Where should we go?

[Mdog]

Hi, I'm new to the forum.

I took a good look around the forum but my topic is vague at best. I'm looking for information on Cruising areas, more from the tourist perspective then from the Sailing perspective. Is there a lonely planet type book or webpage that perspective cruisers use? Preferably organized by geographic area.

The reason I'm asking is my wife, kids and I plan to leave our Jobs in 5 years and are debating the pros and cons of various "expeditions". We have no sailing experience so we are looking for what it has to offer. My research has found that many Cruisers enjoy the South pacific, but how does that compare with South East Asia or Baja Mexico or any other area. What attractions/activities/experiences make that area preferable over another? What sort of timeframe is recommended for any given route? An in depth summary kind of stuff.

I realize there are many very specific logistical issues associated with each area and sailing in general but this is not our first long and sometimes difficult trip: In 2014 we drove from Canada to Ushuaia Argentina 10 months. In 2019 I flew across Canada in a small airplane in the winter. We see the boat buying/ sailing/ bluewater crossings as things we have 5 years to learn.

First we must narrow our focus to what we want to see and do. Any help/ reference material would be appreciated.

Thanks
MDog

[tkeithlu]

Welcome to the forum, MDog.

Thought: If you are getting to a destination by sailboat, you best enjoy the trip as well as the destination, because it's going to take awhile.

You know what training you needed to be an air pilot. There's a bunch of training needed for sailing/cruising as well, but every member of the family who will stand watch needs training, and you also need a bunch of experience near shore before progressing to off shore. So, five years may be a much tighter time frame than it appears.

Good luck witth it, and do post your adventures.

[Cheechako]

Go somewhere that is close and easy at first. Once you start down the South Pacific you are committed.
Get adjusted and figure things out. The E. Caribe is good as no long trips between anchorages.
Mexico is fun, Bigger jumps between anchorages generally than the Caribe.
Bahamas are amazing.
The Pacific Northwest is superb, but not for snorkeling and swimming etc.

[sv_pelagia]

Are you new to sailing/cruising? (If not, do you have appropriate boat, experience, etc?) WHERE are you located?(Canada? East? West?)

Such info might help others answer....

[AiniA]

I think I know where you are coming from. There is no equivalent of a marine Lonely Planet but there is no reason why you cannot use LP to plot out where you want to go from a touristy idea. Balance that with nautical planning and you are set. Key to being a boat tourist is being able to find a safe place (theft or damage, weather) to leave your boat for a few days, a week, or a month. Some particular places we liked were Ecuador where we left the boat for a month to go backpacking (buses) in Ecuador and Peru. New Zealand for a month with rental cars, South Africa for three weeks including a week in Lesotho with a rental car/4wd. You can think you are safe but never entirely know. We went on a four day tour in the Galapagos with the boat in a protected harbour in an area that gets no wind. The day after we returned the tsunami from the big earthquake arrived - the harbour faced directly toward to Japan. We left the harbour for several hours, don't know how the boat would have done sitting by itself.

[Mdog]

I agree Tkeithlu, compared with Flying airplanes sailing is sloooow. We enjoyed our driving days just as much our explore/relax days in the Americas. Part of our love of "vanlife" was the freedom to pick up and go anywhere. We found quite a few resources like ioverlander.com and lonely planet good for picking a route. We would have discussions like "we want to see X, but its going to take and extra 12 hours of driving and the camp spot is in a landfill, is it worth it? Sometimes yes sometime no. You can't see and do everything so what makes an area "worth it" to the cruising community?

My wife and I are pretty good project managers, we pick a goal and work towards it. Once we decide on a goal we will make the appropriate decisions, like doing smaller excursions or delaying a year to improve our blue water credentials.

[grantmc]

To answer the specific question, then probably Jimmy Cornell's World Cruising Routes is the sailing reference. It doesn't say anything about the destination, it simple and clearly states how to get from A to B. And there are 600 pages of A's.

