Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Hal Roth left his career as a journalist and editor more than thirty-five years ago and, with his wife, Margaret, went sailing. Since then, they have crossed all the oceans of the world and sailed to a thousand foreign ports and anchorages. Hal also raced twice around the world singlehanded, in the BOC Challenges of 1986-87 and 1990-91. He has accumulated 200,000 voyaging miles and has sailed to the Aleutian Islands, Japan, the North American West Coast, throughout the South Pacific, around South America, the Caribbean, the U.S. East Coast, Newfoundland, Labrador, and the Indian Ocean, Red Sea, and Mediterranean. He has crossed the Pacific five times and the Atlantic eleven times and has rounded Cape Horn three times. A graceful writer and accomplished photographer, Hal has written eight books about his adventures and one how-to book, After 50,000 Miles, which has sold more than 60,000 copies in its various editions. Two Against Cape Horn, Two on a Big Ocean, and Always a Distant Anchorage rank among the true classics of voyaging literature. He is one of the world's half dozen most accomplished sailing writers. HOMETOWN: St. Michaels, MD

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Whether you'd like to sail around the entire world or just part of it,

the well-tested sea wisdom in How to Sail Around the World will make your voyage easier and more successful. Here's clear and authoritative information on how to buy a small sailing yacht at a modest price, how to sail her on a big ocean, and what it's like to live aboard.

Hal Roth has been a long-distance sailor for 37 years. He has sailed around the world three times and has logged 200,000 miles at sea either with his wife or by himself. His books Two Against Cape Horn, Two on a Big Ocean, and Always a Distant Anchorage are recognized classics of voyaging literature, and his instructional book After 50,000 Miles, published a quarter century ago, ranks among the most influential sailing books ever written. Yet Roth's first sympathies are still "for the beginner with stars in his eyes and not much money," and How to Sail Around the World emphasizes the simple, the essential, and the affordable for ordinary people who would like to see the world from a new and challenging perspective.

To a rare degree, Roth combines a mastery of technical content with an ability to render it in elegant writing that's a pleasure to read. How to Sail Around the World is at once authoritative and accessible. Roth's strongly held opinions, convincingly argued (he chooses not to sail with a refrigerator, for example), add to the book's appeal.

How to Sail Around the World will tell you how sailing yachts are built and rigged, how to handle the sails, and what you need to know about anchors and anchoring. There are details of cooking and eating aboard, sailing at night, planning the trip, foreign paperwork, and exact figures on what it all costs, as well as the clearest and most comprehensive directions ever published on how to deal with storms at sea.

In the beginning, voyaging can be a terrifying prospect. The storms, the leaks, the anchoring, handling the sails, deciding on the route--so many unknowns. But what a payoff! You can sail to Venice, London, Sydney, San Francisco, or Hong Kong. You can pick an island in the middle of the Aegean, listen to green and yellow parrots in the wilds of the Amazon, or visit a thousand places in between. It's exciting to sail to a distant landfall at a slow and leisurely pace, and to meet people in foreign lands.

Fortunately, yachts travel slowly and give you time to learn the fundamentals of long-distance sailing. With patience you will begin to put it all together; life aboard will suddenly start to click. It will happen sooner than you think, and this book will help you.

The big secret of world travel is to do it in a sailing yacht.

You take your deluxe hotel with you, which gives you everything you need to exist pleasantly and comfortably--a snug berth, a writing desk, a navigation center, and a compact little galley--all in a small and neat package.

Once you have your own boat, you can sail for years without the terrible daily costs and hassles of hotels, restaurants, and airplanes. You entirely sidestep the annoyance of reservations, standing in line, security screening, and dragging around awkward luggage. You do things at your own pace because you're in charge.

Where do you begin?

Start by reading How to Sail Around the World. In this guide, based on 200,000 miles of hands-on world-cruising experience, Hal Roth gives you all the information you need to plan, launch, and relish every moment of a journey that is every sailor's dream. You'll learn how to:

• Find a suitable boat for your voyaging
• Assemble a versatile sail inventory
• Select tools and spare parts
• Plan your route and timing
• Choose the right anchors and how to use them
• Minimize costs
• Stay warm, dry, and well fed
• Cope with paperwork in foreign ports
• And much more!

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How to Sail Around The World

McGraw-Hill

Contents

Chapter One

This book is for people who dream of taking small sailing yachts across oceans, who hope to make extended blue-water passages, and who plan to live aboard for long periods. Or said another way: it's for people who want to become high-mileage sailors and to exchange the near and safe for the distant and unknown.

Margaret and I have had a wonderful sailing life for more than thirty-five years. We've crossed all the oceans of the world and have sailed to a thousand foreign ports and anchorages. Yet it seems only yesterday that we elected to sail and earn our way with words and pictures while living aboard a 35-foot yacht.

The people we know in the business world have made far more money, but their riches could never buy the satisfaction that's come to us from all our experiences and the pleasure of making friends in so many places. I think of watching all those sunsets at sea and the excitement of putting together a small shelf of books about our voyages.

On our first trip we traveled across the Pacific from California to Tahiti, Samoa, the Gilbert Islands, and through the four main islands of Japan. Then to the Aleutian Islands, southeast Alaska, Canada's Queen Charlotte Islands, and back to California. Another time we sailed to the Galápagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador. Next we went to Peru, the Strait of Magellan, Tierra del Fuego, and Cape Horn. Finally to Buenos Aires, Uruguay, a dozen places in Brazil, a stop in Bermuda, and on to Nantucket Island.

