Things I wish I knew when I started cruising

Sailing into the sunset while drinking wine. Or diving into crystal clear water right from your sailboat. Isn’t this the dream or what we picture when we think about starting to cruise? Sure it is part of it and a big reason why we do it. But there is a lot of planning and organization in order to get to that point. There are a few things that you will need which you might not even know about yet. The paper work and nitty gritty which makes cruising possible. This is exactly what we will discuss here. I wish I knew all of this when we started cruising and set off from the Great Lakes. Five years later and we are still learning a few tricks.

Insurance

Sometimes it is required, meanwhile it can also be optional. For instance if you purchase your vessel with a loan you won’t have a say in whether or not you should get insurance as it is required. Also keep in mind that most insurance companies will require a recent survey. If you have your vessel all paid for then it is all at your own discretion. However if you will spend any time at marinas then you will need to have at least liability insurance. The big issue with many insurances is that there almost always are geographical restrictions. It might be that you have no coverage whilst sailing in Cuba or Haiti for example. Or you need to bring your vessel North of a certain parallel during hurricane season. If your boat is over 40 years old it might be hard to find a company willing to insure it. When we bought our first sailboat we had no sailing experience and never owned a boat before so this made it so much harder to find an insurance willing to cover us. There are a lot of things to keep in mind so shop around, maybe even before you purchase your sailboat. Know where you want to go and what are your plans, keeping in mind that when sailing they probably will change.

Towing Services

Boats break down, it’s just a matter of time; engine failure, diesel bug (yes that’s a thing, it’s slimy and clogs filters), groundings, loss of a propeller, transmission issue, bent or broken rudder or running out of fuel. The list goes on why at one point in your boat owning life you will probably need to get pulled out of a tricky situation. This might be a very expensive situation and down right stressful. Sometimes your own dinghy might be able to get you out of it or a buddy boat. Towing services are not very expensive for an annual membership and it is a peace of mind for us. But look into the clause of the company or subscription you get. Some friends of ours thought they were covered while drifting into the Atlantic when they realized they had fresh water coverage and not salt water. So do your homeworks and shop around.

Apps

Nowadays there seems to be Apps for everything but it’s hard to know which ones are valuable to you. Over the years we have used both Aquamaps and Navionics for navigation charts while sailing in Canada, the United States and the Bahamas. They both are great options but aren’t free. We use them on a tablet and cellphone as backup when navigating and it has kept us safe and generally on course. On Aquamaps with the Pro membership you can even have the USACE overlay which shows you more accurate depths in colours when cruising through the intercoastal waterways for example.

There is also overlays of currents, wind and waves. Every year new features get added. Something which is also great is the Waterway guide and Active Captain which can be added onto the Aquamaps or Navionics charts. The icons show you anchorage and amenities of what is around with reviews. We plan our sailing journey with those. For weather we use WINDY and Predict Wind. It shows you weather forecasts, wind, wave height, precipitation, tides and more with different models. They both have pro versions where you need to pay along with their free version. An anchor alarm is something which helps me sleep better. There is one integrated within Aquamaps but there are also designated apps for it. You set the parameters of when you want the alarm to go off. How far out of your safe zone you want to allow your boat to drift before going off.

Communication and Internet

These days many cruisers have a Starlink dish in the back of their sailboat to stay connected to the internet even in remote areas where there isn’t any cell coverage. There are different packages which I won’t get into as they’ve changed over the last few years. But keep in mind that if you also want service out in the middle of the water it’ll be more expensive. Something which we’ve been doing for the last few years is to get a new SIM card to put into our cell phone once we get to a new country. But this involves a bit of running around right after you check-in. This past year we tried MyIsland Wifi in the Bahamas and had it shipped to the USA to have data once we sailed into Bahamian waters but we had many issues with it and were more often than not borrowing internet from our fellow cruisers. We eventually just reverted to getting a BTC SIM card. Some companies like Airalo also offer eSIM cards which can be a great option which we haven’t used yet. It would rule out the need to search for a local store to buy a SIM card.

The cruising world is filled with great resources and as you start sailing you will meet many sailors who will teach you a few tricks specific to certain areas. Another thing to research