Nigel Calder - Nigel Calders Cruising Handbook: A Compendium for Coastal and Offshore Sailors

He who goes to sea for pleasure would go to hell to pass the time!

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Copyright 2001 by Nigel Calder. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a data base or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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To Terrie, who humors my addiction to sailboats
in spite of the fact that she would rather explore the world
from behind the wheel of a minibus.

In 1971, as a footloose English hippie, I met a wild nineteen-year-old American. Keen to impress her, I suggested we borrow my brothers 28-foot sailboat, fittingly named Wallop , and spend a week exploring Englands east coast. Terrie took a look at a small-scale chart of the region, which included most of the North Sea and its European coastline, and said, Why dont we go to Amsterdam?

Well, OK, I answered, a little hesitantly, concealing the fact that while I had done a fair amount of dinghy sailing, I had virtually no offshore experience and almost no navigational skills.

Lets go.

We rounded up a crew of landlubbers, filled the bilges with bottles of homemade beer, drank a few toasts, and headed out the Crouch estuary. The first North Sea swells found me hunched over the chart table, poring over the piloting chapters in a well-thumbed copy of Eric Hiscocks Cruising under Sail , alternately reading and retching.

Hiscock got us to Amsterdam, at which point Terrie said she needed to go ashore to make a phone call. Fifteen minutes later, a Dutch boyfriend showed up on the dock and she was gone! There was nothing in Hiscock to help me deal with that crisis. Fortunately, it was soon resolved: Terrie was back the next day (the Dutch guy had a full-time job, which made life rather boring), and we have been cruising together ever since.

Hiscocks book and its companion piece, Voyaging under Sail (combined into a single volume in 1980), were seminal works not just for us, but also for generations of cruising sailors. In fact, his books have been popular enough to spawn an entire genre. This book of mine is just the latest entry in the field. So you might well ask, Why another one?

The answer is that, although many of the skills required to sail a boat are the same today as they were fifty years ago when Hiscock first started writing, the boats in which todays sailing is done are a far cry from those of Hiscocks day, as indeed is the equipment used to sail, pilot, and navigate them. It is this, I feel, that makes another stab at the subject worthwhile.

As irresponsible as it was, Terrie, I, and our landlubberly crew could set off with nothing more than a basic understanding of how to sail a boat, and still successfully cruise around northern Europe (we did, however, get run down by a freighter on the way home, but thats another story ...). We simply could not have done it in most modern boats.

So my hope is that I can demystify the desirable attributes of modern cruising boats, walk the reader through modern cruising systems and equipment, and summarize those skills that we have found necessary or useful to happily cruise for the past thirty years.

My qualifications for writing such a book include decades of experience with the technical side of cruising, an appreciation of the benefits of the best of modern technology, and years of family cruising. Even so, despite the fact that Terrie and I have many miles of blue-water passagemaking behind us, I need to acknowledge that we are no great sailors. Terrie gets very seasick, and I chum the water from time to time. In common with most of the people who read this book, we have never crossed an oceanand maybe never will. The longest open-water passage we have made is 600 milesacross the Gulf of Mexicoalthough we have now done this eighteen times, often in midwinter in unpleasant conditions. As cruisers, we are fairly typical of mainstream or wanna-be cruisersI believe I am coming from the same place most of my readers would like to be!

In writing this book, I have tried to be as objective as I know how but, inevitably, this is a more subjective book than Boatowners Mechanical and Electrical Manual and my other technical books. When it comes to stripping down a winch or overhauling a toilet, there is essentially a right way and the wrong ways. However, when it comes to determining a suitable keel configuration for a cruising boat, there is a range of choices, all of which may be right in different circumstances.