Jerry Dwyer

For learning how to sail, the U.S. Sailing Association and American Sailing Association books written for their courses are very informative. The book on the left is the first book in the U.S. Sailing Association series. It was news to me when I studied it. (That's another way of saying the book was very informative.) I used the books in on-the-water courses and can't speak about how informative they are without an instructor helping you sail at the same time. In combination with good to outstanding instructors, I have learned a lot from them.

Colgate (1978, 1996) is an outstanding summary of information on how to sail and sail well. Some friends gave me this book, and I have read and reread it. There is a lot in it about all aspects of sailing. I learned some things on my initial reading and have learned more as time goes on.

Marshall's Sail Better (1996) and Siminoff's (2001) Boating 101 are books that I happened to buy in bookstores and are interesting to read. Both include some sailing tips that I have not found elsewhere. That said, if you are like me and can't go sailing every weekend, it is hard to absorb helpful sailing hints from a book and put them into practice.

We seem to be into learning most things the hard way. It is said that sailing is a combination of hours of supreme bliss and moments of sheer terror. It does seem to work out that way. The bliss part is unbelievable. The terror part is not so great. (My wife agrees with this description of sailing.)

While Marshall (1996) and Siminoff (2001) will not eliminate all of your mistakes, they will reduce their frequency.

Since we go sailing for a week or so once a year, I have gotten more value out of focusing on one skill each year. For example, one year I focused on weather. Now you might say that learning about the weather in a benign environment like the Caribbean is not exactly hard. In my defense, we go during the Summer when one tropical wave follows another. It is helpful to have a better understanding of their significance in the development of hurricanes. I didn't know anything about tropical waves before we went to the Caribbean. Tropical waves are not exactly a big issue in Lawrenceville, Georgia.

I also knew that the nightly rain in the Caribbean was an annoyance. The rain dropping through the hatch onto my face wakes me up, I close all the hatches, and sometimes I have to wait only a minute or two to open the hatches up. Sometimes this happens three times in one night. Not exactly a solid night's sleep. This seemed odd. In Lawrenceville, our Summer rain always is in the afternoon. Want to know why this happens? Read Kotsch's (1983) Weather for the Mariner.

If you want to understand the weather and will be using that knowledge at sea, Kotsch (1983) is a great book. This book provides explanations of why weather develops, why the trade winds blow the way that they do and what to look for in weather developments. I had read several other books on weather and had learned virtually nothing. I was getting quite down on the whole thing and was about to give up trying to learn about weather. This book, with its informative discussions and applications to developments at sea, explains the weather clearly and carefully.

Kotsch's book is a Naval Institute Press textbook for the Naval Academy, so I didn't absorb it all right away. But the book repays rereading.

The publication date is over twenty years ago. Is the book out of date? You will notice the publication date when you read about satellite systems and hurricanes. We have more substantial satellite systems and know more about hurricanes. On the other hand, knowledge about low pressure systems hasn't changed that much. It is the best book around by a wide margin.

That said, this may not be the book for you. If you are looking for rules of thumb to memorize about the weather, this book is overkill. A better alternative for you may be Weather at Sea by David Houghton.

I found Houghton's (2006) Weather at Sea really informative after reading Kotsch (1983). As a first book, Houghton covers the topics too fast for me to be able to get the significance of what's being said. This is a short book, only 80 pages long. After reading something else and having some understanding of overall weather patterns, the discussion and pictures of weather maps, clouds and hurricanes are unbeatable.

On the other hand, if you're looking for rules of thumb and can remember them, this book may be all that you want. I am horrible at memorizing rules of thumb. I can remember things after I understand them. If you can remember rules of thumb and don't really care about why they work, try this book first before delving into Kotsch.

The link to the left is to the 2006 Fourth edition of Weather at Sea. I first read the 1998 Third edition and bought the new edition just to see how different it is. The fourth edition is not much different. You probably will be just as well off buying a used copy of the earlier edition if you find one cheap. I wouldn't get an edition more than ten years old, because there have been too many recent changes in weather technology such as satellite systems.

