On this page: Your sailing choices | Joining a flotilla lead yacht | Share a sail
Your sailing choices
If you lack enough sailing friends to make a crew, or don’t have someone qualified to skipper your yacht, you have several options:
- Cabin Charter, booking a cabin on a professionally crewed yacht. You can take part in the sailing if you wish, or just sit back and watch the crew take the strain. There’s more about these cruises on the Cabin Charter page.
- Join a sailing training yacht. You don’t have to take a course – you can just go along for the ride. There’s more about the many options on the Sailing Courses pages.
- Joining a Flotilla Lead Yacht, sailing along with the professional crew as they run their Flotilla. More on this below.
- Skippered or Crewed charter, where you charter a yacht for you sole use with a skipper or skipper and crew. You can read more about these on the pages on Skippered Yacht Charter and Crewed Yacht Charter.
- Share a Sail or Pot Luck holidays. These have declined in popularity and I no longer offer these myself. However I can put you in touch with a company that may be able to help.
Joining a Flotilla Lead Yacht
It is possible to take berths on a Flotilla Lead Yacht and sail along with the Lead Crew. This can be an economical option and eliminates any concerns about the competence of your skipper. It can also be quite interesting to see what goes on behind the scenes running a Flotilla – there’s more to it than many people realise.
Most crews will be happy for you to take part in sailing the yacht though it’s important to appreciate they are not there as instructors and their prime task is to look after the rest of the Flotilla. So for example if they are in a hurry to get moored up to assist another yacht in, you may be politely asked to take a back seat. This may also mean if winds are light there’s a bit more motoring and a bit less sailing than the rest of the Flotilla do
On the other hand, by the time they are a few weeks in to the season, most Lead Crews have had quite enough of helming, and appreciate any chance to get sailing, especially if they have willing volunteers to help with the work!
The other advantage of this option over Share a Sail or Pot Luck sailing is the Lead Yacht is in action every week, so availability is a lot better – you can go any week of the season.
At present I can offer this option in just one location, on a 10 day flotilla in Thailand.
Share a Sail / Pot Luck Holidays
Share a Sail or Pot Luck holidays are where you charter a cabin on a yacht on flotila. These were once offered by many of the flotilla companies. However, they have become hard to find for several reasons:
- There have been increased concerns in our ever more litigious society about insurance issues. In the event of someone being injured, the operators don’t want to be involved in legal action between participants.
- For the operators they are a lot of work for minimal income (most participants being at the budget end) and a lot of risk. There is the risk that the yacht won’t be fully booked or that whoever agrees to skipper will cancel their booking.
- There have been too many instances of clashes between participants. I’ve seen many examples in my flotilla skippering days. Some people want to sail all day long whilst others want to motor as fast as possible to the destination. We had skippers who were cast from the Capt Blythe mould. And most memorably, we had a group of 4 yachtmasters, all of whom wanted to be in charge and none of whom was interested in trivial things like handling ropes or the anchor!
Consequently, very few of the flotilla companies now offer these arrangements. But if I’ve not put you off, I can pass your details to an operator who may be able to help you.