Whisper sailing into Attu, the westernmost island of the Aleutians.

On a great voyage in the 1980s, we sailed from Maine to the Caribbean and through the Panama Canal to French Polynesia. We spent a month in the Tuamotu Archipelago, 72 gorgeous palm-clad slivers of coral and sand barely above the sea, where the people seem to be half fish, half human because they live so close to the water. We continued on to Vanuatu in the western Pacific, a place where kinky-haired Melanesian men wore little more than penis sheaths but spoke four languages and knew more about world politics than I did.

Sailing ever westward, we glided along the coast of the immense, rust-colored deserts of Northern Australia. We stopped at Thursday Island and bustling Darwin, where we met Australians and Aborigines. Two months later, on a silky Indian Ocean, we tiptoed along Indonesia's necklace of islands. We took public buses across lovely Bali, an oasis of green hills and oh-so-gentle people, where the driver would stop and worship at a roadside shrine for a few minutes while his passengers sat quietly. Margaret and I stopped at tiny Keeling-Cocos in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Then to the tropical Seychelle Islands off the east coast of Africa and on to Somalia and Yemen, our introduction to the Arab world.

The sail north in the Red Sea was hot, hard, and dusty. We stopped in Port Sudan to fill our water tanks, and 10 days later we passed through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean.

We rested in Cyprus during a mild winter, and the following summer spent a month each sailing along the coasts of Turkey, Greece, Italy, and Spain. Finally we crossed the Atlantic to Martinique in the Caribbean and headed north to Maine. We had gone entirely around the world in our little yacht, Whisper.

I had long wanted to try sailing single-handed to see if I had enough guts and technical skills to do it by myself. So in 1986–87, I set off and made a voyage east-about around the world by way of the Southern Ocean in a competition called the BOC Challenge. I sailed in an engineless 50-footer, and for the first leg traveled from Newport, Rhode Island, to Cape Town, South Africa. Then around the Cape of Good Hope and across the Southern Ocean to Sydney, Australia. Next past New Zealand and across more of the Southern Ocean until I reached Cape Horn. In the Atlantic once again, I sailed north to Rio de Janeiro, across the equator, and back to the United States. Margaret served as my shore support crew and met me at each of the three stops. I made the same journey in 1990–91, and once more my wife helped me.

In 1995, Margaret was again on board, and we were back to a 35-footer, a boat size we liked better. We sailed from the Chesapeake to Gibraltar and thence to northwest Turkey to begin a project to trace the voyages of Odysseus.

In addition to these six major voyages, Margaret and I have made dozens of shorter cruises: from California to British Columbia; Maine to Rhode Island; Maine to Maryland; and Maine to Florida and the Bahamas. In 2000 and again in 2001, we sailed from Maryland to Canada's Cape Breton Island at the eastern end of Nova Scotia. We circled the big island of Newfoundland twice, and in 2001 we made a long run northward along the coast of Labrador among the great icebergs that drift south from Greenland.

At 5 or 6 knots it takes a good many years to accumulate a significant total of sea miles. It's easy to exaggerate one's sailing or to claim a lot of miles as part of a big crew on a long voyage. It's quite a different game sailing with one or two. Our experiences include 5 trips across the Pacific, 11 runs across the Atlantic, and 3 jaunts past Cape Horn. In all, I have sailed 200,000 miles. Margaret has sailed 120,000 miles.

During our years at sea we've been on the yacht continuously, in winter and in summer, and we've visited parts of the earth that a tourist never sees. We've had moments of sublime pleasure and nerve-jarring agony. We've run before the gentlest of trade winds for a month; other times we've bashed into severe headwinds. Once we blew ashore in a frightful storm; another time we hit a coral reef because of an error on a new chart. But the bad times were few, and the good times were many.

I think back to some of our wonderful anchorages: the ethereal turquoise of tropical lagoons; the charming, butterflylike fishing villages along the southeast coast of Japan; the nose-tingling fragrance of cedars and spruces in the bays of southeast Alaska; the rose-colored flamingos flying overhead in southern Peru; yellow and green parrots chattering in the tropical jungles of Brazil next to the yacht; the chilling immensity of frosty, ice-blue glaciers that loomed above us in Beagle Channel in southern Chile; the storybook village of Bonifacio, hidden among the limestone cliffs of southern Corsica in the Mediterranean.

My mind becomes a kaleidoscope of twisting colors, out-of-focus landscapes, storms and calms, sail changes and anchoring. My ears ring with the babble of strange languages, sea sounds in the night, and the hooting of big ships in distant harbors. I hear the shrill sounds of the crier—the muezzin—who calls the faithful to prayer five times a day in the coastal towns and cities we sailed to in Tunisia, Turkey, and Yemen.

I smell the cloying sweetness of drying copra in the tropics. I turn my head to sniff the iodine seashore at low water in the far north. I think of dolphins breathing alongside the yacht at night; of boobies plummeting into the ocean after fish; of frigate birds circling ever higher at the far edge of my eyesight. Of dozens of humpback whales spouting and jumping outside the port of St. Anthony in Newfoundland. I think of pleasant, lingering meals with new friends; the fun of shopping in strange markets with curious money.... All...