Cruising (maritime)

Cruising means different things to different cruisers, but all cruising shares the following characteristics: living on the boat, traveling, extended periods of time (more than a week or two). To reduce fuel expense, the most common cruising boat is a sailboat.

Cruisers on the East coast of North America commonly visit the north (e.g. Maine, Newfoundland) in warmer months and travel south on the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) as far as the Bahamas in the winter. On the west coast, a popular route alternates the Gulf of California in winter with the islands of Washington state and British Colombia in the summer. The Baltic Sea has terrifying equinoxial storms in the winter, but in the summer the coasts of Sweden and Finland have thousands of beautiful islands with well-marked channels. The Netherlands, the northern Mediterranean, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Austrailia, and the South Pacific Islands are other favored destinations with mild or predictable weather.

Many cruisers are "long term" and travel for many years, the most adventurous circling the globe over a period of five to ten years. Many others take a year or two off from work and school for short trips and the chance to experience the cruising lifestyle.

Due to the transient nature of cruising, Cruisers form their own community. Cruisers commonly, upon anchoring in a new area, will stop by nearby boats (in their dinghy) to introduce themselves and say "hello". The classic icebreaker is to hail a boat in an anchorage and ask "where there's good holding?" Many cruisers leaving an area are happy to trade charts with boats going in the opposite direction.

How to do it

Try it out in little steps. First, take a class in sailing. This will teach you the basics, and you'll see if you like to sail at all.

Next, buy a small dinghy (6-11 feet) with sails. Sail it regularly. Do you keep wishing you could go farther?

Next, crew on a yacht, just for fun. Local yacht clubs often have boats looking for crew. It helps if you're a good cook, or good company.

Take a class in celestial navigation. GPS works, but careful navigators use a belt & suspenders approach: They keep a continuous dead-reckoning track using a compass and a distance-measurement device called a log, and use coastal landmarks, GPS and celestial navigation to correct it. Careful navigation is essential to avoiding stormy areas, shoals and other hazards. Currents can carry you into these without any warning, unless you navigate carefully.

Still love being on the water? Buy a small boat, maybe 30 feet. This is small enough that you yourself can go by yourself, and big enough to take a family or your mate to anywhere in the world. Big boats are much more work; many rich people buy a big boat, and eventually sell it and get a smaller one because they are more fun.

Introduce your family to sailing with the most pleasant cruise you can arrange! Share the cooking and house-keeping among everyone, and after they're hooked, send your significant other to a class (your relationship will thank-you). Let them take your dinghy out alone so they can love sailing, too. Teach everyone how to manage all the parts of the boat. This way they can get around even if you get sick. Women follow instruction well, and often make wonderful navigators. The small 30-foot boat will have easy equipment, well within a woman's strength.

Equipment

There are two rather different schools concerning equipment:

1. I'm on vacation. Give me every comfort there is. I can afford it, and I can find a good mechanic.

2. I want to stay on vacation. I want the simplest boat I can get, so it will keep working (so I can go), and cost less (so I can stay away longer).

There are some areas of agreement. In general, try to arrange your boat so heavy weather or losing your engine are adventures rather than a disaster:

Get a monohull. Multihulls capsize in storms, cannot be righted by their crews, and kill their crews.
Get a strong boat. Have it surveyed before you buy it, and tell the surveyor you plan to go offshore.
Do some research and get good safety equipment. Include an EPIRB (emergency position-indicating radio beacon), which will get you out of many types of trouble.
Plan routes to avoid heavy weather, but carry a parachute sea-anchor and storm trysails and learn to heave-to, (bow 50 degrees off the wind, moving slowly backwards) to survive storms. Most boats lost in storms attempt to "run with the storm" or "lie abeam." Heaving-to is a safer way. See the book "Storm Tactics" by Larry & Lin Pardey.
Practice sailing and anchor-warping maneuvers, which don't need an engine, and are fun anyway.
Get a stove with at least two burners, that's easy to light. Many people like liquified propane. Avoid electric stoves run from the engine.
Have running fresh and salt water taps. You can do this with gravity, which is tremendously convenient, yet makes a more reliable boat than a pressurized water system run off the engine.
Have the biggest radar reflector that will fit your boat.
Make sure you can navigate without engine power- i.e. have battery powered GPS or celestial navigation as a back-up.
Have more than one large fresh water tank. In some areas, they limit how long you can stay out, and how safe you are. Engine-powered watermakers should not be essential to return safely.
Consider using oil navigation lights. Most sailboats with electric lights don't run the engine enough to keep the battery charged enough to keep the running lights lit. This is unsafe. Oil lamps aren't bad, especially if the boat has an oil tap (from a gravity tank) to fill them.
Consider charging the boat's batteries with solar cells, wind turbines, or water-turned generators, as well as or instead of an engine. They're much more pleasant.
Consider leaving off the engine. They cost thousands of dollars and break. The propellor slows down a sailboat, and makes another hole in the hull. A sculling oar can move a 6 ton, 30 foot yacht around a harbor at 1.5 knots.
If you must have an engine, consider using a marine outboard. They can be repaired and replaced much more cheaply than in-boards.
If you have an engine, prefer a diesel (economical, safe fuel) with a hand-start option (i.e. it can be started wet with the battery run down- standard on workboats).
If you have an engine, include an engine-driven mechanical (not electric) bailing pump. Many people believe this is one of the most powerful arguments in favor of an engine.
Carry a large manual bailing pump.
Consider using reefing sails rather than carrying a sail for every occasion.

Here are some major comforts, eschewed by minimalists; the trade-offs are given in the way they look on the water:

A hot shower- desperately missed even by most minimalists, who however, often rig solar-powered showers in the rigging, and smugly mention the thousands of dollars they saved. There are also sit-down showers with hand-pressurized tanks that can be filled froma kettle, for those who are unable to commit on this issue.
A watermaker- envied by minimalists... who compensate by carrying a multiple-hundred gallon freshwater tank in the space where your boat has an engine. An reliable though expensive compromise is to run a small watermaker off a solar panel or windmill, just to keep the tanks topped-off, and provide emergency water.
Air conditioning. Even most power boats can't afford this. A few sailing yachts (the Albin Vega is the only mass-produced type with this feature) have a system that circulates air past the sea-cooled hull, where it cools and condenses excess humidity into the bilges. In the Vega, the air circulation is driven by solar heat on the hollow mast, and a wind-powered ventilator on the rear cabin top. Vegas are said to be 5 degrees cooler than outside in most summer areas. Everybody else rigs canvas sunshades and a fabric windscoop over the forward hatch.
A refrigerator- iced beer is an amazing luxury in the tropics. Minimalists grit their teeth and smile thinking grimly of the extra half year they will be able to stay on vacation with the money they saved by not having a refrigerator. Everybody has an icebox.
Washer and dryer for clothes. You're clean, and the minimalist is negotiating with a local washerwoman. Arguably, this is a toss-up. Laundry is a wonderful excuse to meet and mildly enrich locals.
A dishwasher- you're watching a video instead of doing dishes. There's no downside here. Everybody hates doing the dishes.
A stereo/video system. The minimalist is in town dancing the lambada with the locals.
Radar and imaging sonar- genuine, though expensive safety equipment, when it works.
An amateur radio rig- very handy when you get tired of talking to your crewmates. There are insulators and antenna tuners that allow one to use a sailboat's standing rigging as the antenna. You have to have a license. The minimalist loves his wife and carries a short rack of great books...
Satellite phones (most often INMARSAT or IRIDIUM). Only a business desperado takes a satellite phone cruising.