How hard is it for your average Joe (or Jody) to sail a boat around the world?
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Two good youtube channels to watch are Sailing Nahoa (Canadian couple with 2 kids on catamaran) and Sailing Yacht Florence (young British couple on monohull). Both recently completed circumnavigations and documented the entire journeys. Both do a great job and Florence crew have really became amazing cinematographers.
There used to be a world record for the youngest to sail around the world. But it got discontinued as rich parents would buy a fancy boat with lots of automated features, take their kids out of school for a year, and let them have a go at the world record. In fact we have come to the point when there are autonomous sailing drones making their own way under wind power one the open ocean for various reasons. I do not know of any of these who have made a fill circumnavigation but they are certainly capable of this. So the only thing you need to sail around the world is a fancy sail boat and lots of time.
I’m doing it right now! Couple in our mid thirties, not rich by any means. I take care of the boat and she takes care of the money, for the time being. Circumnavigating and sailing in general has huge ups and downs. Yes some of it is sipping cocktails in beautiful anchorages gazing at yet another sunset, but the majority of the time is fixing things, trying to earn money to fix things, and spending money on fixing things. It’s outrageously expensive, overtime the marine environment just ruins everything. Things that you purchased where you thought “oh! this was expensive and high end item, it’ll last a long time!” nope, salt water and humidity gets it eventually.
But the barrier to entry does not have to be that high, buy a boat within your means, set aside that amount of money again for fixing it up and set sail. Take a year and see how you like it.
depending on your meaning, the average joe knows around 0% of how to sail a boat………..so it would be pretty hard.
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