Mar 25 2010
Vacation Sailing – Part 3 – What to Know Before You Go
In two previous installments we got all the preliminary work done to get the wheels turning on a bareboat sailing vacation. Now it’s time to flesh out your trip. A sailing vacation takes some additional research and planning than a land based vacation. As soon as you can, you want to order whatever “pilot” or cruising guide book there might be about where you are going. I like to get them early, so I can browse them several times before getting serious about a day by day itinerary. I like to learn where people run to when the weather gets bad… where to wait it out. Get familiar with general info about your planned itinerary.
Soon after I get nautical information, I look for general travel guides that can help me learn more. Call me old fashioned, but I like a couple of general interest books. I will go online too but there’s something about a real book. Sailing in Europe will inherently require more research than one to an individual island somewhere else. We plan our sailing adventures for good weather. But it is all together possible that a frontal system could keep you in one place a lot longer than you had planned. So, having as much info about places along your route can become invaluable. Finally, if I can get some paper charts for where I am going it helps before and during the trip. I have a Raymarine portable GPS chartplotter that actually uses the same flash cards as the big units, so I purchase electronic charts for where I am going. Im comfortable with my own electronics and am weary of having to learn about one that may or may not work on the charter boat. I spend several months with all of this stuff planning an itinerary.
I augment the printed information with searches on the internet. You can learn about planned anchorages, marinas. etc by reading other people’s stories on the web. Ive found that if you use the word, anchorages, trip report, sailing log or captains log with the name of the destination, you will find a wealth of web sites run by folks who cruised the area on their own boat or visited on a charter like you are planning. In fact, YouTube probably has a couple or several videos too. Ive also found, places like sailnet and tripsailor to be useful places to check.
Some time during this period you also want to make airline and hotel reservations. Some people think waiting is one way to get a good deal. Others use Priceline. More important to me is to schedule my travel so that it is padded with contingency time. There is nothing worse than having flight delays which cause you to miss the first day of your charter. Ouch! Instead I pad the front of the trip with a day or two hanging out in the vicinity of the marina. If I am delayed, it doesnt hurt the plans so much. Come to think of it, I like to “pad” the end of the trip as well with a few days on land, relaxing before heading home. But I do that for strictly personal reasons…I dont want to go home just yet! Recently, it appears the best flying days, price and availability wise, are Tuesday and Wednesday. Some airlines deeply discount those days. It can make it worth leaving a day early and coming home a day late.
I recently stumbled onto a wealth of videos about our next sailing destination around Sicily’s Aeolian Islands. It really helps me visualize like one couldn’t ever before this wealth of footage exists now on the web. Once you get to 60 days out, all preliminary work should be done and a working itinerary should be in place. That’s how we will conclude this series with a look at final trip preparations.
