Books to Help Buying A Sailboat

Choosing a sailboat is hard. Worse, choosing books to help choose a sailboat is almost as hard as choosing a sailboat.

While no amount of reading will teach you how to sail, books can help you learn a lot about different kinds of sailboats, what they're good for, and at least as important, what particular sailboats are not good for.

I am in the middle of buying a sailboat. I have started buying one, have looked at some boats and have a fairly good idea what I want. I have read a fair number of books along the way.

Which books are useful for learning what? I hope that this survey helps you out with that question.

To me, buying a sailboat has quite a few similarities to buying a car. There are many different kinds of sailboats, different sailboats are good for different things, and different people want to do different things in their sailboats. Some people want a Cadillac, some people want a Honda, some people want a Porsche, and some people want an SUV.

The differences between buying a car and a sailboat are big though. Most of us have been driving since we were teenagers. We have a good idea whether we prefer small cars or big cars, fast cars or slow cars and manual transmissions or automatic transmissions. Do you want a manual windlass, electric windlass, remote-control windlass, or none at all? What is a windlass anyway? It is a very small part of buying a boat, but not completely irrelevant since they are not cheap. If you don't already know about windlasses, it pays to learn about them and much else besides before you buy a boat over 20 or 25 feet in length.

I assume that you know something about sailing. If you haven't been sailing, then don't buy a boat. Instead, go sailing with a friend. If you're like me and don't know anyone locally who sails, take a sailing class and rent a boat from a local sailing club. You learn a lot about what you like and don't like while sailing. Your personal preferences will have a big effect on the sailboat that you buy. I discuss some books below on sailing, because you can make a better choice of sailboat if you know more about sailing. You can't learn how to sail only from books, but it is hard to learn how to sail well without ever reading a book about sailing.

Magazines

This is a short summary of some magazines available. It may seem like a lot of magazines. I guess that it is. I subscribe to a couple of magazines and pick up others on occasion.

Sail magazine has interesting articles on voyages, short-term cruises and sails on local lakes. It has articles on maintenance, boat parts and every issue has reviews of new boats. The reviews of new boats may depress you if, like me, you are not rich. The definition of rich here is someone with more money than I have.

You might get the impression from the reviews in magazines that you can forget about sailing unless you can afford to drop several hundred thousand dollars on a new boat. Fortunately that's not true. Think of these reviews as being like the reviews in Car and Driver. It's fun to read about someone driving a $150,000 car but I do not walk because I can't afford a Ferrari. Instead, I have a Mustang GT. Most of the sailboat reviews are the same way. You probably can't afford a $300,000 sailboat but it can be interesting to read about them. If you don't think that the reviews are interesting, don't read them. In any case, you can spend far less on sailboats that are quite capable of sailing around the world, or a lake.

Cruising World is a magazine that we got free after completing a U.S. Sailing course and we have kept up the subscription. Cruising World seems similar to Sail with fewer how-to articles and more articles about cruising. Fair enough given the title. It can be fun. Among other articles, they have a continuing series of articles by Fatty Goodlander and his wife Carolyn about sailing around the world. Many of the pieces are about cruising and people's exploits. This can be sort of Walter-Mittyish, but it also can help you learn what to do and what not to do.

Sailing is an oversized format magazine with spectacular pictures. I have picked this magazine up at magazine racks. Besides the pictures, the reviews by Robert H. Perry – a well-known sailboat designer – are the most distinctive aspect of this magazine from my point of view. The magazine includes interesting articles about sailing in various parts of the world. Including articles about sailing the Great Lakes is one big difference between this magazine and the ones mentioned above.

I have bought Sailing World at a few airports. This magazine also has an oversized format that makes it possible to have stunning pictures. For example, there is an article in one issue with spectacular pictures about sailing around Ireland.

Yachting Monthly and Yachting World are available in Europe, especially the U.K. and Ireland. I buy these magazines when I travel to the U.K. and Ireland, and they can be found some other places such as Rome's Fumicino airport. Both of these magazines are very interesting with informative reviews of boats and new equipment, articles about sailors and their exploits and sailing trips in Europe. Yachting Monthly is more centered on the U.K. and Yachting World is more about areas around the whole world. I like these magazines a lot, even though I have no reason to think that I will be sailing around Ireland in the foreseeable future. (I wish I had a reason to think so.)

With two exceptions, all of the sailing magazines seem to have a bias toward reviews of the sailing equivalents of Ferraris and Rolls Royces.

