Indeed. In order to be competitive, racers need very light masts. So they push it… and when they have to give up the race because of an accident, this is generally because the mast broke.
Yes. IMHO sailing is a skill developed by feel. Only experience will enable you to distinguish between a sudden heel that means you’re now going to go faster and a sudden heel that means you must take immediate action (to spill wind) or capsize.
For sure. You’ll need to know what little chart smudge means “obstruction that will sink you” and which one means “obstruction that will sink you – position shifts from year to year” and which one means “chart produced in a foreign country, same smudge means something entirely different”. Nautical right-of-way. Laws – when I was looking at boats, in my jurisdiction boats over a certain size had to have particular markings and various specific items of equipment (usually safety equipment) in order to operate legally.
There’s a lot to learn just to reach the status of “dangerously inexperienced.”
I would stay at home and read Maiden Voyage for a peek at the experience without the personal danger. It’s a great book, BTW.
I imagine that if you are very lucky and don’t encounter any weather, your equipment doesn’t fail and you don’t do anything unrecoverably stupid, it’s probably relatively easy to sail from to Tahiti once you learn how to operate the boat. You just raise the sail, follow your GPS and steer towards Tahiti.
But that’s the trick, isn’t it? There are probably a million things that can go wrong and if you don’t know what to do beforehand, you probably won’t get a chance to figure out how to do it right the second time.
Given a few months of theory and practice to learn the mechanics of sailing, general competence, stamina and resourcefulness, good planning and provisioning, and a 28’ cabin cruiser in sound condition, the chances of disaster, while still unacceptably high, are far lower than the near-certainty implied in most of the above posts. Absent encountering a tropical storm or similar event, the structure of the boat itself is built to survive even severe weather.
Of course, if anything goes wrong (from illness to equipment failure), and the people on board don’t have the competence or resources to fix it, or work around it, the consequences could get very serious very quickly.
The main problem I would see is that the trip is imagined as a kind of pleasure cruise, perhaps with cocktails, sunbathing, and relaxing evenings of pleasant conversation. The reality would be very, very different. It would be a grim, protracted, exhausting, often frightening, often tedious, miserable, sleep-deprived ordeal, with little or no opportunity to wash, eat a proper meal, or engage in any civilised activities.
So either an office cubicle job or grad school ?
I disagree with this sentiment which I have heard often.
I am very knowledgeable about celestial navigation. I have studied it for years just for the pure joy of learning. I have written a few web pages about celestial navigation. I have taught celestial navigation to others in classrooms. I know several methods of sight reduction which I can use in practice as well as knowing the basics of a few more. I developed my own more compact variation of the HO211-Ageton tables which I keep inside the case of the sextant. I love celestial navigation.
But let us be realistic. A GPS costs a fraction of what a sextant costs. For the price of a sextant you can have one GPS, four backups and a load of batteries to last you forever. Not to mention that for astronav you need a watch which also uses batteries so that argument goes out the window. Not to mention the most accurate timepiece you can have on a boat is a GPS receiver. Not to mention that a sextant is infinitely more liable to break or be damaged than a GPS (an expensive sextant belongs in your living room and not in a small boat where it will be damaged). Not to mention that paper navigation tables can get wet and become unsuable. Not to mention that even the best navigater can make mistakes. Sight reduction by hand is time consuming. So, being realistic today astronav is not a practical method of navigation when compared with GPS. It just isn’t.
Astronav is what it is: something historical really nice to learn if you like it and enjoy it. And which could conceivably be used under certain circumstances. But let us not pretend it is something practical.
When I sail offshore I like to take sights and plot positions just for the heck of it but it takes me 5 seconds to read a GPS and it takes a hell of a lot longer to reduce sights. And the position provided by the GPS is much more reliable. There is just no color in the comparison.
I could do astronav if I was forced to but there are many more important things to learn before that.
As for the OP I think there is no answer. Some people have a gift for learning to sail and other people are just no good at it. A prudent sailor always knows his limits. Sailing a boat is a lot about being able to maintain and repair every piece of equipment on your boat, not just about actual sailing.
People have sailed very small boats around the world. There was a kid who sailed a small boat around the world and his story was in National Geographic. I forget his name. Maybe it was in the 1970s.
I heard some story about a bunch of kids who sailed to Hawaii and made their final approach by homing in with a hand-held transistor radio on a commercial AM radio station. Not something I’d recommend though.
I almost hate to quibble with you Hibernicus, as you are one of the few people that seem to realize this isn’t the suicide mission that others make it out to be, but it’s also not the Bataan death march that you are describing either.
Google “Coconut Milk Run”. That is what this passage (central America to French Polynesia and beyond) is called. It’s generally some of the easiest down wind sailing anywhere in the world as you are almost always in the very consistent trade winds. I’ll agree with “protracted” and will half agree with “tedious”. The difficulties can come into play as the passage can take almost a month in smaller, slower craft. Also, you are probably in one of the most isolated places in the planet, so you’d better be able to improvise if something goes wrong. But technology has come a long way into removing the frightening, sleep-deprived, non-civilized aspects of such a journey. Most people that perform this passage describe it as boring- as there is little to do or see as the boat sails itself morning, noon and night. But most eat very well, read lots of books, sleep well and keep themselves clean without much effort.
