The International Marine Book of Sailing (INTERNATIONAL MARINE-RMP) - Tapa dura

Robby Robinson’s experience-based approach makes sailing more transparent and accessible than ever and sets a new standard for learn-to-sail books. The International Marine Book of Sailing’s how-to text focuses on the actions you need to take to sail on your first afternoon, and then goes on to cover everything from sail trim and seamanship to advanced racing and voyaging, introducing each new skill and technique as it becomes relevant to your progress.

There may be other sailing instructional books, but there are none like this! Not only is this one the largest--with more than 500 pages and 1,000 color photos and illustrations--but it is painstakingly written and designed to accompany you along the ideal learning curve for sailors.

In Chapter 1 Robby Robinson gets you sailing in a single afternoon using just the mainsail and basic sail trim while you learn to judge the wind and your course. In later chapters he introduces the jib and other sails along with progressively more subtle sail-shaping adjustments, until you know enough to win races or cross an ocean.

Similarly, you'll find the basics of anchoring, knot tying, piloting, and seamanship early in the book and more advanced techniques as they become relevant later on. This progressive mode of organization is intuitively easy to use, but The International Marine Book of Sailing is the only book designed this way. Other books organize content by topic, giving you, for example, everything about sail trim in a single chapter. The result is too much detail too soon for beginners, while experienced sailors must wade through things they already know in order to find what they don't. A sailing instructor since he was a teenager, Robinson knows what you need to know when. Editor, author, and seamanship source, he knows how to help you continue honing your skills.

And this is a sailing book with a sailor's heart. Robinson reaches deep into his well of experience to share definitions, variations, and alternatives in the book's generous sidebars. The result is a richly informative how-to mix of technology and technique, lively anecdote and sailing tradition--all thoroughly cross-referenced so you can easily find more advanced or basic details on the subject at hand.

The hundreds of photos shot especially for the book help take you from one-design sloops to high-performance racing dinghies and sturdy offshore cruising vessels. The book's vision of sailing is wide-ranging and democratic. Robinson has cruised Europe and the U.S. East Coast with his wife and children in his simple 25-footer and has chartered bigger boats all over the world, cruised multihulls as well as monohulls, and raced dinghies as well as keelboats. In The International Marine Book of Sailing he distills the lessons of a lifetime into a book organized to make them readily available and powerfully clear.

But it's Robinson's ability to turn a phrase that makes this book such a delight and his lessons so memorable. He gently reminds us, for example, that "no matter how peaceful your time on the water, you are never that far from being in the water." And he punctuates his advice for choosing the right cruising boat with the disclaimer that "applying someone else's standards is like chasing someone else's dream. Find out what matters to you, and use your own standards to chart you own course."

In The International Marine Book of Sailing, Robby Robinson has charted a new course for sailing books.