One of the exceptions is Practical Sailor. Practical Sailor is quite practical. Much of it will seem irrelevant to you at first. Practical Sailor is the Consumer Reports of sailing and it includes long-term articles about the durability of marine paints structured quite similar to Consumer Reports' review of household deck stains. Someday this will matter and you may find it interesting even before you buy a boat. I do. I'm not sure what that says about me, but I'll leave that aside.

You may want to read Practical Sailor while you're thinking about what boat to buy because it includes reviews of new and used boats. The new boats reviewed tend to be mainstream production boats, which in the United States today means mostly Catalina, Hunter and Beneteau. The used boats are all over the map. The reviews tend to be technical and, if you're like me, they are hard to understand at first because nautical terms are used without explanation. Now I find them pretty clear, but it has taken a while.

Nautical terms is a nice way of saying sailing jargon. After a while with other reading, the terms become more comprehensible.

Good Old Boat is another magazine that includes a lot of information on affordable boats. Good Old Boat focuses on what the name suggests: good old boats. These tend to be less expensive than newer boats. Like good old cars, they also tend to be higher maintenance. The articles are very informative about older boats and, reading this magazine for a while, you will begin to get the idea that you don't have to sell your house and live on the sailboat or else be satisfied with a windsurfer.

Sometimes the tone of some articles is a little disparaging about nice, new boats, an attitude that I don't get. Just because I can't afford a Ferrari doesn't mean that it's not a great car.

Each issue includes at least one article on a particular older boat. Generally one of these articles is followed by a short, clear evaluation of the boat by Ted Brewer – a well-known sailboat designer. His evaluation also includes a comparison of the spotlighted boat to other similar boats, which is really helpful. Good Old Boat is published in Minnesota and includes articles about sailing in the upper Midwest. This is a distinguishing feature of this magazine and Sailing.

How To Read These Books

When reading these books, you often will find yourself reading terms that you do not understand and that do not have a readily available definition. Get used to it. It will happen a lot. Yes it's frustrating, but no book or magazine article can know exactly the terms that you know and that you don't know.

There are a lot of terms in sailing, and I mean a lot, and many are not apparent. I was perusing the glossary to a book one day and came across the term baggywrinkle. Before then, I had run across the term a couple of times and had no clue what it meant from the context. (Apparently baggywrinkle is recycled line used to prevent sails from chafing on lines.) I did not find a ready definition and just kept reading about the sailing adventures. I still don't know how to install it if I need it. (I think it will be a while in the future anyway.) There's always more to learn in sailing. That's one of the things I like about it.

Learning to Sail

For learning how to sail, the U.S. Sailing Association and American Sailing Association books written for their courses are very informative. The book on the left is the first book in the U.S. Sailing Association series. It was news to me when I studied it. That's another way of saying the book was very informative. I used the books in on-the-water courses and can't speak about how informative they are without an instructor helping you sail at the same time. In combination with good to outstanding instructors, I have learned a lot from them.

Colgate (1978, 1996) is an outstanding summary of information on how to sail and sail well. I have read and reread this book, learning some things initially and learning more as time goes on.

Marshall (1996) and Siminoff (2001) are books that I happened to buy in bookstores and are interesting to read. Both include some sailing tips that I have not found elsewhere. That said, if you are like me and can't go sailing every weekend, it is hard to absorb helpful sailing hints from a book and put them into practice. We seem to be into learning most things the hard way. It is said that sailing is a combination of hours of supreme bliss and moments of sheer terror. It does seem to work out that way. The bliss part is unbelievable. The terror part is not so great.

Since we go sailing for a week or so once a year, I have gotten some value out of focusing on one skill each year. For example, one year I focused on weather. Now you might say that learning about the weather in a benign environment like the Caribbean is not exactly hard. In my defense, we go during the Summer when one tropical wave follows another. It is helpful to have a better understanding of their significance in the development of hurricanes. I didn't know anything about them before we went to the Caribbean. Tropical waves are not exactly a big issue in Lawrenceville, Georgia.

I also knew that the nightly rain in the Caribbean was an annoyance. The rain dropping through the hatch onto my face wakes me up, I close all the hatches, sometimes have to wait a minute or two and then open up all over again. Sometimes this happens three times in one night. Not exactly a solid night's sleep. This seemed odd. In Lawrenceville, our Summer rain always is in the afternoon. Want to know the answer to this or a lot of other questions? Read Kotsch's (1983)Weather for the Mariner. The book is dated, I know. I knew that when I bought it in 2004. I had read several other books on weather and had learned virtually nothing. You will notice the publication date when you read about satellite systems and hurricanes. Knowledge about low fronts hasn't changed that much. It is the best book around by a wide margin.

