Trailer SAILING
Moving your yacht by road seems counter-intuitive, but it gives you the freedom of coastal cruising wherever you want, whenever you want it, as Matt Newland of Swallow Yachts tells Theo Stocker
Sail wherever and whenever you want with a boat you can take by road
Not even Alex Thompson aboard his Hugo Boss rocket ship can sail to windward at 60 miles an hour. As we all know, getting to your chosen cruising ground can mean days of slogging to windward, or waiting for a better weather window. Unless you have a yacht you can tow. I admit, I’ve often dismissed trailerable boats as ‘not real yachts’.
Certainly, you can’t tow a 45ft bluewater cruiser behind your car, but what if you could have a boat that is beautifully built, sails well, and is comfortable enough for you and your partner to spend a long weekend or even a week or two on board? That’s a fair summary of what most of us use our boats for.
The benefits of trailer sailing are numerous: no costly lift-out fees, hard standing on your driveway, no corrosion, no fouling. Furthermore you can sail wherever you want, whenever you want. If the weather looks unexpectedly good on the west coast of Scotland, a few hours’ driving will have you gently rocking at anchor on a remote loch by nightfall.
You want to cruise the West
Country, but don’t want to spend a week sailing west down the Channel? Simple.
Even a two-week cruise in the Mediterranean on your own boat becomes a reality.
For most cruising sailors, launching, recovering, towing and rigging are a new set of skills. Making sure your trailer is safe, and ‘rules of the road’ need to be taken seriously. Done methodically, however, it is easier than you might think. With the right boat, you could have more adventures than with a yacht kept permanently afloat.
We went to Pembrokeshire to meet Matt Newland, owner of Swallow Yachts, who agreed to take us for a familiarisation sail on a Baycruiser 26 with its proud new owners.
Ludger and Sonja Bödding, from Germany, plan to keep their boat at Hooksiel near Wilhelmshaven on the German North Sea coast. While she will have a berth afloat, they intend to explore the North Sea, Baltic and Ijsselmeer, depending on the weather, and all within a couple of hours’ drive from her home berth, demonstrating just how flexible trailer sailing is. I was keen to see if it was as easy as I had been led to believe.