Chapman's Piloting (2013 and earlier years) and The Annapolis Book of Seamanship (2014 and earlier years) are classics of boating including sailing. They contain a great deal of useful information.

I use them the same way that I use dictionaries. I tried reading them, but that didn't seem very helpful. Both Chapman's Piloting (2013) and The Annapolis Book of Seamanship (2014) are useful for looking up things, such as the rules of the road and lights, not for reading about sailing or, more generally, boating.

The Annapolis Book of Seamanship (2014) is available in Kindle format and that is the way to get it. It is more like an encyclopedia and computerized searches are great for encyclopedias. It is the reference and well worth having. It is too bad that Chapman's Piloting (2013) is not available in a digital format for your ocmputer. That really would be worth having! Still I have it in paper and read parts of it off and on. It just is not so ready at hand as a computer file.

Gustafson (1991) is a good survey of the issues involved in buying a boat. He gives a nice overview of the whole process of buying a boat. He pointedly asks the basic question.

Do you really want to buy a boat? It might well be cheaper to sail without owning a boat, and many people do. This is a tough question to ask because it puts your budget up against your dreams. It is an important question. Buying a boat is expensive and selling one is expensive too. If you buy a boat, hardly use it or can't afford it, and then sell it, you will be noticeably poorer for the experience.

Most people don't rent cars because they use their car all the time. Most people don't sail all the time. Renting boats can be a sensible – and even great – way of going sailing. It is possible to rent boats in the most exotic locations in the world. We have rented boats for day sails on Lake Lanier, Georgia and Charleston, South Carolina. (Not exotic, I know.) We have chartered boats for the last few years in the British Virgin Islands and the Grenadines. We have had a great time each year in the Caribbean for less than the cost of docking a sailboat in Charleston, S.C.

Gustafson (1991) is not readily available any more. Still, I found it a nice, readable book that could be digested in several hours. It assumed as much as I knew: basically nothing. If you can find a copy somewhere, I strongly suggest reading it. It really helped me.

Daniel Spurr's (2004) Your First Sailboat is readily available and is a more thorough book than Gustafson (1991).

A major difference, though, is a basic one: Spurr assumes that you will buy a sailboat. Even Chapter 9's title, "What Will It Cost Me?", pretty much gives it away. The title supposes that you will buy a boat. Maybe that's the most common outcome, but I think it would be helpful to give people the reasons for buying or not buying a boat and the information to think about the alternatives. (Maybe I think that because we have not bought one as of today?)

Spurr (2004) goes into more detail than Gustafson (1991) about what to look for in a boat, the different styles and the effect of age. This is very informative. You can read more details about these subjects later but you will have a fair amount of basic information from reading this one book.

That said, I have to wonder about some of the chapters. One chapter is titled “How Do I Get Back to the Dock?”. Take my advice: If you don't know how to get back to the dock, do not buy a boat! Or at least not a boat that costs more than what seems like a trivial amount to you. (In my case, that would be a few hundred dollars.) Know a lot more than how to get back to the dock before you buy a boat that cost tens of thousands of dollars. You may find going back to the dock so intimidating and difficult that you don't ever want to do it again. Probably not, but you never know until you try it.

There are other chapters on topics such as how to raise the sails. These chapters also are not very helpful for buying a boat.

A very good part of the book is Spurr's summary of 75 different boats' qualities. Spurr is a very knowledgeable sailor and his knowledge shines through in this section of the book. The boats range from eight-foot boats big enough for only one person to catamarans big enough for a large family. Or put differently, they range from boats that should never go much beyond shouting distance of shore to boats that have gone around the world.

Overall, this is an excellent first book on buying a boat. And the relatively low price doesn't hurt.

What Will You Do With A Sailboat?

Roughly speaking, there are four types of sailing: daysailing; coastal cruising; offshore cruising; and racing. Daysailing is just that: sailing for the day and going home. Coastal cruising is traveling on the boat, possibly long distances, but not more than a few hours from some safe port or anchorage. Offshore cruising is sailing well away from shore for extended periods.

I cannot imagine that you will start to learn much about racing by reading books. You want to start by racing on someone else's boat.