Kotsch's book is a Naval Institute Press textbook for the Naval Academy, so I didn't absorb it all right away. But the book repaid rereading.

After reading Kotsch, I found Houghton's (1998) Weather at Sea really informative. It covers the topics too fast for me to be able to get the significance of what's being said as a first book. After reading something else and having some understanding of overall weather patterns, this discussion and pictures of weather maps, clouds and their meaning, and hurricanes are unbeatable.

The link to the left is to the 1998 Third edition. If you look at Amazon, you'll see a 2005 edition. This is not available, either new or used. The 1998 edition is available. It is the edition I have and I don't see anything in dire need of updating.

Chapman's Piloting (2006 earlier years) and The Annapolis Book of Seamanship (1999) are classics of boating including sailing. They contain a great deal of useful information, but they are not intended to be helpful for buying a boat.

I use them the same way that I use dictionaries. I tried reading them, but that didn't seem very helpful. Both Chapman's Piloting (2006 and earlier years) and The Annapolis Book of Seamanship (1999) are useful for looking up things, such as the rules of the road and lights, not for reading about sailing or, more generally, boating.

It is too bad that Chapman's Piloting (2006 and earlier years) and The Annapolis Book of Seamanship (1999) are not available as CDs to load on your computer. That really would be worth having!

Choosing A Boat

Gustafson (1991) is a pretty good survey of the issues involved in buying a boat. He gave me a nice overview of the whole process of buying a boat. He pointedly asks the basic question.

Do you really want to buy a boat? It might well be cheaper to sail without owning a boat, and most people do. This is a tough question to ask because it puts reality up against your dreams. It is an important question. Buying a boat is expensive and selling one is expensive too. If you buy a boat, hardly use it or can't afford it, and then sell it, you will be noticeably poorer for the experience.

Most people don't rent cars because they use their car all the time. But most people don't sail all the time. Renting boats can be a sensible – and even great – way of going sailing. It is possible to rent boats in the most exotic locations in the world. We have chartered boats for the last couple of years in the British Virgin Islands and the Grenadines. We have had a great time each year for less than the cost of docking a sailboat in Charleston, S.C.

Gustafson (1991) is not readily available any more. Still, I found it a nice, simple read that could be digested in several hours and it assumed as much as I knew: basically nothing. If you can find a copy somewhere, I strongly suggest reading it. It really helped me.

Daniel Spurr's (2004) Your First Sailboat is readily available and overall is is a better book than Gustafson (1991). A major difference is a basic one: Spurr assumes that you will buy a sailboat. Even Chapter 9's title, "What Will It Cost Me?", pretty much gives it away. The title supposes that you will buy a boat. Maybe that's the most common outcome, but I think it would be helpful to give people the reasons and information to think about the alternatives. (Maybe I think that because we have not bought one as of today?)

Spurr (2004) goes into more detail than Gustafson (1991) about what to look for in a boat, the different styles and the effect of age. That is very informative and means that you can read more details about these subjects later but you will have some basic information from reading this one book.

That said, I have to wonder about some of the chapters. One chapter is titled "How Do I Get Back to the Dock?". Take my advice: If you don't know how to get back to the dock, do not buy a boat! Or at least not a boat that costs more than what seems like a trivial amount to you. (In my case, that would be a few hundred dollars.) Know a lot more than how to get back to the dock before you buy a boat that cost tens of thousands of dollars. You may find going back to the dock so intimidating and difficult that you don't ever want to do it again. Probably not, but you never know until you try it.

There are other chapters on topics such as how to raise the sails. I think these chapters are not very helpful for buying a boat.

Possibly the best part of the book is Spurr's summary of 75 different boats' qualities. Spurr is a very knowledgeable sailor and his knowledge shows in this section of the book. The boats range from eight-foot boats big enough for one person to catamarans big enough for a large family. Or put differently, they range from boats that should never go much beyond shouting distance of shore to boats that have gone around the world. Overall, this is an excellent first book on buying a boat. And the relatively low price doesn't hurt.

Which Boat To Buy?

There are roughly four types of sailing: daysailing; coastal cruising; offshore cruising; and racing. Daysailing is just that: sailing for the day and going home. Coastal cruising is traveling on the boat, possibly long distances, but not more than a few hours from some safe port or anchorage. Offshore cruising is sailing well away from shore for extended periods.

