What is Cruising?  This is the term we sailors use to describe the lifestyle of living aboard a sailboat and traveling, by sailing ourselves over the sea, to all parts of the globe.  It has nothing to do with being a passenger on a cruise ship!  "Cruisers" are the people who embark on this lifestyle.  We also fondly call ourselves "yachties" although many of us would refute the use of the word "yacht" to describe our sailboats.  The term "yacht" somehow implies mega-fancy, expensive toys belonging to billionaires who don't work on their own boats (which all of us certainly do!).  Humorists Henry Beard and Roy McKie (in their book "Sailing") define the term yacht, in part, as a word used "by many boat owners to describe their vessel to persons who have never seen it and are never likely to do so."

So, if you're a cruiser yourself, or a wannabe sailor/cruiser, this section is for you!

If you're a sailing family, or thinking of taking your family cruising, you might want to read what Chris and Amanda wrote about this lifestyle.  Chris has a big section, with many pages, on all aspects of the Cruising Life (written when he was 16-18).  Amanda writes about her feelings about life on a sailboat, written when she was 18, looking back on 6 years aboard.

This section is new and therefore evolving.  Its purpose is to provide those cruisers following in our wake with some more cruiser-specific information - stuff that casual readers of this site would not be as interested in.

Because of the interest this section has generated, we've decided to expand it and organize it better.  We moved our Cruising Recipes and Provisioning pages here from Sue's area so we currently have 4 sections, with a handful of pages under each:

The Australian Cruising and Indonesian Cruising pages contain detailed descriptions of virtually every anchorage we visited in those countries, with Lat/Lon positions, anchoring depths, and photos of the anchorages and/or their approaches. Other countries we sailed may not be covered so completely, but we've written about what we thought we would have liked to know before going -- so we hope it's of some benefit to you, too.

MaxSea Layer Files:
For those sailors using the MaxSea Electronic Navigation program from I&M (probably the most widely used electronic navigation program among world-cruising sailboats) we've now posted some MaxSea "Layer" (.ptf) files.  MaxSea can display these Layer files as a transparent overlay on top of your existing charts and then remove them with just the click of a mouse.  The charts themselves are never changed.  "Track" files show safe boat tracks, while "Mark" files have comments and additions to the charts (moorings, misplaced reefs or navigational aids, minimum depths through passes, additional anchorages, GPS corrections, etc.).

To download these files, create a MaxSea folder under your "My Documents" folder and save the files there.  To use them in MaxSea, go to File, Open, go to the MaxSea folder you just created, and open the file you just downloaded.  If you're looking at the area, you should immediately see the additional information.  Please note that the boats that made these tracks only draw 5' (1.5m), and that electronic navigational aids should not be depended on completely.

Checking chart accuracy:
We never trust the accuracy of our electronic charts too much when approaching a new area.  For instance, even the 2006 version of the CM93 chart database has all of Tonga displaced by at least 1/4 mile from it's true position!  This can be very unsettling if you're approaching in the dark.  But how do you know, when you're just entering a new area, how accurate your charts are?  One way we've found is to use our radar, which is connected to our NMEA bus and therefore gets positional information.  One method is to put our radar's cursor on a prominent landmark (like the tip of an island or peninsula), read off the lat/lon, and compare that to our electronic charts.  Similar in concept is to put a waypoint on a prominent landmark.  We've found that our JRC radar displays waypoints on the screen, so that is another correlation between our charts and reality (as measured by radar).  These methods are not super-accurate, but they'll give you a rough idea.

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