About
Refit Guide is a curation of the best techniques and gear to improve your boat. Whether you’re a cruiser, blue water sailor, weekend joy rider, or new boat owner, we make it easy to keep your boat ship shape.
Our advice and recommendations are made after poring over online reviews, forum discussions, magazine articles, books—any information we can get our hands on. Every article on the site is updated as new resources and products become available. We thoroughly research all options and compare them against explicit criteria, deferring to experts where appropriate.
So basically, we do exactly what you would do if you had the time.
We look for what we think is best for most people. We may not recommend the top of the line option if we don’t think it’s appropriate for the everyday mariner. If you have specific needs or criteria, we hope you still find our research helpful for making the decision that is right for you. If you think we got something wrong, please let us know!
Our recommendations are rooted in a particular philosophy.
Our Philosophy
Boat ownership should be enjoyable, but it also takes maintenance—you know the sayings about how much time and money a boat can require. We think it’s all about balance.
Our philosophy helps us strike this balance:
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We believe the Reliability of the vessel and safety of the crew should never be compromised. We never simply hope for the best; we prepare for the worst by outfitting our boat with the right gear and properly maintain it.
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We prefer simple over sophisticated. Simple systems are easier to fit, easier to maintain, more resilient to failure, and easier to replace when they inevitably fail. We avoid dependencies between systems where possible.
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We respect tradition and welcome progress. There are troves of age-old wisdom and skill that every mariner would do good to understand. Congruently, advances in engineering and technology are changing almost everything about our world–for better and worse. We welcome those advances and account for them in our contingency plans.
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We weigh cost versus dependability. There’s a deferred cost to cheap products, and there’s a point of diminishing returns at the top-of-the-line. If you take care of your boat—and outfit it appropriately for your use—it will take care of you.
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We prefer to do it yourself–at least once. By doing it yourself, you learn about it, you understand it, you know it’s done to your standards, and you known how what to do when something inevitably goes wrong.
