Sailing Britain: A Cruising Companion to the Solent, West Country, Channel Islands, Wales and Scotland
Sailing Britain is the fourth sailing title in our Travel Guides series, joining Sailing Greece, Sailing the Eastern Aegean and Sailing Croatia. Those three are warm-water charter guides. This one is for the coast on our own doorstep, where the tide sets the day's plan, harbours dry out and the water is cold enough to change how you think about safety.
Six Grounds, Matched to Crews
The book covers six cruising grounds: the Solent and the south coast with Poole and Weymouth; Devon, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly; the Channel Islands; Pembrokeshire, Cardigan Bay, Anglesey and the Menai Strait; the Clyde and Argyll; and the Inner Hebrides with the Caledonian Canal. Each one gets an honest difficulty label and a plain statement of which crew it suits, whether that is a first charter, a club cruise or an experienced skipper bringing their own boat.
Tides in One Chapter
British sailing is tidal sailing, so the book gives tides a chapter of their own: ranges and streams, tidal gates, slack water, drying harbours and the double high water, with pointers to the official sources rather than numbers to plan from. It also explains how UK chartering works, including bareboat, skippered, training cruises, club boats and crew-finding, and why flotilla sailing is scarce here.
Hazards Described, Never Recipes
The Alderney Race, the Swellies, Corryvreckan, Dorus Mor, Hurst Narrows and the great headlands are described honestly, with no waypoints, transit lines or slack-water timings. This is a planning companion, not a pilot book, and it says plainly where you should stop reading and go to the current almanac, the pilot and the harbour authority.
The Practical Layer
The practical chapters cover qualifications, cold-water safety, formalities for the Channel Islands and cross-border passages, provisioning and canal transits. Five example itineraries run day by day, covering a Solent week, a West Country week, a Channel Islands fortnight, a Clyde and Argyll week and an Inner Hebrides week, each with what could change the plan. A glossary of more than 60 terms and a UK-US terms table help overseas readers.
As with every title in this catalogue, there are no reader quotes, no testimonials and no printed prices: mooring fees, dues and charter costs move, and a wrong figure in a guidebook gets planned around. Sailing Britain pairs with Sail Further for keelboat skills and Shorebased To Succeed for tides and chartwork theory.