Long-haul cruising CHECKLIST

Jimmy Cornell boils down decades' worth of world cruising surveys to find the factors that affect voyage success

- Jimmy Cornell

For 35 years I have been keeping a record of the global movement of sailing yachts by obtaining the number of arrivals in several key locations around the world.

During this period there has been a steady increase in those numbers; the most significant being the number of transits by cruising yachts through the Panama Canal, which went up from 495 in 1987 to 919 in 2022. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria is the foremost sailing hub in the North Atlantic where yacht arrivals rose from 1,038 to 1,237. At Horta in the Azores, there has been a near two-fold increase from 614 to 1,131. Arrivals in New Zealand grew from 250 to 489 while Tahiti saw an increase from 328 to 404. High latitude destinations have also seen a marked increase from only four yachts calling at Spitsbergen in 1990 compared to 52 last year, with an increase in Antarctica from eight to 26 over the same period. The only place where there was drastic reduction was the Suez Canal, which recorded a fall from 198 in 2000 to 36 in 2022. This is undoubtedly due to safety concerns, with sailors preferring the safer route around the Cape of Good Hope as shown by the numbers going up in Cape Town from 67 to 126.

On a global level, an estimated 10,000 boats are undertaking a long voyage at any given moment. The vast majority have a happy ending. That was certainly the case with my own voyages and also for the majority of participants who sailed in my rallies, whether transatlantic or around the world.

Bearing in mind the many challenges that those sailors had to overcome to bring their voyages to a successful conclusion, it's remarkable how relatively small the number of failures was.