Liveaboard Sailing for Beginners: How to Choose Your Boat, Leave the Dock, and Live Full-Time on the Water The Complete Step-by-Step Guide to Buying,

Living aboard means your home moves with the wind and the tide. This practical guide takes you from the first question, whether the life is right for you, through choosing and buying a sailboat, fitting it out, learning to handle and navigate it, and settling into daily life on the water.

It is written for beginners and for people planning their first year aboard. Every chapter is practical, with figures, tables, checklists and worked numbers you can use on your own boat.

WHAT IS INSIDE

Parts 1 to 17, 137 lessons:
- Is living aboard for you: the real day-to-day life, trying it first, living aboard as a couple, and leaving life ashore.
- Choosing and buying: boat types, layout and systems, viewing, survey, sea trial, paperwork, insurance and buying abroad, with an eight-area boat inspection checklist.
- Budgeting: purchase, refit, running costs, saving money and income.
- Systems and fitting out: 12 V electrics and power budgets, batteries and solar, water, heads and holding tanks, the galley and gas safety, heating and damp, with nine step-by-step fitting-out projects.
- Safety aboard: equipment, life jackets and harnesses, communications, fire, keeping water out, liferafts and first aid.
- Seamanship: boat handling, reefing, docking and finger berths, moorings, anchoring (scope, swinging room, tidal waters, two anchors), navigation (charts, tides, buoyage, the rules of the road, lights, radar and AIS, passage planning), weather, and engine and rigging care.
- Life aboard and on the move: storage, food, work, family, security, where to keep your home through the year, night sailing, landfall, and emergencies.

Part 18, thirty decisions aboard: real situations, from a dragging anchor at 2 a.m. to a gas smell below, with the steps a careful skipper takes and why.

Part 19, sixteen practice drills, each with steps to tick and a practice record.

Part 20, fifteen liveaboard profiles, each with power, battery, solar, water and monthly budget worked out.

Part 21, twenty-seven exercise sets with answers, including chart work on a fictional practice chart: positions, distance, true and magnetic courses, and course to steer across a tidal stream.

Part 22, quick reference: the phonetic alphabet, the distress call, sound signals, lights and shapes, units, and step-by-step instructions for eight essential knots.

Parts 23 to 25: sixty common questions answered, eighteen worksheets and logs for planning your boat, budget, safety and passages, and the answers and a glossary.

WHO IT IS FOR

People thinking about living aboard, new owners in their first year, couples and families planning to move onto a sailboat, and anyone who wants a practical grounding before buying a boat.

PLEASE NOTE

This guide is not a substitute for hands-on training, a qualified surveyor, or professional legal, tax, insurance and electrical advice. Rules on equipment, licensing, registration, waste discharge, anchoring and entering foreign countries differ by country and change over time; check the rules that apply where you sail. The practice chart is fictional and not for navigation. Worked examples use round illustrative figures.