How to Sail Around the World: Advice and Ideas for Voyaging Under Sail

Whether you’d like to sail around the entire world or just part of it,

the well-tested sea wisdom in How to Sail Around the World will make your voyage easier and more successful. Here’s clear and authoritative information on how to buy a small sailing yacht at a modest price, how to sail her on a big ocean, and what it’s like to live aboard.

Hal Roth has been a long-distance sailor for 37 years. He has sailed around the world three times and has logged 200,000 miles at sea either with his wife or by himself. His books Two Against Cape Horn, Two on a Big Ocean, and Always a Distant Anchorage are recognized classics of voyaging literature, and his instructional book After 50,000 Miles, published a quarter century ago, ranks among the most influential sailing books ever written. Yet Roth’s first sympathies are still “for the beginner with stars in his eyes and not much money,” and How to Sail Around the World emphasizes the simple, the essential, and the affordable for ordinary people who would like to see the world from a new and challenging perspective.

To a rare degree, Roth combines a mastery of technical content with an ability to render it in elegant writing that’s a pleasure to read. How to Sail Around the World is at once authoritative and accessible. Roth’s strongly held opinions, convincingly argued (he chooses not to sail with a refrigerator, for example), add to the book’s appeal.

How to Sail Around the World will tell you how sailing yachts are built and rigged, how to handle the sails, and what you need to know about anchors and anchoring. There are details of cooking and eating aboard, sailing at night, planning the trip, foreign paperwork, and exact figures on what it all costs, as well as the clearest and most comprehensive directions ever published on how to deal with storms at sea.

In the beginning, voyaging can be a terrifying prospect. The storms, the leaks, the anchoring, handling the sails, deciding on the route–so many unknowns. But what a payoff! You can sail to Venice, London, Sydney, San Francisco, or Hong Kong. You can pick an island in the middle of the Aegean, listen to green and yellow parrots in the wilds of the Amazon, or visit a thousand places in between. It’s exciting to sail to a distant landfall at a slow and leisurely pace, and to meet people in foreign lands.

Fortunately, yachts travel slowly and give you time to learn the fundamentals of long-distance sailing. With patience you will begin to put it all together; life aboard will suddenly start to click. It will happen sooner than you think, and this book will help you.

The big secret of world travel is to do it in a sailing yacht.

You take your deluxe hotel with you, which gives you everything you need to exist pleasantly and comfortably–a snug berth, a writing desk, a navigation center, and a compact little galley–all in a small and neat package.

Once you have your own boat, you can sail for years without the terrible daily costs and hassles of hotels, restaurants, and airplanes. You entirely sidestep the annoyance of reservations, standing in line, security screening, and dragging around awkward luggage. You do things at your own pace because you’re in charge.

Where do you begin?

Start by reading How to Sail Around the World. In this guide, based on 200,000 miles of hands-on world-cruising experience, Hal Roth gives you all the information you need to plan, launch, and relish every moment of a journey that is every sailor’s dream. You’ll learn how to:

• Find a suitable boat for your voyaging
• Assemble a versatile sail inventory
• Select tools and spare parts
• Plan your route and timing
• Choose the right anchors and how to use them
• Minimize costs
• Stay warm, dry, and well fed
• Cope with paperwork in foreign ports
• And much more!

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