An automated sailboat would take all the joy out of sailing anyhow.
Well, here is one that really exists.
Maltese Falcon (yacht) - Wikipedia
It cost somewhere between $150 mil and $300 mil.
It appears that board is clipping off the last ) in the above link but the link is good.
You can also find the info on the yacht by searching for Maltese Falcon Yacht or Tom Peters Yacht.
Learning how to sail a boat in approximately the right direction in a nice weather is not so difficult.
The problems are dealing with rough weather, docking or leaving a harbour, and getting back a man who passed overboard. Having a fully automated boat won’t help for this.
There are also countless little technical, safety and daily life organization issues that you should be at least a little bit experienced with. Otherwise, these issues will prove time consuming, even harrassing and will lead to to make one mistake sooner or later. Once you hurt yourself or break something, then these issues become harder to deal with…
Good summation. The OP should consider the races around the world, or even across the oceans. Sailors with years of experiece, all the best equipment and top boats often encounter so many problems in bad weatehr that they don’t finish. Or worse.
That may be why wealthy people, who are wise, hire an experienced captain and crew for their boats.
It’s easy, just use this book as your guide: Kon-Tiki.
A Description of the voyage.
Sorry, no. That is not a fully automated sailboat. It is a motor yacht with 3600hp worth of propulsion that can essentially be supplemented with sail power. It can function under wind alone, but not for the purposes of pure blue water sailing. On top of that, the computers on board don’t make decisions about steering & getting the boat from point A to point B under sail.
To be fair, a lot of those circumnavigation races are truly pushing the limits of what can otherwise be comfortably done. On top of that, a great many of those accidents have happened in a lot of the same places. They are also under time constraints that prevent them from hunkering down in a port and waiting for an excellent weather window.
I suspect that is but a part of the reason. I would also suspect that the vast majority of super wealthy people aren’t crossing many oceans in sailboats, but the ones who are want to do it themselves. There’s a fairly large community of full-time cruisers who have gone all over the world, many of whom have done so in boats under 40 feet in length. A Bristol Channel Cutter is considered the best 2-person blue water cruiser in the world, and it’s a 28-foot boat.
It’s never that easy. I have a 36 foot cruiser. Autopiolot on a yacht doesn’t work the way you think it does.
If by “much better,” you mean “stand more than a snowball’s chance in hell of arriving alive,” then we are in agreement. The second law of the sea is “Everything breaks, and the more complicated it is, the sooner it will break.” I wouldn’t trust my life to a boat, much less a sailboat, controlled by computer. Equipment, and especially electronics, fails with astonishing regularity in a marine environment.
As for the o.p., I recommend reading The Water In Between: A Journey at Sea by Kevin Patterson. The author did exactly what the o.p. is enquiring about; knowing nothing of the sea, he bought a ferro-concrete hull boat, took on a semi-experienced hand, and tried to sail to Tahiti. Patterson is candid about his lack of experience and the results are as expected.
As far as navigation, pretty much no one these days knows how to use a sextant, or at least not well. This is a shame, because while GPS is a great system and can keep you out of trouble when ded reckoning, it doesn’t work if the batteries are dead. A sextant, on the other hand, works as long as you have a watch and tables, no batteries required. There are still a few companies that produce sextants, but a decent one will run you several hundred dolllars, more than most people are willing to spend on a “backup” device, and the skill to use one has to be developed by experience.
Stranger
I imagine it’s distracting but is it really that much more difficult to sail a boat just because everyone’s naked?
Sunburn.
The owner of a yacht moored next to us at Charlotteville, on Tobago in the Carribean was a US businessman. His crew comprised a Dutch semi-pro skipper and his wife, and another woman from upstate NY. The latter two didn’t bother with clothing much of the time. The owner came over for drinks one evening. He said he didn’t spend as much time sailing as he would have liked and one of the reasons was that his wife didn’t like sailing and didn’t like him going away sailing for reasons that included, he suspected, the sartorial habits of his crew. So the answer to your question, at least for him, was yes.
Yet strangely I have a feeling that he wasn’t too keen to order his crew to keep their clothes on. And we certainly weren’t suggesting he should.
I have the sextant, I have the Air Tables, I have 2 copies of Bowditch, My BIL who was in the Coast Guard keep Ocean Station Charlie on station for one duty tour with the sextant as the primary…
As to the OP, well sometimes God protect fools and drunks…
I don’t count on it though.
YMMV
Been messin with sailboats all my life… Tossed a few flowers in the water for those that tried what the OP is suggesting…
My dad was a very experienced sailor of small sloops (up to 35 feet), having sailed for the majority of his 56 years of life, and never came close to attempting what you’re proposing. Didn’t even contemplate it, as far as I know.
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Buy a sailboat - This part is relatively easy. Get some cash together and sign the papers, find a berth and your done.
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learn to sail good enough - You couldn’t learn what you need to know from reading a book, you definately need hands-on experience. To do it right, you’d need at least one other person with you. The kind of yacht size you’d need to handle the bad weather (about 38-60 foot) can’t easily be handled by one person, and you’re going to have to sleep sometime, so you need to work in shifts. You’d also need a to get a license which is not usually difficult to do (depending on where you live and the type of yacht you have). You’d need to learn a lot about navigation, radio, safety equipment, engines - a few months of study at least. You need to drill for emergencies. And you’d be well advised to do a few weekend trips, planning and provisioning. Even with all this, experienced sailors (guys with 20 years experience) routinely get killed on the open water. A few years ago in the Melbourne to Osaka double-handed yacht race half the fleet never made it back to any port
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actually sail to Tahiti - You’ll need experience, stamina and good planning.
How do you know what size and type of boat is needed to survive on the open ocean? (see above)
How much do they cost? Second hand you can find lots of bargains (from people who bought during the good years but don’t use them anymore and don’t want to have to keep up paying the monthly fees for berth), but they’ll all probably need work. Yachts are holes in the ocean into which you poor your money and time.
How do they navigate–GPS? You do the navigation, the computer just tells you where you are.
What if they don’t have GPS, do people still use sextants? - No, only enthusiasts use sextants.
Compasses? - Yes, compass is essential for most sailors.
I know this is about sailing, but this kind of thinking drives me crazy with hikers, too. These idiots go out with no skills or tradecraft at all, not even a compass, because “I have a GPS!” :rolleyes: Do you REALLY want your life to depend on your battery-operated device that doesn’t perform well in bad weather or under a heavy canopy?
Great- maybe we can ping it next week to find your remains…
Some people think they can go out in a remote area to hike or canoe or kayak since they can use a cell phone to call for help. In some cases they can get a cell signal if they are close to a major road but in other cases they cannot.
It would be unlikely in my opinion for a complete beginner to sail to Tahiti. There are way too many things you have to know well. Experienced sailors disappear without a trace occasionally.
There are lots of good books about blue water sailing and single handed circumnavigations. That’s where I would start my investigation as well as starting to sail locally.
It’s certainly not impossible to learn to sail on the fly. Here’s the blog of a couple that did exactly what you are asking about: http://bumfuzzle.com/Pages/2003/2003_10.html
They probably paid about $175k for their boat, but you could certainly purchase a capable craft for quite a bit less (probably 50-75k, although some have done it in very small and affordable 30 foot Cape Dorys). Elsewhere on their site is a month by month breakdown of their expenses.
I just read a book about survival when problems happen in the wilderness. One of the interesting points was that “Rambo” types don’t survive and normally die quickly. One of the key points is to stay calm and plan what you do, don’t rush into things.