From what I can tell, you will not learn about racing by reading books. You want to start racing on someone else's boat.

General Discussions of Boats

Much of the focus of available books is on offshore cruising. Possibly this is because authors tend to be offshore cruisers. Writing books is one way to earn money to pay for extended trips. Possibly more books on offshore cruising are sold because of demand. It is more fun to imagine sailing in Tonga than in Charleston Harbor. Whatever the reason, it's a problem if you're not sure what you want to do in your boat.

Herb Payson (1997) and Jim Howard (2000) are books about equipment and organization for offshore cruising. If you think that you might be interested in offshore cruising in the boat that you will buy, they will be helpful. Payson's book is the more entertaining of the two. It is hard not to like a title like Advice for the Sealorn. Payson uses a question-and-answer format for topics and uses stories to make his points. If you are sure that you will only daysail, neither book has much to help you choose your boat.

If you think that you might do some coastal cruising, then both Payson (1997) and Howard (2000) will be somewhat helpful. If you are coastal cruising instead of cruising offshore, you won't have to worry about your children's schooling, which you would if you spent a couple of years in the South Pacific. That difference is obvious. Less obvious are some of the equipment differences. That said, it is hard to find sensible discussions of boats for coastal cruising.

Given the lack of boats on coastal cruising, or just sailing around the Great Lakes or Charleston harbor, the single best book on the overall question of buying and outfitting a boat is Beth Leonard's The Voyager's Handbook: The Essential Guide to Bluewater Cruising (2007). This is the second edition. The first is available used. I have read both.

I strongly recommend buying the new edition. The first edition was very good, but it was like a lot of other such books. It had a fair amount of general information and was interesting. It lacked specifics.

This edition is an impressive book packed with a lot of highly specific information and pictures. To give you an idea, she talks about alternative ways to set up anchors. She talks about keeping the deck clear so that you can walk to the bow without tripping on stays. Even if you have no intention of spending more than a week on your boat or ever being out of sight of land, these discussions will give you things to think about when you're looking at boats. You might think of them on your own. Then again, you might not.

She talks about what people commonly do when they are out cruising and how much money they spend. And she doesn't guess. She actually asked people, enough of them to get a good general idea.

Besides all this, she uses three families as examples of what it costs to go cruising, either spending extremely little, a moderate amount and a lot. Even if you are not going bluewater cruising, these examples will give you a good idea of the cost of different ways of setting up your boat. This can give you ideas about what equipment is realistic and what isn't.

The cover of Nigel Calder's book (2001) claims that it is "the essential guide for choosing, equipping and sailing coastal or offshore cruising boats." The book is strongest on offshore cruising boats. I think that it is less helpful for coastal cruising, where the requirements are not so demanding or expensive. Calder took delivery of a Pacific Seacraft a short while before writing this book; much of the book uses his choices as a benchmark for a solid cruising boat. For offshore cruising, I think that it is a fair benchmark. For daysailing and some coastal cruising, it is not necessary to have such a heavy and expensive boat and not even necessarily desirable.

From Calder's book, you might get the idea that offshore cruising is quite expensive. Offshore cruising need not be expensive if you are willing to forego some conveniences. There are limits though. As Calder points out, his family and many others are not willing to wash dishes in sea water to conserve on fresh water. (I know that my wife wouldn't!)

I have to add that I liked reading Calder's discussion of features and he is mechanically and electrically adept. His focus, though, is on offshore cruising, not coastal cruising.

John Vigor's book (2001) is another book on offshore cruising. There is a lot of comparison to coastal cruising and daysailing boats though. This book is very helpful for understanding the advantages and disadvantages of various configurations and dimensions. For example, he discusses widths and lengths of bunks in about a page of text (pp. 140-41), including how to set up a lee cloth.

The title of Roger Marshall's book (1999), Choosing A Cruising Sailboat, indicates that it is about choosing cruising sailboats. After seeing other titles, you might suspect that the book really is about offshore cruising. No. On the contrary, I think that the book is quite helpful for deciding on characteristics of daysailers as well as coastal cruisers.

How does Marshall cram all this in 210 pages including numerous figures? Marshall compares the designs of five different boats: a weekender; a cruiser; a voyager; a single-hander; and a cruiser- racer. All of these boats would be relatively expensive, but that is irrelevant. The comparisons of features among the boats gives you serious food for thought about what features are important for what type of sailing. Then you can start thinking about how much inconvenience or how much complication you are willing to deal with.