There are books about sailboats in general including setting them up and books about collections of specific sailboats. Books about sailboats in general discuss the usefulness of various characteristics and any disadvantages. They are useful reading unless you plan on buying a boat other than a relatively simple daysailor, in which case the short summaries in Spurr's book Your First Sailboat probably are more than adequate.

If you plan on buying a boat twenty feet or longer or you plan on sailing it overnight, you will benefit from reading at least a little about sailboats in general. Besides, you might find the books interesting reading. After you've learned about the characteristics of boats in general, comparisons of specific sailboats will be a lot more informative.

You might think that Roger Marshall's book (1999), Choosing A Cruising Sailboat, is about choosing only offshore cruising sailboats, or at least cruising sailboats. You'd be wrong. This book is quite helpful for deciding about characteristics of coastal cruisers and even daysailors.

How does Marshall cram all this in 210 pages including numerous figures? Marshall compares the designs of five different boats: a weekender; a cruiser; a voyager; a single-hander; and a cruiser-racer. All of these boats would be relatively expensive, but that is irrelevant. The comparisons of features among the boats gives you serious food for thought about what features are important for what type of sailing. Then you can start thinking about how much inconvenience or how much complication is right for you.

The title of John Vigor's Seaworthy Offshore Sailboat (2001) suggests it is about offshore cruising only. In part, that is correct. He does talk about offshore cruising.

There are a lot of comparisons of offshore cruising to coastal cruising and daysailing boats though. These comparisons help clarify why you don't need certain equipment for coastal cruising, let alone daysailing. He can help you avoid getting a boat that has equipment that's really of little value to you. Vigor does a particularly nice job of explaining the advantages and disadvantages of various configurations and dimensions. For example, he discusses widths and lengths of bunks in about a page of text (pp. 140-41). I have found few such discussion elsewhere, and that's very helpful. After all, even on a sailboat, sleeping well is important if you will be on the boat for a few days or longer.

The single best book on the overall question of buying and outfitting a boat for cruising is Beth Leonard's The Voyager's Handbook: The Essential Guide to Bluewater Cruising (2007). Besides offshore cruising, the book is quite helpful for coastal cruising, or just sailing around San Francisco Bay or Charleston harbor in a boat that's 30 feet long or more. This is the second edition. The first is available used. I have read both.

I strongly recommend buying the new edition. The first edition was very good, but it was like a lot of other such books. It had a fair amount of general information and was interesting. It lacked specifics.

This edition is an impressive book packed with a lot of highly specific information and pictures. To give you an idea, she talks about alternative ways to set up anchors. She talks about keeping the deck clear so that you can walk to the bow without tripping on stays. Even if you have no intention of spending more than a week on your boat or ever being out of sight of land, these discussions will give you things to think about when you're looking at boats. You might think of them on your own. Then again, you might not.

She talks about what people commonly do when they are out cruising and how much money they spend. And she doesn't guess or just say “do it my way”. She actually asked other people, enough of them to get a good general idea.

Besides all this, she uses three families as examples of what it costs to go cruising, either spending extremely little, a moderate amount and a lot. Even if you are not going bluewater cruising, these examples will give you a good idea of the cost of different ways of setting up your boat. This can give you ideas about what equipment is realistic and what isn't for coastal cruising.

Herb Payson (1997) and Jim Howard (2000) wrote books about equipment and organization for offshore cruising. If you think that you might be interested in offshore cruising in the boat that you will buy, they will be helpful. Payson's book is the more entertaining of the two. It is hard not to like a title like Advice for the Sealorn. Payson uses a question-and-answer format for topics and uses stories to make his points. If you are sure that you will only daysail, neither book has much to help you choose your boat.

If you think that you might do some coastal cruising, then both Payson (1997) and Howard (2000) will be somewhat helpful. If you are coastal cruising instead of cruising offshore, you won't have to worry about your children's schooling, which you would if you have children and spend a couple of years in the South Pacific. That difference is obvious. Less obvious are some of the equipment differences. That said, it is hard to find sensible discussions of boats on coastal cruising alone.

