargantuan wharf built for the ferry has a little nook behind it in which small boats can hide from all weather.  We approached this nook with great caution since during our last docking event, at a lonely wharf near St. Agustin where no one goes except on ferry days, a combination of strong ebb current and short-lived wind squall had conspired to make me […]
- [The Windy Wilds of Quebec](https://zartmancruising.com/the-windy-wilds-of-quebec/): Our first stop in the province of Quebec, at a little place called La Falaise, was all among rocky islands smothered in deep moss—moss more than ankle deep, with occasional hidden boggy patches to add interest.  It would have been a pleasant place to spend a couple of quiet days, but Tropical Storm Gabriel was passing by offshore, and quiet days were not on the agenda.  We were grateful enough to get nothing more than absolutely torrential rain as we made our way between a dozen little islands on the approach to Eskimo Bay and Riviere St. Paul. We might […]
- [The Last of Everything](https://zartmancruising.com/last-everything/): “Dig out some more rice while you’re down there,” I called, upending the last little bit out of the ready jar into a pot. “There isn’t any more down here.”  Danielle puffed, straightening up red-faced from the depths of the forward locker which she’d been organizing. “No more at all?”  This could be serious.  Of all the supplies that come and go depending on season and location, rice was one we’ve never run out of.  We always buy 25-pound sacks of Jasmine rice at Asian groceries, and usually go nowhere without an extra one comfortably stowed below.  It’s about the […]
- [The End of Newfoundland](https://zartmancruising.com/end-newfoundland/): The very top of the Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland, at almost 52 degrees of North latitude, is a chilly place all year ‘round.  There’s not a lot of trees, and the ones there are cannot be called opulent.  It’s windy and rocky and cloudy and spends most of the winter frozen over.  The locals love that, since it makes travelling over the sea a lot easier.  After all, there’s no waves in sea ice, you can drive your pickup truck on it, and there’s no speed limit.  It’s also the place where the vikings first came ashore, and it’s no […]
- [Quirpon is pronounced “Cahr-poon”](https://zartmancruising.com/quirpon-pronounced-cahr-poon/): St Anthony, Newfoundland, was not an unpleasant place to spend a week.  There were two decent grocery stores, a public library with wifi, a laundromat, and plenty of walking to do.  Most importantly, there was a chart agent, and we needed charts.  I had bought the two small-scale charts of the coast of Quebec that Campbell’s, way back in St John’s, had in stock.  But those were no good for detail—we needed all the coastal charts from Blanc Sablon, at the edge of Labrador, to the entrance to Lake Champlain, off of the St Lawence River.  I’d been hoping to […]
- [Turkey Necks in Fleur-de-Lys](https://zartmancruising.com/turkey-necks-fleur-de-lys/):  La Scie, just on the north side of Cape John, is the first of the old French fishing ports encountered as you sail north along the east coast of Newfoundland.  It is not an interesting place, except as a haven from bad weather, but it did have showers at the public wharf and a gas station nearby.  In a testatement to the latitudes we were getting to (we’d just crossed the 50th parallel of North latitude rounding Cape John), a notice at the head of the wharf strictly forbade the pelting of seals on it.  We half hoped someone would […]
- [Where North is Down](https://zartmancruising.com/north/): We were talking about Labrador, a local and I, and I asked him whether a place was further up along the coast than Red Bay.  “No,” he said, giving me a funny look.  “There’s not much further UP from Red Bay—everything’s down to the North from there.”  I remembered reading, somewhere long ago, that along this coast they refer to North as “Down”, as if descending into further cold and danger, and South as “Up.”  Up toward the light and warmth and greenery; up to where life is easier.  But it was still surprising to encouter it the first couple […]
- [Noseworthy for Mayor](https://zartmancruising.com/noseworthy-for-mayor/): At first, Twilingate appeared to brim with promise.  Negociating the approach channel we saw the back of a Foodland supermarket dominating the harbor; we hadn’t seen more than a convenience store since leaving Bonavista.  In the harbor, though the water was bright pink from shrimp processing and smelled to high heaven, there was plenty of room, and there were showers and laundry in the harbor authority building.  All of it almost too good to be true—and at first it was.  Though right on the water’s edge, the Foodland was all the way around the other side of the harbor: a […]
