Tag: ActiveCaptain
How to Mark Your Anchor Chain
This post is the result of an item on Jeffrey Siegel’s personal blog, Taking Paws, on which he and his wife Karen document their travels aboard aCappella, a 53′ RPH DeFever trawler. The subject of marking your anchor chain is a popular one on forums and discussion boards around the boating world, and one of the [...]
Second Great Technique for Dinghy Anchoring
Our recent piece by Jeff Siegel of ActiveCaptain about a novel dinghy anchoring technique stimulated quite a bit of discussion from readers and we even heard about another, possibly even better, technique from John Marshall, owner of the Nordhavn 55 Serendipity. Marshall discovered a particular product that makes the process of anchoring the dinghy off [...]
Great Technique for Dinghy Anchoring at the Beach
By Jeffrey Siegel (ActiveCaptain); Videography by Karen Siegel Here’s a great technique for anchoring the dinghy off the beach. Our dinghy weighs about 800 pounds. She’s a rigid inflatable with a 40 HP engine. It’s our family car when we’re cruising and we put a lot of demands on her. So I was telling Larry [...]
The Underway Engine Room Check: Why You Need It
I saw a great example recently of why you need to be diligent about the hourly (or whatever regular schedule you set) engine room check while cruising offshore. As you know from some earlier posts, Jeffrey and Karen Siegel, owners of ActiveCaptain, aboard their DeFever 53 aCappella, are headed south for the winter and recently made an [...]
iPhone for the Boat? Jeffrey Siegel of ActiveCaptain Says “Yes”
I recently talked with Jeff Siegel about some of the issues related to mobile phone service for coastal cruisers. I asked Jeff whether the data rates for the iPhone and others were really good enough to rely on for a typical coastal cruise such as theirs. I think you’ll find his reply, as usual, not only informative, but definitive.
ActiveCaptain Could be the Wave of the Future
Telling you that ActiveCaptain “could” be the wave of the future is probably a little bit like saying the Internet will “probably be a big thing.” The truth is, ActiveCaptain already is a fantastic resource for cruisers and passagemakers, but it might actually become something huge — a source of real-time, up-to-the-minute information that your [...]





