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Articles are of general interest to the entire CCA membership, and are not particular to any specific station. Categories include Feature Articles, Safety Moments, White Papers and For Ocean Racers.

  • How Can I Help? Rendering Assistance

    CCA Safety Moment for March 2021

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  • Skipper, Leadership and Vessel Safety: Executive Summary

    Executive Summary

    William Strassberg, MD

    January, 2021

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  • Showtime mast down
    Showtime’s Last Delivery
    A rescue amid a terrifying capsize is brought to life in this firsthand retelling. Read more
  • Night Watch on the Fly
    Goodbye Baltic and Scandinavia (Hello Tides, Currents, and Fog)

    Summer 2019—Night Watch in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands

    by David Tunick, New York Station

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  • an anchor
    Anchor Testing and the Effect of Vitamin D on COVID-19
    Perhaps a meta-analysis of anchoring tests is the only way to get a sufficiently broad idea of what will work best for an individual. No single test proves very much, and all are compromised by the simplifying assumptions in the test protocol. Read more
  • An Albatross
    Film "Albatross": The impact of the environment on the birds

    The movie “Albatross” shows the impact of plastics on the albatrosses of Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge. The movie was made between 2009 and 2012. Midway Atoll NWR is located more than a thousand miles northwest of Honolulu and shelters the world’s largest colonies of Laysan and Black-footed albatross, along with a single pair of Short Tailed albatross.

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  • A cheap life vest
    The Labels are Coming, the Labels are Coming!
    After an initial stage of having existing life jacket designs updated with modern labels, new life jacket designs created under a new UL standard (UL 12402) will begin to enter the market, and these life jackets may have features and innovations which are not currently allowed under the older UL standards. At least that is the hope. Read more
  • High Visibility for Safer Boating

    Sea and be Seen

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  • Unstable Approaches: Listen to the clues that tell you to reset
    Sailors can learn from the crash of flight 8303. We can, on occasion, get into a situation that gets more and more difficult from which to recover. This can be caused by ego, or by a sudden change in the expected circumstances, or a lack of “forehandedness”, which was one of the late Capt. John Bonds’s favorite words to throw out at Safety At Sea students. Forehandedness, he’d lecture, was the ability to anticipate possible changes in the current situation and to be ready… Read more
  • A VHF with DSC
    Group DSC Primer for Fleets and Safety: Group Calls on your VHF and SSB
    Not just for safety anymore, DSC can be used to contact another boat for purely non-emergency reasons, such as find other boats positions and automatically plot them on your chart-plotter Not only that, you can set your radio to be part of a “group” to send and receive alerts intended for a fleet of vessels. This capability may serve any fleet, be it yacht club, regatta, race or just a group of friends. Read more
  • Spinlock inflatable
    Life Jacket Recommendations
    The CCA recommends that, at the skipper’s discretion, all crew should WEAR A LIFE JACKET when on deck of a recreational boat. There are various types of life jackets with advantages and disadvantages, and that are appropriate for different conditions. But the best one is the one you are WEARING. The boat's skipper should establish a culture of safety and protocols, the goal of which is: don't fall overboard. Read more
  • Preventer diagram
    Preventers: A Comparison of Approaches

    Preventers for off wind sailing has always been a popular discussion topic.

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