- [Fogo Finally](https://zartmancruising.com/fogo-finally/): Blown Away in Lumsden It blew near-gale or gale force four out of the five days we were at Lumsden.  We hadn’t meant to stay that long—in fact we tried to leave once, when the wind was only supposed to blow 25-30.  With storm try’sl and reefed stay’sl, we were making good time close-hauled against a wicked chop, which was considerable even less than a half-mile from shore.  But the wind kept getting stronger, and worse, shifting gradually more and more on the bows.  With a skinny passage through shoals to run, we didn’t have that greatest of sailor’s comforts: […]
- [Lumsden Days](https://zartmancruising.com/lumsden-days/): Berry Bounties Ganymede likes what every sailboat does; give her a wind just forward of the beam, a little more sail out than feels prudent, and she’ll put her lee side down and go.  Danielle likes that also, and will sit at the helm for hours just loving everything while Ganymede makes 6 ½ knots and spray crashes over the foredeck and tries to wash my halyards out the scuppers.  I on the other hand, who has to go forward to fiddle with sails or try and navigate below, like it a little less.  It’s wonderful, of course, to be […]

## Pages

- [Least Said, Soonest Mended in San Blas of Nayarit](https://zartmancruising.com/home/about/voyages/pacific-coast-sailing/least-said-soonest-mended-in-san-blas-of-nayarit/): It’s a testament to the fury of the gale we had just passed through that even though the following day was sunny with a mild, fair breeze, we neither shook out the first reef nor flew the big jib.  It was enough just to slip along quietly, relieved that it was over while half-dreading another sudden tempest out of a clear sky. We found the anchorage at Isabella Island deserted when we arrived the following day—several boats that had narrowly survived what must have been the worst night of their lives had limped off to San Blas for repairs, and […]
- [US East Coast](https://zartmancruising.com/home/about/voyages/us-east-coast/): The cruiser returning to Florida from a voyage around the Caribbean encounters an abrupt shift in official mindset.  While the hassle of passports, visas, checking in and out, and petty third-world officialdom is gone, it is replaced by a different sort of regulation.  PFDs, lights, flares, decals, whistles all need to be in order.  Registrations, sanitation, expirations had all better be attended to, since there are almost a half-dozen law enforcement agencies with the right to board and search at any time and for no reason as you cruise the Florida Keys. It’s kind of nice, though, not having to […]
- [Western Caribbean](https://zartmancruising.com/home/about/voyages/western-caribbean/): Once the cruiser has transited the Panama Canal from the Pacific Ocean to the Caribbean, life becomes infinitely easier.  Gone are the neverending swells and the 25-foot tides that make for crazy anchoring and dinghy shenanigans; clear water for swimming is easier to find, and everything civilization is lots closer together.  The solitude, the sunsets, and the lonely harbors become a remote memory in the easy and social living on the south shoreline of the Caribbean. It’s wise, while still near the Canal, to re-stock and fill up on any supplies that were not secured in Panama City.  The farther […]
- [Getting our Sea Legs in the Sea of Cortez](https://zartmancruising.com/home/about/voyages/pacific-coast-sailing/getting-our-sea-legs-in-the-sea-of-cortez/): We had lived aboard before, Danielle and I, on a very small 27’ boat.  Capella had the usual narrow beam, tight bilges, and unuseable space of the boats of her era, and her cargo capacity was pretty small.  Part of our requirement for Ganymede, when we were shopping for a hull to finish, had been the ability to carry a big payload and still move.  Even so, when all five of us moved aboard in Conception Bay, with everything we needed, plus a ton of stuff we began shedding along the way, Ganymede immediately felt small. It was a miracle […]
- [SF to Sea of Cortez-A Clattery Shakedown](https://zartmancruising.com/home/about/voyages/pacific-coast-sailing/sf-to-sea-of-cortez-a-clattery-shakedown/): Never, since boats first began to be built, has a boat been ready to depart on its scheduled departure date.  Noah didn’t shut the hatch on his famous ark: God had to do it for him, no doubt while Noah ran around looking for a spare set of bilge pump gaskets and maybe some more fruit hammocks. So neither was Ganymede ready to sail when, groaning under a load of food supplies worthy of a doomsday prepper, we cast off from the dock in Stockton that had been her home for the three months since her launch.  It wasn’t for […]