Book includes the routes, charts/pilots required, waypoints, useful guides, suggests best times of year to sail, typical weather conditions. Plus a narrative about the passage. The book describes typical cruising destinations, it does not include high or low latitude destinations.

Also OP welcome to CF. It's always great to have new people join up. Do please be a poster not a lurker. I politely suggest too to complete your profile, as it helps if we know where your from.

One of the issues you will face in your choice is where you start from. Buying a boat far from where you are based, especially for blue water trips, presents it's own challenges. So most people's first serious trip is just leaving their home.

[fxykty]

noonsite.com provides “arriving by sailboat” information for pretty much every country in the world. Together with a Lonely Planet and you’re set.

Cruising guides combine the functions of how to get somewhere with what to see and do (from the water) once you get there. Many popular cruising destinations have their own cruising guides.

[NedX]

Originally Posted by Mdog

Hi, I'm new to the forum.

I took a good look around the forum but my topic is vague at best. I'm looking for information on Cruising areas, more from the tourist perspective then from the Sailing perspective. Is there a lonely planet type book or webpage that perspective cruisers use? Preferably organized by geographic area.

The reason I'm asking is my wife, kids and I plan to leave our Jobs in 5 years and are debating the pros and cons of various "expeditions". We have no sailing experience so we are looking for what it has to offer. My research has found that many Cruisers enjoy the South pacific, but how does that compare with South East Asia or Baja Mexico or any other area. What attractions/activities/experiences make that area preferable over another? What sort of timeframe is recommended for any given route? An in depth summary kind of stuff.

I realize there are many very specific logistical issues associated with each area and sailing in general but this is not our first long and sometimes difficult trip: In 2014 we drove from Canada to Ushuaia Argentina 10 months. In 2019 I flew across Canada in a small airplane in the winter. We see the boat buying/ sailing/ bluewater crossings as things we have 5 years to learn.

First we must narrow our focus to what we want to see and do. Any help/ reference material would be appreciated.

Thanks
MDog

Hi, MDog, and welcome to the forum. I think, in addition to all the great advice you will get from posters here, it might be interesting to you to see what bluewater sailing can be like.

I'm not talking about the highly polished and curated videos that show lots of scuba diving in the Caribbean, either. Those might get you dreaming, but they don't usually show you the setbacks and challenges.

One of the reasons I like these is to see how people solved problems that cropped up during their passages, and compare it to what I'd do. Occasionally, they come up with solutions that would've never occurred to me.

Not that this is by any means the only way to learn, nor does it substitute real time-on-the-water experience, but, for example, this gentleman's thought process in when to deploy his drogue,

and this gentleman's decision-making on everything

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QF6FjOe5TsU

(including when to tough it out and when to turn around and enjoy a beer in port)

and this guy

this guy

, who always gets into tough situations and guts them out (I love his accent and the way he talks to himself, or when he radios a Russian ship to get a weather forecast, but I have to turn down the volume sometimes because I don't need the music)

Occasional self-aggrandizing and fundraising aside, these videos give you a magnified look on the kind of equipment and wherewithal, especially in dealing with setbacks and coming up with solutions when things break, that you'll need when you go offshore.

Again, I do not consider YouTube videos a substitute for actual experience, but I do think they allow you to see what can go wrong and allow you to picture yourself and your family in those situations.

Adding one more guy, because he never stops smiling, even when he's seasick, and he builds a birdhouse in the middle

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUi0gsxVHZM

[Don C L]

So I may have missed it, but are you in BC? I'd just start with poking along down the coast to Baja and Sea of Cortez. There's plenty of good stuff to see in that little jaunt. If all goes well and you want to go farther out into the blue, then Hawaii. But that's just me.
https://www.cruisersforum.com/forums...t+sailors.html

[JPA Cate]

One way to approach the issue is to buy a nice trailer sailer, and see if you even like sailing, or being on the ocean. (Not everybody does.) Unless you're wealthy, you're going to be doing maintenance on your boat (like being your own aircraft mechanic, familiar with EVERYthing you need to do.) If you plan on paying for it, understand that the field has many operatives who do not communicate well with boat owners, do incompetent jobs, and/or deliver late. And since travel by sailboat means paying close attention to the favorable seasons, your boat can get stuck for a whole season by waiting on boat work. Not all destinations have reliable boat workers.

