World's Best Places to Sail

Cruising Guru Jimmy Cornell on what is driving the migration of yachts around the globe and where you can still get away from it all.

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People complain ever more frequently that their favourite anchorages are now overcrowded and that in many places, if you don’t book ahead you won’t get a place in the marina. Yet, astonishingly, the number of foreign-fl agged vessels visiting the world’s key cruising hubs is down by at least 20 per cent overall since the start of the Millennium. So what is going on? Where have all the boats gone?

Since my last global yacht cruising survey in 2010, politics and climate change have affected offshore cruising both in the short and long term, but in order to understand the changes, we need to know exactly where the 8,000 or so ocean cruising yachts actually went (and where they didn’t), what size the boats typically are and how many people were on board. The survey is a good opportunity to find out the actual proportion of catamarans there are among cruising yachts and should prove that you can still find unspoiled, uncrowded harbours and destinations.

The political upheavals in the Middle East and North Africa have greatly affected cruising in the Mediterranean as well as passages through the North Indian Ocean and Red Sea, but while those effects can be regarded as regional, the consequences of climate change are now affecting the entire world. Global weather conditions in 2015 were also affected by a prolonged El Niño episode that exacerbated the ongoing effects of climate change, most notably in the north-west Pacific where at least one typhoon occurred in every month of the year, with a safe sailing season now sadly a thing of the past.