- [Pacific Coast Overview](https://zartmancruising.com/home/about/voyages/pacific-coast-sailing/): The Pacific coastline of America, at least from San Francisco to Panama, is not the easiest to cruise by sailboat.  There are occasional long distances between harbors, and more of those anchorages than otherwise are open to the perpetual swell that abides in the Pacific Ocean.  To sail south along it becomes an exercise in patience, planning, and endurance.  That’s not to suggest for a moment that it’s not worth doing—I’ve never cruised anywhere that wasn’t at least worth the visit—but there’s far more challenges there than cruising the Caribbean or the east coast of the US. The brightest spot […]
- [A Choice to be Made](https://zartmancruising.com/home/about/voyages/pacific-coast-sailing/a-choice-to-be-made/): Of all the various things that come to trouble the human mind, having to make a hard decision may be one of the most difficult to endure.  I can think of no more agonizing moments in my life than having to make a quick choice without much information—like what to do this moment when night was coming on, the engine wouldn’t start, and it was now or never for an uncertain anchorage with rocks under our lee or a night blown out to sea.  Neither choice was good in that situation, far away at the northern end of Newfoundland, and […]
- [What is UIAA Rating?](https://zartmancruising.com/home/rigging-shop/gear-hardware-services/uiaa-rating/): Established in 1932, the UIAA is an institution devoted to the safe development of climbing gear and practices.  Their safety label program requires members’ equipment to meet stringent loading and performance standards.  The UIAA label on a piece of gear indicates that samples of that item have been subjected independently to the required testing.  Seeing the value of such labelling, especially for gear never before seen at the crags, Zartman Rigging joined the UIAA and sends samples of every new product for testing.  While it’s a costly and time-consuming process, climbers can have the confidence that their gear from Zartman […]
- [Splicing Library](https://zartmancruising.com/home/rigging-shop/splicing-instructions/diy-splicing/): Three Strand Eye Splice Rope To Chain Splice For more detailed instructions:
- [What is Seamless Technology?](https://zartmancruising.com/home/rigging-shop/gear-hardware-services/seamless-technology/): For more than thirty years, quickdraws, slings, and runners have been made by bar-tacking webbing together, resulting in a hard, inflexible section of the product that has to be managed carefully, adds bulk, chafes easily, and lacks elegance.  Seamless technology taps into the potential of rope splicing, in which strong connections are made without sewn seams.  This renders a product stronger, lighter, and less bulky than the sewn gear it has made obsolete.  Zartman Rigging has developed a line of spliced slings in which the core of load-bearing strands is protected from chafe and UV by a tough, yet supple […]
- [My account](https://zartmancruising.com/home/rigging-shop/gear-hardware-services/my-account/)
- [Checkout](https://zartmancruising.com/home/rigging-shop/gear-hardware-services/checkout/)
- [Cart](https://zartmancruising.com/home/rigging-shop/gear-hardware-services/cart/)
- [Sailing & Climbing Soft Gear, Hardware, & Services](https://zartmancruising.com/home/rigging-shop/gear-hardware-services/): Ben Zartman offers custom solutions for all your synthetic rigging needs. Dyneema in SK75, 78, 99, and DM20; pre-stretched, heat-set, covered, color coded; loops, shrouds, strops and soft gear. Splicing supplies and seminars available. Email inquiries to benjaminzartman@gmail.com
- [Cruising With Children](https://zartmancruising.com/home/about/crew-of-ganymede/cruising-with-children/): Of all the various opinions in sailing, in the small corner which involves cruising with children are found perhaps the strongest.  Some who have not done so recoil at the very thought of living with children on a small boat; others set firm ages before which you should not take them to sea: five years old, seven, twelve.  You’d think that with all those feelings strongly expressed, there’d be a lot of judgment coming toward anyone who takes a different approach.  Strangely, though, when we set out with our three daughters in a 31-foot boat, ages 5, 3, and 9 […]
