Lauren Landers counts her anchor chain by the foot while Nigel Calder counts kilowatt-hours and a Brazilian sailor counts four decades in the same hull

Eighty-five videos published by 68 channels across 14 cruising regions — the fleet stretched from a boatyard in Les Sables-d'Olonne, where a gaff-rigged circumnavigator is being stripped to 1988 specifications, to the reef-studded lagoons of Tahaʻa, to the summer furnace of the Sea of Cortez where refrigeration failed and bees drove crews below. This week the channels documented Atlantic crossings under gaff rig, voltage conversions that replace every electrical component aboard, and the navigation skills that existed before satellites — plus one cruiser who has spent four decades living aboard 24 feet of fiberglass after bone cancer took his leg at 27.

Sampson Boat Co brings the 1910 gaff cutter Tally Ho back to Irish waters after 26 days crossing from Florida 0:20, a homecoming freighted with history—she won the Fastnet race in 1927, and now Leo Goolden and crew are closing on the rock that gave that race its name. The final approach is a deliberate motor-sail under steady diesel 1:09, burning less than half the fuel load to guarantee a daylight landfall at Baltimore Harbour; running dead downwind would mean slow jibing miles and an arrival in darkness. Morning is spent scrubbing topsides, rigging fenders, and clearing the deck in glassy conditions, the crew transforming a passage boat back into something fit for ceremony. Bull Rock lifts off the horizon first, then Fastnet Rock and its lighthouse 2:33 sharpen into view—concrete proof the Atlantic is behind them. As Tally Ho threads between Sherkin Island and the mainland, a flotilla of local boats 4:24 forms up to escort her the last miles, and the passage ends not with an anchor drop but with a crowd on the quay, flags flying, the kind of welcome a boat like this hasn't seen in County Cork for nearly a century.

SheHelms Sailing brings us into the boatyard at Les Sables-d'Olonne, where Mara Løvenskiold is rigging Showgirl — a traditional production yacht designed before 1988 — for the 2026 Golden Globe Race, the solo, non-stop, unassisted circumnavigation 5:05 she will undertake as the fleet's only woman. The race permits no GPS, no weather routing, no electronic charts — only sextants and paper 3:53 — a constraint that pushes preparation into the physical realm: two weeks in Jersey fixing the rig, solar panels installed by Sailing Uma, endless shakedown miles. Løvenskiold reports the Jersey work gave her confidence in the boat's ability to hold together in the Southern Ocean, but notes that coastal passages remain more draining 24:19 than open water — the vigilance demanded by shipping lanes and shorelines leaves less rest than a transoceanic leg. It is a story about methodical readiness for a race that rejects the very technologies most sailors now take as given, and the footage captures the unglamorous hundreds of hours that precede the start gun.

BoatHowTo brought Nigel Calder aboard a 2003 Hallberg-Rassy 43 to weigh the jump from twelve volts to forty-eight. The owner wants to swap an 840-amp-hour AGM bank for a 22-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion phosphate system 0:25, and Calder points out that forty-eight volts lets you run an 8-kilowatt integral alternator 1:22 without turning the conductors into fire hoses — but the conversion means replacing every piece of twelve-volt hardware on the boat, from the inverter to the windlass, and making sure the battery talks to the chargers. He floats twenty-four volts 1:58 as the sensible middle ground if charging speed matters less than the invoice.

Huub Vlogs worked the lagoons around Tahaʻa, French Polynesia, hunting for manta rays and touring the island's vanilla and pearl operations. The island is a half-sunken volcano — its coral reefs grew faster 1:46 than the volcanic rock subsided, leaving a ring lagoon riddled with poorly charted shallows that keep crews anchoring stern-to-the-reef in case they need to kedge themselves off 3:38. The local pearl farm grafts Mississippi River mussel beads into host oysters to seed the gems, and the vanilla plantation 14:54 trains the vines up host trees with coconut-shell mulch at the base — the kind of agriculture that makes sense only when you see it.

Lauren Landers departed the Tuamotu Archipelago after six months, the weather window closing and a 300-mile solo passage 30:40 ahead to begin boat work before a New Year's charter commitment in the Bahamas. Recent solar panel upgrades now cranked enough surplus power 4:22 to run the watermaker and freshwater washdown freely, but a failing windlass spring 18:18 forced her to anchor in twelve feet of water or less with minimal chain deployed — a constraint that would dictate where she could stop through the whole refit calendar. She squeezed in final reef dives with friends Lindsay and Nate, the last margin of leisure before the rhythm flipped from freediving to fitting out, and pushed off alone.

Tom Tersey, owner and instructor at Maryland School of Sailing, analyzed what he calls the navigation skills GPS has erased 0:53 — the environmental cues ancient and post-WWII sailors used as primary position data — and explains how to recover them for modern cruisers who won't rely forever on satellites. He covers reading Gulf Stream entry by the shift to cobalt water and temperature rise 1:56, spotting land proximity through floating vegetation and bird species, and using cloud formations stacked over islands as position indicators — observations a screen never teaches. For post-WWII technique, he walks through dead reckoning with compass, speedometer, and paper chart; danger bearings 10:22 as an imaginary fence between vessel and hazard; and compass calibration 11:55 and deviation tables as a step skipped by nearly everyone until the chartplotter dies. A lightning strike killed all electronics on a Maryland School of Sailing boat, forcing the crew to navigate home without even a depth sounder.

El Viaje de Bohemia pushed north through the Sea of Cortez in thirty-six-degree heat and seventy-seven percent humidity, the kind of summer week that makes you understand why people leave the region in May. The refrigerator died 0:47, the main production hard drive crashed, and swarms of bees forced the crew to button up and retreat below 1:43 for days. They pressed on from Bahía de los Ángeles toward Isla Ángel de la Guarda, catching sierra 14:08 when the fishing was good and learning what it costs to cruise Baja in August.

Hashtag Sal documents 40 years aboard a 24-foot Ardigia sailed by a Brazilian cruiser who lost a leg to bone cancer at 27 and discovered that sailing opened a second world where physical limitation yields to the geometry of sail and wind 6:53. The Pablo Ciber–designed Ardigia 5:29 draws just 65 centimeters with its centerboard up and carries 500 kilograms of lead ballast in the shallow keel, a combination that let him sail her single-handed through 90 km/h winds at a summer regatta 6:08 with full canvas up. The boat answered where everything else had closed: football, volleyball, the terráqueo life—all gone after the amputation, replaced by a craft that asks nothing of legs and everything of attention.

The week was bigger than the eight stories above — the fleet kept filming long after the issue was full. Jakob Lang provisioned his sailboat Wolf in Tenerife 31:28 for a two-month Atlantic crossing to Brazil, while SV Cordelia navigated shallow channels and faded markers 3:29 to reach a vacant marina in Belize, and Wildling Sailing scraped barnacles off the hulls before departing Porto 3:43 for a 150-mile drifter run to Lisbon. Every one of these videos, and thousands more spanning languages from Norwegian to Portuguese and anchorages from the Baltic to Belize, is indexed and searchable in plain language at sailing.directory.