In the aircraft world (I’m a pilot as well as a boaty), when the wing or a cabin door falls off, the event is called an unscheduled disassembly. Many years back. I was halfway through a Transpac yacht race from Los Angeles to Honolulu when the top half of our spinnaker departed from the lower half in an unscheduled disassembly.

After retrieving half the spinnaker from the top of our mast, we spread it out in a cabin. My mother had taught me how to sew a loose button, so I was selected to be the repairman.

I broke out the sail repair kit: a bag filled with straight and curved needles, several spools of thread, a cake of beeswax (to lube the needles) and a sailmaker’s palm that was absolutely guaranteed to raise several blisters on my hand in less than an hour.

We stretched out the chute and used duct tape to hold it together temporarily, before my best imitation of Betsy Ross sewing that first flag of the United States. I threaded a needle and set to work as quickly as I could. This was, until its beheading, our best chute.

It was boring, steamy, hot work. The sailmaker’s palm would push the needle through the fabric, often into my other hand, and then it was just push, repeat, push, tighten and repeat. Inch by inch, the seam grew that restored (more or less) our spinnaker to its original shape.

Since we blew the chute at night, it wasn’t until the following morning that I started Betsy Rossing, after it had dried a bit and been laid out and taped. By nightfall, my eyes were failing, my right hand was bleeding copiously, and my other hand felt like I’d been wrestling a porcupine. Still, I finished with a flourish and several quite professional cross-stitches.

It was then that I discovered I had, in my weary final hour, carefully stitched the leg of my shorts to the spinnaker. The long and shorts of this is that I was absolutely not going to rip out those hard-won stitches in the chute, so we crossed the finish line at Diamond Head with my shorts flying proudly from our spinnaker.

I tell you this woeful story because many Passagemaker readers are do-it-yourself stalwarts. My DIY wisdom: Mind your shorts when you stitch a seam.

Since that time, I’ve learned a great deal about DIY stitchery. I have no pretense of becoming a Savile Row seamster, but there is a whole lot of fabric on a boat that will need your attention. Bimini tops, cockpit and bridge cushions, dashboard covers, wind scoops for hatches at anchor, dodgers to protect the bridge—it’s endless.

My first foray into becoming a boat tailor was when I needed a cover for my 14-foot rowing wherry. If I didn’t turn it over, it filled with Florida’s palm fronds and assorted droppings. I went to a local canvas shop with a photo of the boat and its measurements for an estimate, and I thought the man was offering to buy the boat.

Eventually, I bought a sailmaker’s sewing machine from Jim Grant at Sailrite, whom I’ve known since the early ’70s. This machine opened a new world for me, since it does everything except nuke popcorn, and even that may be farther back in the manual. It can punch through leather without breathing hard. The same goes for multiple layers of Sunbrella fabric.

Since then, I’ve made everything from that rowboat cover to duffel bags, repaired the stitching on my Bimini top, reinforced the helm seat cover where my rear is shredding it, and generally had great fun.

In the list of most-needed tools for any passagemaking boat, I would put my trusty Sailrite just below a Phillips-head screwdriver and right above a multimeter for testing voltage. In quite a few coves and harbors around the world, I’ve discovered that more than a few boats have a similar sewing machine on board.

Oh, and I did have a spare pair of shorts aboard, so I didn’t cross the Diamond Head finish line starkers.

This article was originally published in the October 2024 issue.