- [The Modern Gaff Rig](https://zartmancruising.com/home/rigging-shop/the-modern-gaff-rig/): In deciding whether to put a modern gaff rig on a new build, or change the rig of an older boat to a gaff, several things must be considered.  The first is the hull.  A properly designed rig is not an afterthought on a hull: it’s part of the overall design, and the two must complement each other.  Racers with bulbed fin keels and spade rudders are optimized for super-tight, high-aspect ratio sail plans, where every molecule is strained to the limit to get the last scrap of windward performance out of it.  To put a slack, easy, comfortable gaff […]
- [Recent Posts](https://zartmancruising.com/home/recent-posts/)
- [Home](https://zartmancruising.com/): Products & Services Climbing Gear Splicing Supplies In the heart of California’s Sierra Nevada foothills, miles from the sea, Ben and Danielle Zartman built an ocean-going sailboat with which to cruise with their growing family. Having no definite plan, they simply sailed away to see how far they could get. After five years and 12,000 sea miles, they finally moved ashore in Rhode Island, having cruised from San Francisco to Newfoundland by way of the Panama Canal. But Ganymede’s not done yet! Upgrades, refits, improvements, and more voyages to come. Building Ganymede Rigging Ganymede Jaws or Saddle? North West Passage […]
- [Blog](https://zartmancruising.com/home/blog/)
- [Additional Equipment](https://zartmancruising.com/home/northwest-passage-resources/high-latitude-sailing-equipment/): The most important piece of ancillary Arctic sailing gear for a high latitude voyage is an ice pole or two.  These are immensely useful for pushing bits of ice out of the way as they drift toward your anchored boat, or for shoving them aside as you wend your way through pack ice.  As can be imagined, these are not commercially available, and every boat up there had something different: some a piece of aluminum tube, some simply a boat hook.  Thinking it through beforehand, I had a friend with a plasma cutter cut me some pike heads out of […]
- [What the Well-Dressed Arctic Explorer is Wearing](https://zartmancruising.com/home/northwest-passage-resources/what-the-well-dressed-arctic-explorer-is-wearing/): Being well-dressed is one of the keys to Arctic survival, and the most important layer is the first.  Next to my skin, I wore a full outfit of merino wool.  This is better than synthetics because it not only does the same job of wicking away moisture, it gathers body odor far less quickly, and won’t get all slimy feeling after just two weeks.  It stays warm when wet, rather than getting clammy.  The Smartwool brand is durable, comfortable, and well worth the price.  For gloves and sock liners, also merino, I used Sealskins, and though I had a lot […]
- [The Boat](https://zartmancruising.com/home/northwest-passage-resources/high-latitude-boats/): There are many who insist that only a metal boat should go into the ice-fraught waters.  Between the danger of hitting a bergy bit in open water, or getting squeezed by pack ice, it would seem like anything less ductile than steel or aluminum would be unsafe.  But we transited the NWP with a fiberglass hull, as have a minority of others, and I would confidently do so again.  That being said, I would not do any high latitude sailing among ice with a lightweight cored fiberglass hull: it would have to be solid laminate, with a pretty beefy layup.  […]
- [Northwest Passage Resources](https://zartmancruising.com/home/northwest-passage-resources/): It goes without saying that high-latitude cruising in general requires special considerations.  Between cold water, cold air, and ice, not to mention a sluggish compass and scanty cartography, it can get pretty hairy up there.  To sail the Northwest Passage adds another whole layer of requirements on top of that.  These pages summarize everything I can think of that the sailor needs to consider when planning a NWP transit.  After transiting from east to west in the summer of ’22 in a 47-foot fiberglass sailboat, I can confidently discuss what worked, what didn’t, what would have been nice, and hopefully […]
- [Splicing Instructions](https://zartmancruising.com/home/rigging-shop/splicing-instructions/): I started putting splicing instructions on this page to make up a shortfall in information that I had felt keenly while building our sailboat, Ganymede.  Back then, core-dependent double braids were rather new and Dyneema only came in one flavor.  Splicing instructions were hard to find, and often incomplete when located. Thanks to YouTube, you can now find video tutorials for nearly every sort of splice out there.  While I still prefer the captioned slide shows that I began with here, after enough requests I’m trying my hand at videos as well.  Hopefully I’ll get better at camera work as […]
- [Chronological Blog](https://zartmancruising.com/home/recent-posts/chronological-order/)
