Starting from:
$8
Cruising Small, Crusing Fast
First Edition, 288 pages
I cut my cruising teeth in smaller boats, and now I'm back at it, sharpening my small boat cruising mojo on my F-24 Mk I trimaran.
From Chapter 1:
One Keeping it Small
This is not a book for racers. Although I raced performance catamarans in my youth, I’ve lost my taste for it. This is not a book for bluewater cruisers. Popular magazines are full of tales of daring-do, circumnavigators, and crossings to the Mediterranean. It’s not a primer for beginning sailors, although I mean it to be readable at all levels. It is simply a compilation of ideas that may help you cruise a little bit better in the boat you have. If you like it a lot and decide to cross oceans, you’ll be better served by a larger boat and a different book. In this book we’ll keep things small and simple.
For many of us, the pull of the water is summed up by this powerful quote from The Wind in the Willows; “Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.” But that Chapter one quotation is often stretched completely out of context, into a moral imperative to ditch all and go to sea. In fact, in Chapter 9, the very same innocent water rat, so taken in chapter one with the river and his clinker-built rowboat, spends a day with a charismatic seafaring rat. Our simple, provincial water rat is so completely mesmerized by the vast and sweeping stories (exaggerated, no doubt) told by the wayfaring rat about his adventures aboard a coastal freighter and the mysteries of the many ports of call, that immediately upon returning home he begins to plan his own departure to the sea. He tries to explain his new compulsion to his friends but can’t find a rational argument. He fights through fits and seizures until, in his own words, he regains his sanity.
From there, the book goes on to explain what it takes to cruising in smaller boats. I've done thousands of miles in trailerable multihulls, some in quite remote areas. There is nothing so worth doing.
I cut my cruising teeth in smaller boats, and now I'm back at it, sharpening my small boat cruising mojo on my F-24 Mk I trimaran.
From Chapter 1:
One Keeping it Small
This is not a book for racers. Although I raced performance catamarans in my youth, I’ve lost my taste for it. This is not a book for bluewater cruisers. Popular magazines are full of tales of daring-do, circumnavigators, and crossings to the Mediterranean. It’s not a primer for beginning sailors, although I mean it to be readable at all levels. It is simply a compilation of ideas that may help you cruise a little bit better in the boat you have. If you like it a lot and decide to cross oceans, you’ll be better served by a larger boat and a different book. In this book we’ll keep things small and simple.
For many of us, the pull of the water is summed up by this powerful quote from The Wind in the Willows; “Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.” But that Chapter one quotation is often stretched completely out of context, into a moral imperative to ditch all and go to sea. In fact, in Chapter 9, the very same innocent water rat, so taken in chapter one with the river and his clinker-built rowboat, spends a day with a charismatic seafaring rat. Our simple, provincial water rat is so completely mesmerized by the vast and sweeping stories (exaggerated, no doubt) told by the wayfaring rat about his adventures aboard a coastal freighter and the mysteries of the many ports of call, that immediately upon returning home he begins to plan his own departure to the sea. He tries to explain his new compulsion to his friends but can’t find a rational argument. He fights through fits and seizures until, in his own words, he regains his sanity.
From there, the book goes on to explain what it takes to cruising in smaller boats. I've done thousands of miles in trailerable multihulls, some in quite remote areas. There is nothing so worth doing.
1 file (15.5MB)