In your shoes, I'd get started sailing and see if both you and your wife think it is fun: i.e., worth devoting a lot of time to. If the answer is yes, what you need most is sea time in varied weather conditions, to work out how you handle what the weather gives you. It is very different from land travel.

Concurrently, each of you make a list of places you really want to see, and Lonely Planet guides are great for that. Many destinations have cruising guides, some of which are on disc these days. Occasionally there are mistakes in such guides, so you have to really trust your own eyes, and avoid coral heads, and *stuff* that may be there but not on your chart. Nonetheless, you need to locate safe places to leave your boat for *a while*, usually in a marina, while you do exploration. Some places you hire motorcycles, or cars; others, one uses public transport (which can be an adventure in itself); others, you might buy a camper van or car for a season.

Anyhow, your first step is to get out on the water, and see if sailing appeals. If that's a go, then you start thinking about your first boat, knowing that it may not be the last one you buy.

Another way to get out on the water is to sign up for sailing lessons. The courses offered by the RYA are sort of the gold standard for this. You'll learn about sailing and docking, and spend some time on the water. If you don't like it, you quit there, and go back to being a regular tourist. However, on the water, as you travel, your wife is going to need to be able to do all the jobs on the boat necessary for sailing it, piloting it, navigating it. So both of you need to learn: you will be trusting each other with your lives, and she needs to have equivalent confidence to yours. You, at a minimum, have to trust her to wake you from your off watch if she has a concern, and she'll have to know enough to know there's a problem. Honestly, I think she should be able to sail the boat by herself if you went overboard or were incapacitated, but some women are willing to accompany their man but not learn to manage the boat. Such women don't know me from a bar of chalk! You can check my sailing history on my profile, if you're interested. I am a very long term cruiser.

Ann

[Mdog]

Thanks for the quick replies!

As guessed, I am from the interior of BC Canada. And like I said, I have very little experience sailing, I have been on a sail boat but unfortunately not in rough water.

I guess with COVID restricting some of the sailing options and before jumping in with both feet and buying something. I thought I would lay the ground work for possible options. Part of that includes finding out what benefits cruising has to offer. It would be easy for us to do another road trip, but there is no challenge in that.

I guess what I am finding difficult about doing the research is that its not as intuitive as road tripping. On the road, if we found an attraction we wanted to do or see then we could easily understand the logistics of how to get there, where to park, where to camp etc. With cruising I lack experience so I am looking for a resource that couples the attraction with the transportation. They go hand in hand, if you want to see something but there is no anchorage nearby, then its not really available via sailboat. This is also a benefit as there are probably alot of attractions that are only accessible by sailboat and may not be in Lonely planet type books.

It sounds like Jimmy Cornell's World Cruising Routes is where I should start. Its actually how I ended up asking the question. I thought before buying route only information, I'd see if there's the Cruisers lonely planet.

Thanks for the contributions!

[sv_pelagia]

MDog,

Given your lack of sailing experience...
- consider avenues to get experience w/o too great of a commitment ($, time, etc) BEFORE committing. A trailer sailor as suggested, is a great start (you can sail it in the interior as well as out on BC's coast).
- Jimmy Cornell is fun to go through, but doesn't tell you about what's involved in doing so (good and bad)... I suggest you find some classic cruising books to learn more (soooo many of them)... most however tend to gloss over the negatives
- seriously, there is no comparison between land travel and travel by sail

It can be exciting to begin to dream. (But reality not always what you dream.)

[Mdog]

sv pelagia, What classic cruising books? This is what I'm asking for.

Don C L, I like the information on the West Coast. Thanks

[fxykty]

https://www.waggonerguidebooks.com/w...bookstore.html

There was a thread on CF a while ago that had lots of links to cruising guide books for the PNW from Puget Sound to Alaska. Most cruising guides do describe the land attractions and how best to access them.