- [Gaff Jaws or Saddle?](https://zartmancruising.com/home/about/building-a-kitboat/gaff-jaws/): It’s the perpetual debate: should the gaff use jaws or a saddle?  Some see jaws as an antique and crude solution: heavy, snag-prone, and liable to break.  By contrast, a mast-hugging saddle spreads the load while maintaining a lower profile, doesn’t snag lines, and can’t break a leg like a wooden jaws can.  But there are hidden dangers behind the saddle’s shine. Having drunk the Kool-Aid of the saddle enthusiasts before knowing anything of gaff rigs for myself, I built a saddle for Ganymede which gave nothing but trouble until I finally replaced it.  To begin with, it was prone […]
- [Zartman Rigging](https://zartmancruising.com/home/rigging-shop/): Zartman Rigging offers ingenious, simple solutions to previously complicated problems.  Blending age-old methods with modern materials, the best of both unite in gear that is stronger, lighter, safer, and easier to use than was previously possible.  From Seamless ™ slings, quickdraws, and friction loops for rockclimbers and arborists, to high-strength loops, toggled soft shackles, and running rigging for the world’s fastest ocean boats, the future is happening first at Zartman Rigging. We supply custom solutions for boats cruising the tropics, transiting the Northwest Passage, and crossing oceans.  We’ve made unique crevasse rescue gear and specialty slings for climbing expeditions from […]
- [The Crew of Ganymede](https://zartmancruising.com/home/about/crew-of-ganymede/): We are the Zartman family: Ben & Danielle, and our three girls, Antigone, Emily and Damaris.  We created this website/blog to chronicle our sailing adventures on Ganymede, a home-finished 31-foot gaff-rigged cutter.  Ganymede has been our home since 2009, when we sailed from San Francisco, Califonia to the Sea of Cortez, then down along the Central American coast.   The girls were five years, three years, and nine months old respectively when we began.  Our voyage carried us further than we’d dared to dream, through the Panama Canal, to South America, the Caribbean, and along the US eastern seaboard to Newport, […]
- [Building Ganymede](https://zartmancruising.com/home/about/building-a-kitboat/building-ganymede/): When the inevitable advent of children made us look for a boat bigger than our little 27-foot Capella, we knew that the “Perfect” boat would be very hard to find. We had a very specific style in mind—full keel, heavy displacement, stern-hung-rudder style; the sort designed along the lines of working pilot cutters of a century ago and more. We also wanted to add a lot of our own design ideas: ideas conceived in the long night watches sitting at Capella’s helm, wishing that was just a little different, and this wasn’t quite so in the way. It really seems […]
- [Rigging Ganymede](https://zartmancruising.com/home/about/building-a-kitboat/a-modern-gaff-rig/): Details of Ganymede’s Rig Synthetic Gaff Rigging with Composite and Alloy Spars We decided to put a gaff rig on Ganymede for several reasons.  The first is that I really like gaff-headed boats:  I find in them a beauty and saltiness that can’t be found in triangular Bermudian-rigged ones.  Another is that while sailing on Capella I felt a real need for a lower-aspect-ratio rig—I wanted to carry more sail, but lower down where the heeling moment would be less.  A third is that Ganymede’s hull, a full-displacement, long keel sort, is eminently suited to such a rig.  All the […]
- [Voyages](https://zartmancruising.com/home/about/voyages/): In August of 2009, Ganymede was launched in the Stockton River, three years and one month after arriving in our yard as a bare hull. I refrain from any commentary regarding the boat hauler who trucked it to the marina other than to say he gave me many wonderful opportunities to exercise a forgiving spirit. The launching was mercifully uneventful, and in the weeks before November second we got her rigged, had a sea trial or two, and moved hundreds of pounds of EVERYTHING on board. November second was the date we’d set for sailing—any later and it would be too […]
- [Our Book](https://zartmancruising.com/home/recent-posts/we-who-pass-like-foam/): Ben and Danielle Zartman, as a young couple, begin their life together by buying a wrecked sailboat from a Florida thrift store, fixing it up and sailing off to a formal wedding in Mexico.  Driven by wanderlust and the joy of discovery, they press further along in spite of limited funds and scanty equipment.  During the 5,700 sea miles which follow—spanning from the sweat-soaked jungles of South America to the pine-clad shores of Down-East Maine—every sinner, savage or saint they meet adds another thread to the tapestry of an unforgettable voyage.   Available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.   […]
