Performance daysail: The Joy of Sailing Local

May 8, 2025

By Peter Rowe

Why would readers wish to read about sailing short distances, close to home, in benign weather, with no storms, groundings, unfriendly locals, or foolish maritime mishaps to enliven the tale? Standard practice for articles in most sailing magazines like this is to write about destinations that are distant, exotic, and hard to get to. It is understandable, of course. This article is the exception. My heretical premise is that the best sailing is daysailing in your own backyard, wherever that may be.

I can certainly understand the more conventional viewpoint. Within a month of getting my first keelboat – a very modest 24-footer with a little outboard on the back – I had enlisted two friends and taken off on a 1500-mile cruise to Staniel Cay in the Bahamas. I repeated that jaunt, going north from the islands or south from Canada, four more times in various boats over the next eight years. I’ve also sailed beyond the horizon in many other places. I’ve sailed from California down into Mexico, around the Gulf Islands of the Salish Sea, all through the Caribbean from Trinidad to the Virgin Islands, along the coast of Turkey, and through the Greek Isles. I’ve run a long-distance charter operation out of Nassau, sailed around Cape Horn in big seas, and done something almost no-one else has done – sailed to a distant, brand-new island in Tonga, still hot to touch after its explosive, volcanic birth only two weeks earlier.

It’s a different story today

But that is the past. These days, I sail a lot – 91 days last season – but seldom more than five miles from my home port. I’m here to promote the joys of sailing local. I am no apologist for the owners of the many hundreds of sailboats one sees tied to docks or mooring balls, seldom or never used. I certainly sail way more than they do. I also believe I sail – really sail, not motor or anchor or live aboard – more than many of the people who are out on extended cruises at sea.

I once spent three weeks in Elizabeth Harbour off George Town, Great Exuma Island. It is one of the biggest and best-known assemblages of cruising sailboats in the world. There are hundreds of boats anchored there. I saw people using their dinghies – motoring around to get groceries or take their dogs to shore or drive to the beach to play volleyball or poker – but I never once saw anyone use their sailboat to go sailing.

The Fact is..

The truth is long-distance cruising often gets in the way of actual sailing. A big dinghy is strapped to the foredeck, making it difficult to see, difficult to tack without tangling the jib sheets or damaging the genoa or the dinghy. Or else, it is towed behind, slowing the boat speed by a knot. There is frequently a bimini, which makes it hard to see the sails in order to properly set them, and a dodger, which often makes it hard to access the winches and traveller. I’ve seen cruising boats where it is so hard to set the traveller that it is never used.

Cruising boats are frequently so cluttered inside with dishes, sleeping bags, books, IPads, pet trays and the other needs of living that it can become a giant mission to prepare them for movement. They are also often decked out with folding bicycles, windsurfers, spare water canisters and gas cans, which on mega yachts can be hidden away, but on the average Canadian boat of less than 50 feet will get in the way of sailing performance. Further, the requirements of getting somewhere on a schedule mean that unless the wind is perfect, the engine is turned on. That’s not sailing, that’s motor boating on a boat that accidentally has a mast.

In my kind of sailing, we are not out there for anything other than the pure joy of the activity. I have the absolutely best sails, a folding propellor and a clean and slippery bottom. The boat is ready for action. I can get sailing within five minutes of climbing onboard. The engine is used to get us off the dock and out of the harbor and then is turned off. We sail on whatever is the most fun point of sail – usually a close reach, tack a few times, and return five or six hours later on a reciprocal reach – the fastest and most enjoyable point of sail. Sailing to me means the fun of tweaking – adjusting traveller settings, jib fairlead cars, the backstay, halyards, cunningham and sheet tension to make the boat sail as well as it can.

KISS

I can certainly understand the attraction of distance cruising, but I believe it often gets in the way of actual sailing. Instead of the focus being on the wind and the sails, it is on the drinks, the galley, the repairs, the provisioning, the fishing, the sleeping accommodations, the navigational challenges, the need to tone down the sailing to the level of the least adventurous person onboard.

I like to introduce people to sailing, and so I take out lots of folks who are new to the sport. I also skipper a big classic yawl, Jilasi, for the Broad Reach Foundation giving disadvantaged kids an opportunity to get on the water. But again, we do it for three or four hours and then get them back to shore. I don’t want to turn sailing into a mission with night watches, rainstorms, head maintenance and struggling to cook meals on a heel of 20 degrees. I follow the KISS rule – keep it simple, stupid. Most of the joy of sailing comes from afternoon sailing in sunshine with six to eighteen knots of warm wind.

There are lots of ways to make sailing much more challenging than that, and if that’s what fills your boots, then go at it. If your dream is like that of a fellow I once knew who had never once sailed a boat but was adamant that he wanted to get a boat and then sail alone to Japan, of all places, then follow that dream. As for me, I intend to try to break my record of 91 sailing days this season by sailing on sunny afternoons, without making voyages of much more than twenty miles from home.

Peter Rowe is a filmmaker and author. His latest feature film is titled “Water Crazy.” His latest book, published by Sutherland House, is “Out There – The Batshit Antics of the World’s Great Explorers”.