The cover of Nigel Calder's book (2001) claims that it is “the essential guide for choosing, equipping and sailing coastal or offshore cruising boats.” The book is strongest on offshore cruising boats. I think that it is less helpful for coastal cruising, where the requirements are not so demanding or expensive. Calder took delivery of a Pacific Seacraft a short while before writing this book; much of the book uses his choices as a benchmark for a solid cruising boat. For offshore cruising, I think that it is a fair benchmark. For most coastal cruising, it is not necessary to have such a heavy and expensive boat and not even necessarily desirable.

From Calder's book, you might get the idea that offshore cruising is quite expensive. Offshore cruising need not be expensive if you are willing to forego some conveniences. There are limits though. As Calder points out, his family and many others are not willing to wash dishes in sea water to conserve on fresh water. (I know that my wife wouldn't!)

I have to add that I liked reading Calder's discussion of features and he is mechanically and electrically adept. You want to be aware, though, that his focus is on offshore cruising, not coastal cruising.

The books most dedicated to choosing specific boats are two by John Kretshmer, a two-volume set from Practical Sailor, a book by John Vigor and one by Gregg Nestor. Older, interesting books by Ferenc Máté with beautiful photographs are discussed below, but his books are less likely to include a specific boat that you might buy. You will learn about specific boatbuilders from his books but not so much about specific boats that are common today. I found it helpful to put together a file with the boats in these various books. You may find the Excel file BoatsInBooks helpful for deciding what books to get.

John Kretschner has written a pair of books that are an outstanding summary of the characteristics of many older boats. They are contained in two books, one published in 2002 and the other published in 2007. The newer book is called The Best Used Boat Notebook and the older one is called just Used Boat Notebook, but there is no good reason for calling one book better than the other. Actually, they are more similar than different. With one exception, the newer one just has newer reviews. The one exception is at the end. Both books end with a section on ten great boats to sail around the world. The first book includes only used boats and the second one includes only new boats. This difference probably simply reflects a paucity of boats that were new in 2002 and used in 2007 and would be good for sailing around the world.

John Kretschmer reviews used boats for Sailing Magazine. By itself, this may not seem terribly remarkable, but he is an experienced sailor who has sailed 35 different boats for 1,000 miles or more. His experience with many of these boats shows in the detailed reviews.

It might seem, given his experience, that the reviews will focus on boats for offshore cruising. Not so. Many of the boats are not adequate for offshore cruising. While some of the 40 boats could be used for offshore cruising, most could not be used that way comfortably or safely. The first boat in the first book is a trailer-sailor, the O'Day 23 and there are many reviews of smaller boats. Many of the smaller boats are well suited for a daysail or a weekend cruise with flaky winds, although a few are not.

The reviews follow a standard format that keeps each review on track. The introduction discusses the boat, the builder and its history. The review then discusses the boat's characteristics in the same sequence in every chapter. This format makes it easy to compare characteristics of boats because the same characteristics are discussed in the same section for each boat. This format lacks in originality for reading the book from cover to cover, but I was not reading the book mainly to be entertained or amused and you probably won't be either.

The writing is lively and interesting. A standard format could be associated with a plodding writing style. It's not. For example, the title of each chapter is the name of the boat, such as the "Irwin Citation 34," but the sub-title of this particular chapter is "Inexpensively built coastal cruiser with great potential." The sub-title does an outstanding job of summarizing the chapter. The review informs you about the boat's history, its construction, its most common problems, its layout and its characteristics when sailing or motoring. But Kretschmer interlaces this discussion with interesting and informative discussions of his experience with the boat.

Overall, this is a very helpful book. While, for me at least, just one book or even two books on various sailboats would not be enough, these definitely are two of the best.

Practical Boat Buying (2003) is a collection of reviews from Practical Sailor. The reviews cover boats from 20 feet to 64 feet, although all but four of the boats are less than 50 feet long. The reviews are from different dates, and I can't figure out when they were written. In some cases, the price information has been updated, which eliminates a clue to when the articles were written. That's not a complaint. The updated price information makes the articles more informative than they would be otherwise.