- [Building Ganymede](https://zartmancruising.com/home/about/building-a-kitboat/): When the inevitable advent of children made us look for a boat bigger than our little 27-foot Capella, we knew that the “Perfect” boat would be very hard to find. We had a very specific style in mind—full keel, heavy displacement, stern-hung-rudder style; the sort designed along the lines of working pilot cutters of a century ago and more. We also wanted to add a lot of our own design ideas: ideas conceived in the long night watches sitting at Capella’s helm, wishing that was just a little different, and this wasn’t quite so in the way. It really seems […]
- [About Us](https://zartmancruising.com/home/about/): We are the Zartman family: Ben & Danielle, and our three girls, Antigone, Emily and Damaris.  We created this website/blog to chronicle our sailing adventures on Ganymede, a home-finished 31-foot gaff-rigged cutter.  Ganymede has been our home since 2009, when we sailed from San Francisco, Califonia to the Sea of Cortez, then down along the Central American coast.   The girls were five years, three years, and nine months old respectively when we began.  Our voyage carried us further than we’d dared to dream, through the Panama Canal, to South America, the Caribbean, and along the US eastern seaboard to Newport, […]

## Products

- [Dreamlink toggled soft connector](https://zartmancruising.com/rigging-shop/product/dreamlink-toggled-soft-connector/): The Dreamlink is the perfect alternative for those who hate cross-loading carabiners.  Strong (43kN) and light (14 grams), the Dreamlink is a toggled soft connector designed to replace a carabiner in any application where rope doesn't rub over it.  Made of an SK99 Bio-based Dyneema core with a protective Dyneema cover, and a hard-anodized aircraft alloy toggle.    Easy to open and close, it remains secure without the aid of springs, locks, or moving parts that can corrode and stick.  Never needs lubrication.    Includes an optional keeper cord to prevent dropping.     
- [Soft Funkness](https://zartmancruising.com/rigging-shop/product/soft-funkness/): Soft Funkness made of spliced Dyneema, with large eye to girth-hitch to hammer eye.    Ever get tired of a swaged wire Funkness beating you up as much as it does the pins it's removing?  Meat hooks, stiffness, weight--it's got a lot of downsides.  Leave the violence behind with the spliced Soft Funkness, and pare down weight and bulk at the same time.    With a large eye that can girth hitch directly to the hammer hole, you'll break 50% less cleaner 'biners, and decrease the noise of funking to a mere whisper, while still ruthlessly removing the over-driven pitons your partner beat on too hard.
- [Loop Joiner](https://zartmancruising.com/rigging-shop/product/loop-joiner/):      The Loop Joiner is the perfect solution to joining two spliced rope eyes without having a permanent toggle in place.  Easy to place and remove, it stays secure while in use with the help of a durable, Dyneema covered shock cord.  Unlike a carabiner, it's not susceptible to failure in an edge-load situation, while being far stronger and lighter.    Stronger than any ropes that will fit it, made in the USA from corrosion-resistant 6061-T6 aluminum, and anodized bright gold.
- [5mm PAS Lanyard](https://zartmancruising.com/rigging-shop/product/5mm-pas-lanyard/): 5mm PAS Lanyard.  Paired with the RPL, this static lanyard makes an ultralight personal tether    This super-strong (11.7kN break load) line has a Dyneema core and Technora cover, making it easy to grip and hold friction in the RPL, when used as an adjustable tether.  Simply girth-hitch the loop to your harness, thread the RPL, and tie a stopper knot in the far end.    Combined weight of RPL with lanyard is 62 grams, or 2.15 Oz, making it one of the lightest mechanical PAS systems on the market.
- [Methods and Materials of Modern Climbing Gear](https://zartmancruising.com/rigging-shop/product/climbing-splicing/): A brief but thorough manual of techniques and best practices for splicing Dyneema and other high-modulus ropes.  Learn to make safe, repeatable, full-strength eye-splices, loops, soft shackles, and other rope structures useful for climbing and slackline rigging.
- [Mega Micro Loops](https://zartmancruising.com/rigging-shop/product/mega-micro-loops/): Mega Micro Loops are the perfect Seamless solution for pin tie-offs on bigwalls.  No more knotted 1/2" webbing to bulk up your rack: these Bio-based HMPE, UV-coated color-coded loops can tie off knifeblades, Lost Arrows, and angles up to 1 1/2"    Slightly longer than the iconic Seamless Micro Loops, their construction and load-bearing (9kN!) are otherwise the same, while their versatility is unmatched by any other product.  Package of 5.     