Roughly 400 cruising boats make this journey each year. I’d bet at least 5-10 of them have less than a year’s total sailing experience. Many people purchase boats in Florida, learn to sail them as they travel west through the Caribbean for a few months and are perfectly fine when they come out of the Panama canal heading to Tahiti.
And please don’t get me wrong, this isn’t the way I would recommend for someone to undertake this passage- I’m just saying some very inexperienced people have made it just fine and it’s not something that only sailors with 50 years of experience are capable of.
Robin Lee Graham in the Dove.
I’m glad to hear it’s not as grim as I portrayed. My only experience of a multi-day sea crossing was from Norway to Scotland. When I wasn’t on watch, I was strapped into my bunk below decks. If I wasn’t strapped in, I was bouncing around like a pinball. I did indeed sleep well, for the few hours between watches. Progress was painfully slow. Reading a book was absolutely out of the question, as was cooking or washing. After only a few days of exertion and lack of sleep, I was almost hallucinating with exhaustion. If I extrapolate that experience to the month-long journey from the continental US to French Polynesia, I can only imagine it as an extreme test of endurance.
For my money, I would put a greater chance of disaster on a 2 day North Sea crossing than on a full year of tradewinds sailing. High-latitude sailing like that really takes much more knowledge and determination. What most eqatorial sailors would describe as a full on gale is merely a brisk wind to a lot of northern Europeans.
I’ve sailed from the Med to the Caribbean on a 55 footer. It’s not that grim. It is tradewind, downhill sailing, which is mostly somewhere between dull and pleasantly relaxing. We had a “moment” or two we could have done without (waking up as you fly out of your bunk as the vessel is nearly knocked flat is not one of life’s greatest experiences) but mostly fine.
Yes, Robin Lee Graham. Thanks.
He started out when he was just 16 but already had good sailing experience with his father.
Some people have a gift for sailing and for things mechanical. Some people are just no good. A teenager with a natural ability will learn fast and will be resourceful. An older adult with no natural ability… well, I wouldn’t recommend it.
A lot of it is preparation. You need to understand and be able to work, maintain and repair every piece of the boat. You need to be able to make jurig-rig repairs. Robin Graham was dismasted twice and twice had to sail with a jury rig.
An interesting tale of sailing the Pacific (and skeletal remains) is And The Sea Will Tell by Vincent Bugliosi.
It tells the story of two different couples attempting long sailboat voyages in the Pacific, one a well-equipped, experienced duo in a custom ketch, the other an inexperienced screwed-up young couple in a poorly-stocked, deteriorating sailboat. They eventually meet up (with tragic results) on Palmyra, which is high on the list of exotic islands I plan never to visit.
Hijack story coming. Run and get a beer.
In May 1987 I was working in Salinas, UT on a pipeline. The guy I was sharing a room with woke me up one morning early and demanded I come with him to meet, “Vern.”
It seems that the previous evening (10ish o’clock) he stopped at the local 7-11. The aforementioned Vern was there trying to find out where he could get some tools. My friend told him he had some tools and would give him a hand, so they drove out of town to where Vern was broke down.
Vern was pulling a trailer with a 36ish foot sailboat on it. A bolt holding the trailer springs had come loose or something like that. Gary said it wasn’t all that big of deal to jack up the trailer and get it all back together.
As a reward Gary wanted a tour of the boat and some beer, being more than just a bit of an alcoholic.
The story was that Vern had worked for the railroad in Kansas until he retired a year or two earlier. One day he sat down for breakfast, looked Mrs. Vern in the eye and said, “I’m selling everything I own and buying a boat to sail around the world. You coming?”
A couple of months before he had found a boat he liked in Houston and bought it. The previous owner gave him a month or so of boat driving instruction on the Gulf and he was now on his way to California to set sail on his great adventure.
Gary said it was plain that Mrs Vern wasn’t nearly as happy with the prospect as Vern was.
By the time we got to where Gary had left them the night before they were gone.
I suppose I’ve wondered 10,000 times what ever happened to them.
When you sail from San Diego to Tahiti, are you sailing along a busy shipping route? I’d feel safer if I knew there might be some ships around, if something went wrong. Question: will merchant ship capatains alter course to rescue a yactsman in trouble? Richard Halliburton was crossing the Pacific (alone) in 1939-and disappered without a trace.
My late brother-in-law decided to attempt this very thing, about 25 years ago.
Note I say “late”.
And he was a fairly experienced sailor.
Private sailors tend to avoid shipping lanes, simply b/c they don’t want to wake up in the middle of the night staring down the business end of a supertanker.
I on the other hand have always wanted to go there. The couple I sailed with on the yacht mentioned above (I’ll call them J&G) had been there, and they had experiences slightly similar to that described in “And the Sea Will Tell” but definitely without the murder bit. J&G were extremely experienced and very considered and they went to Palmyra with a very large quantity of supplies so that they would be able to stay at the island for a long time, independantly.
They said there were a number of yachties at Palmyra (who they described contemptuously as “tramps” or “hippy yachties”) often on yachts of dubious quality and repair, and who were desperate to extend their stay but who had run out or were running out of supplies, and by rights should just have left. But at that stage they would begin to try to beg supplies off recent arrivals.
I can’t now remember details but I know that J&G had a number of very uncomfortable conversations with tramp yachties who got quite confrontational in their demands that J&G “share” their supplies.
Real food for thought when you thousands of miles from law enforcement.