Discussions of Specific Boats

Ferenc Máté (1982, n.d, 2003) has three books that survey the features of various boats. On one level, these are great books. The photographs of the boats are stunning; the descriptions of the boat's features are clear and understandable; and Máté clearly loves sailboats.

Máté's Best Boats to Build and Buy (1982) is a little dated. Apparently there were many people who built their own boats, or at least started to build a boat, when Máté wrote the book in 1982. There is not much evidence of people building their own sailboats today. Some of the features that Máté decries, such as hull liners, are just as problematic today as when he first wrote but are ubiquitous on inexpensive and even expensive boats. The emphasis in this book is more on boats that are suitable for offshore cruising than for coastal cruising or sailing on a nearby lake.

Máté (n.d.) is the best book by him reviewed here. This survey of The World's Best Sailboats even includes Beneteau, one of the big three sailboat manufacturers in the United States today. (Dare we say "manufacturer" instead of "shipbuilder"?)

Máté's The World's Best Sailboats, Volume 2 (2003) seemed a little repetitious to me. In some ways, the book is no more than an update of the earlier survey in The World's Best Sailboats.

My rank ordering of these three books by Máté is: 1. The World's Best Sailboats: A Survey (Máté n.d.); 2. Best Boats to Build and Buy (Máté 1982); and 3. The World's Best Sailboats: Volume II (Máté 2003). I am glad that I own all of them. You may not want to buy all three. It is a little expensive.

It is impossible for me to think of Máté and not think of the Seven Seas calendars. This is only the most recent of many. I have been buying them for several years now and even bought a couple of old ones for the pictures. In fact, my oldest son framed some (you might say "many" since there are about twelve) pictures and they are hanging on my office wall. They are gorgeous pictures. The calendar also includes maps of the areas where the pictures were taken. These pictures don't have much to do with buying a boat, but they are impossible to resist if you like sailboats and the ocean!

On a totally different note, John Vigor (1999) discusses a selection of the older and therefore less expensive boats that can be safely taken on offshore cruises. The boats are 20 to 32 feet long and are available in the United States for several thousand dollars to $50,000. Vigor discusses twenty such boats. Each of the boats has sailed around the world. There are informative drawings of the boats although no photographs. The book is quite short – 131 pages – although the print is not large type and the material is pointed and informative and the book is relatively inexpensive.

If you are thinking about buying a Pearson sailboat from the 1970s, you want to read the discussion of this and similar boats in Vigor's book. Even though I am not planning on offshore cruising in the near future, I learned quite a bit reading the discussions of boats' features and the tradeoffs. I enjoyed them. I'll know a lot more about some of the other boats in the marina because of this book, and I know more now about some boats for sale at the marina.

Practical Boat Buying (2003) is a collection of reviews from the Practical Sailor. The reviews cover boats from 20 feet to 64 feet, although all but four of the boats are less then 50 feet long. The reviews are from different dates, and I can't figure out when they were written. In some cases, the price information has been updated, which eliminates a clue to when the articles were written. That's not a complaint. The updated price information makes the articles more informative than they would be otherwise.

I think that Practical Boat Buying (2003) has no substitute on the bookshelf. It gave me a clear idea of various boats' features and the advantages and disadvantages. I cannot use them uncritically. I went to the Charleston Boat Show to look at a Catalina reviewed in the books and found that their evaluation of the accommodations and mine were quite different. Still, I know of nowhere else that you can get such wide ranging reviews of boats from 20 to 50 feet.

Examining Boats

Buying a used boat has similarities to buying a used car. Some used boats are in very good shape, some are in terrible shape, and age takes its toll in all cases. I hasten to add that sailboats fortunately can last in serviceable shape far longer than cars.

If you are spending more than a couple of thousand dollars, you will want to have the boat surveyed before buying it. A boat survey is similar to a house inspection, just more expensive. As a result, you want to learn to spot the more obvious problems and avoid the expense of a survey that the boat will fail.

Mustin (1994) goes into substantial detail about boat construction and what can go wrong.

Casey (1997) discusses what can go structurally wrong with sailboats and how you can tell.

Now you may wonder: How many books has he read? Actually I've read quite a few more. I read a lot; it's an occupational hazard of being a professor.

In this review essay, I have mentioned the ones likely to be useful to someone thinking about buying a boat. I know that I have found them useful.

Obviously you don't have to read all these books and I wouldn't suggest to anyone that they read them all. I've tried to provide enough information about each so you can tell if a book might be useful to you.