- [Lashing Tangs](https://zartmancruising.com/rigging-shop/product/lashing-tangs/): Lashing Tangs are the perfect mast hardware for terminating synthetic shrouds, running backstays, and other high-tension fittings.  Made from 1/2" thick, powder-coated 6061 T6 aluminum alloy, the lashing holes are smoothly radiused to accept loops or lashings.  1/2" bolt hole can be drilled out to 5/8" or accept a bushing for smaller fasteners.    Easily retrofit Dyneema rigging onto boats that once had wire shrouds with a minimum of fuss, or incorporate easily into new designs.
- [Micro Serrated Scissors](https://zartmancruising.com/rigging-shop/product/micro-serrated-scissors-are-indispensable-to-the-modern-riggers-art/): Micro Serrated Scissors from Clauss are the strongest, longest-lasting shears we've found.  Short, thick blades with egonomic ambidextrous handles have amazing power to cut thick Dyneema ropes as well as fine loop-core material without snagging.    Designed for Kevlar cloth, they're the perfect shear for every rigger's bag and bench.  No other shear combines such a nimble small size with such cutting power and durability.
- [Splicing Starter Kit](https://zartmancruising.com/rigging-shop/product/splicing-starter-kit/): Splicing Starter Kit includes:    Two sizes of wire pullfid with hand-turned hardwood handles.    A stainless steel picker fid    3X self-adhesive fid-gauge/ruler    Ceramic knife with scabbard    Hardwood drift pin    Needles    Optional Scissors and Modern Splicing Manual    The Classroom kit includes scissors, but no book--rather, it's packed with extras specific to the rigging classes offered by IYRS.
- [Modern Splicing Handbook](https://zartmancruising.com/rigging-shop/product/modern-splicing-handbook-is-a-reference-for-all-the-latest-strongest-ropework-techniques-for-the-diy-sailor-climber-and-arborist/): The second edition of this manual of splicing techniques, originally compiled as a textbook for a live splicing and ropework class at the International Yacht Restoration School in Newport, features several additional splices, soft shackles, and useful charts.  Covering basic techniques in 3-strand and various solid-plait ropes, it continues into more depth with modern core-dependent ropes, 12-strand high-modulus ropes, and loops and strops, both plain and covered.  Anyone who wants to improve their Dyneema splicing game will find this a useful resource, and the DIY sailor will find everything here for doing any ropework on his boat.
- [Seamless Micro Loops](https://zartmancruising.com/rigging-shop/product/seamless-micro-loops/): Bio-based HMPE Seamless Micro Loops, pack of five different colors.  Use for hooks, birdbeaks, peckers, cam hooks, and other bodyweight placements. Naturally UV-resistant High M-weight fibers have the added protection of Armourcoat rope paint.
- [Dragon Coat Rope Dye](https://zartmancruising.com/rigging-shop/product/rope-dye/): Dragon Coat is the ultimate in protective performance rope coatings.  Water-based, non-toxic concentrated polyurethane with UV-resistant solids and vibrant colors.  Specially formulated for Dyneema, it also works with polyester, nylon, and natural fibers. Mix as much as needed at a 1:1 ratio with water and shake well before use.  Shelf-stable before dilution.    Sold by the quart.    Colors are:    Blue, Red, Green, Yellow, Purple, Orange, Gray, Beige, Black, and clear.
- [Fid Length Splicing Gauge](https://zartmancruising.com/rigging-shop/product/fid-length-splicing-gauge/): Fid Length Splicing Gauge, self-adhesive, pack of 3.
- [Ceramic Rigging Knife](https://zartmancruising.com/rigging-shop/product/ceramic-rigging-knife/): Ceramic rigging knives will hold a sharp edge longer than steel ones, and are the go-to among riggers who work with hard-to-cut ropes like Dyneema, Technora, and PBO.    Ceramic Rigging Knife with scabbard.
- [RPL Micro Rappel Plate](https://zartmancruising.com/rigging-shop/product/rappel-plate/): RPL micro rappel plate, line diameter: 6mm.  Anodized aluminum.    Bright violet, totally awesome.