I think that Practical Boat Buying (2003) has no substitute on my bookshelf. It gave me a clear idea of various boats' features and their advantages and disadvantages. I cannot use them uncritically. I went to the Charleston Boat Show to look at a Catalina reviewed by Practical Sailor and discovered their evaluation of the accommodations and mine were quite different. Still, I know of nowhere else that you can get such wide ranging, detailed reviews of boats from 20 to 50 feet.

I suggest that you check the pricing and availability of the two volumes from Practical Sailor's website besides looking at amazon.com. In early March 2008, Amazon had only used copies and three of the four used copies had higher prices than a new copy from Practical Sailor's website. (Go figure.)

Gregg Nestor's book “Twenty Affordable Sailboats To Take You Anywhere”(2007) delivers on the promise of the title. The book includes straightforward summary reviews of the characteristics of 20 boats. The boats are from the 1970s and 1980s and 30 to 38 feet long. This is large enough to be moderately comfortable for an extended period for many people. The boats are available in North America for prices ranging from $20,000 to $70,000, which is an “affordable” range for most people who want to go “anywhere”.

The summaries are reasonably informative and clearly written. Each of the chapters covers a single boat using the same outline for every boat. The review of each boat covers the functional parts of the boat and includes a section on “Things to Check Out” and owner's comments. While using the same outline for every chapter makes it easy to compare boats, it results in a book is not interesting to sit down and read from cover to cover. It is too bad that the reviews were not spiced up by interesting stories related to each of the boats.

John Vigor (1999, 2010) discusses a selection of the older, smaller and therefore less expensive boats that can be safely taken on offshore cruises. The boats are 20 to 32 feet long and are available in the United States for several thousand dollars to $50,000. Vigor discusses twenty such boats. Each of the boats has been sailed around the world. There are informative drawings of the boats although no photographs. The book is quite short -- 131 pages -- although the print is not large type, the material is pointed and informative and the book is relatively inexpensive.

If you are thinking about buying a Pearson sailboat from the 1970s, you want to read the discussion of this and similar boats in Vigor's book. Even though I am not planning on offshore cruising in the near future, I learned quite a bit reading the discussions of boats' features and the tradeoffs. I also enjoyed them; the book is nicely done. I'll know a lot more about some of the other boats in the marina because of this book, and I know more now about some boats for sale at the marina.

Mustin (1994) goes into substantial detail about fiberglass sailboat construction and what can go wrong. The information is very helpful because you will find many other books that discuss boat construction and don't provide enough information to really follow the discussion.

For example, Mustin explains how fiberglass is laid up. He explains how problems arise in the process and how to look for the ill effects of problematic construction.

This could get extremely technical, but Mustin's clear explanations didn't go past my very limited knowledge of chemistry or physics and probably won't overwhelm you either.

Mustin's (1994) book also is helpful for comparing sailboats. He explains alternative ways of putting sailboats together and their implications. When these differences show up on specific sailboats, you will have the background from Mustin (1984) to understand the effects on the boats.

Casey (1997) discusses what can go structurally wrong with sailboats and how you can tell. Drawings illustrate every short paragraph in the book. By the time you're done reading the first 120 pages, you wonder “How in the world will I ever remember all this?” Then you find out how.

A little over ten pages is devoted to what to examine in a 30-minute survey of a boat. This survey repeats selected points from the text. I at least have a chance of remembering them because they were the most important points of the original 120 pages. This is great reinforcement. And it's easy to take copies of ten pages with you or make a checklist so you don't forget something.

This is a great book. It makes me feel like I have a shot at finding problems. I read it before I went to look seriously at two boats. It helped me spot some serious problems with one of the two boats and made me more comfortable with my decision to not consider it further. Nigel Calder's Cruising Handbook (2001) has a 15-page checklist in small type on big pages. Even he (p. 258) says “To go through this entire questionnaire relative to any boat could easily take days (maybe weeks)!” That's not terribly helpful. It's impossible for me to imagine having the time to spend days looking at each of several boats!

Casey's list, on the other hand, is practical and focuses on basic issues affecting used fiberglass sailboats. After having read the book, you remember it pretty well. Then, after having done the tests on a few boats, it doesn't take much more than 30 minutes to examine all the basics.