Best sailing destinations in the world: a seasonal map
Where the wind and the water line up, month by month, and how to read the calendar before you book the boat.
Destinations
Destinations covers where the boats actually go: Mediterranean coasts, Caribbean islands, Nordic fjords and the marina towns in between — with anchorage notes, berth prices and the weeks each season is worth sailing.
Where the boats actually go.
The Hardangerfjord: Norway at walking pace
A hundred and eighty kilometres of orchard-covered cliffs, waterfalls you can walk behind, and water deep enough to make anchoring a navigation exercise — the fjord cruise is the anti-Mediterranean, and it is magnificent.
Göçek's bays: Turkey's most protected week
A dozen pine-walled anchorages inside one gulf, restaurants that run their own jetties, and weather that mostly declines to participate — the blue cruise's home water.
Newport to Nantucket: New England by water
Gilded-age harbours, a race island, a vineyard, and a sandbank town at the end of it — the American summer's most civilised week runs on moorings, fog charts and lobster rolls.
The Balearic triangle: Palma, Mahón and Ibiza in one week
Three islands, three temperaments, one honest constraint — the distances are real, the anchorages are regulated, and the week that respects both is the week that works.
The Côte d'Azur by sea: Antibes to Saint-Tropez without the shore traffic
Forty nautical miles of the most famous coastline in the world — and the boat is the only way to see it that doesn't involve a queue.