- [Marlow Lashline](https://zartmancruising.com/rigging-shop/product/marlow-lashline/): Marlow Lashline, SK99 silicone-coated Bio-based Dyneema.    All prices are per foot.
- [Rope Sleeve](https://zartmancruising.com/rigging-shop/product/hmpe-sleeve/): HMPE sleeve for chafe protection and loop covers.
- [Knotless Swami](https://zartmancruising.com/rigging-shop/product/knotless-swami/): Knotless Swami.  A swami belt for the future.
- [Seamless Friction Cords](https://zartmancruising.com/rigging-shop/product/friction-cords/): UIAA-rated Seamless Friction Cords, eye-to-eye.  Bio-based SK99 Dyneema core inside a 100% Technora cover for ultimate grippy-ness without melting.  24" inches from eye-to eye, with no sewn seams to get in the way, these are perfect for any of the friction hitches popular with arborists, cavers, mountaineers, and rescue personnel.
- [Seamless Friction Loops](https://zartmancruising.com/rigging-shop/product/friction-loops/): UIAA-rated Seamless friction loops.  Bio-based SK99 Dyneema core, 100% Technora cover.  For prussiks and autoblock, this is the strongest, lightest, least bulky friction product on the market. Strong enough to be used as a sling (UIAA 24kn), light enough to hardly be felt, durable enough for years of heavy use.
- [Seamless Anchor Extender](https://zartmancruising.com/rigging-shop/product/anchor-extender/): Super-strong anchor-building cord with spliced eyes. 8 or 12 feet.    Designed to replace knotted-loop cordelettes, the UIAA rated Seamless Anchor Extender is the next step forward in building both bigwall anchors and setting up topropes.  With a spliced Dyneema core inside a protective polyester cover, it's strong enough to be used single-strand (10kn break load) to extend an anchor across a ledge, and is ideal for wrapping a tree or equalizing several pieces.    Best of all, it weighs less than the same length of cordelette, with far less bulk and no awkward knots.  Buy at least a dozen of each size so there will be no limit to your anchor building!    For custom lengths please email benjaminzartman@gmail.com
- [Hardwood Drift Pin](https://zartmancruising.com/rigging-shop/product/drift-pin/): Hand-turned hardwood drift pin for ropework.
- [Wire Pullfids](https://zartmancruising.com/rigging-shop/product/wire-pullfids/): Wire pullfids with hand-turned hardwood handles.
- [Toggles](https://zartmancruising.com/rigging-shop/product/toggles/): 1/2" High-strength anodized toggle.
- [Seamless Runners](https://zartmancruising.com/rigging-shop/product/seamless-runners/): Seamless Runners, short, shoulder, double, and triple length.  Bio-based SK99 Dyneema inside a UV-coated Dyneema cover.  These will outperform, outlast, and out-awesome every other sling avaliable today.  More cut-resistant than Nylon, more UV resistant than sewn webbing, lighter and less bulky than either.  UIAA 24kN certified.
- [Seamless Quickdraws](https://zartmancruising.com/rigging-shop/product/seamless-quickdraws/): Seamless extendable quickdraws.  Unique technology using an SK99 Bio-based Dyneema core inside a Dyneema cover, which is further protected by a colorful UV-protective coating.  More versatile gear means you have to carry less of it, and if it weighs next to nothing, so much the better!  UIAA certified to an astonishing 24kn in open configuration, they'll hold nearly twice that in basket (folded over).    The future of quickdraws has arrived, and it is beautiful.
- [Seamless Daisy Chain](https://zartmancruising.com/rigging-shop/product/daisy-chain/): Quantum Leap Seamless Daisy Chain, ten-link.  Bio-based SK99 Dyneema core inside a UV-coated Dyneema cover, with contrasting end links.  There is no other daisy chain so strong and light available today.  Use for aid climbing, personal tethering, and rope-access work where weight and bulk would be a disadvantage.  Each link has a break load of over 8,000 lbs.    String Theory nano-light daisy: High-modulus braided fibers, UV-coated.  Break load 9kN.
- [Splicing Fids](https://zartmancruising.com/rigging-shop/product/splicing-fids/): 1/4" Splicing fid, Stainless or Titanium


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