Delivery trips, mile building and booze cruises Organising sailing weekends with your friends is a great way to enjoy sailing and share the cost but it can sometimes be difficult to get the "booze" and "cruise" elements in the correct proportions and you often find you need to overpopulate the boat to offset the cost of hire. With six crew on a modern yacht a skipper needs to think carefully about the duty roster to ensure no-one gets bored on trips of more than a couple of hours. Sailing weekends need to be arranged weeks in advance, when you can have little idea of what the weather is going to be like. You can find yourself with a boat booked and paid for, a crew eager to get out there and a force seven keeping you pinned down in the marina. Many charter operators also offer mile building cruises which are intended to maximise sailing time usually including a lot of night sailing. This is a very good way to broaden your experience and add miles to your logbook. I opted for a mile building cruise last year but before the date for the cruise came the same company invited me to form part of a 4 strong crew for a yacht delivery of around 110 miles. I decided to do that instead. No responsible delivery skipper is going to attempt a voyage in adverse weather conditions if it can be avoided. This is very reassuring but it also means that the skipper can only give an expected date for the trip and the crew must be ready at short notice. It is not easy for many of us to rearrange holiday at short notice. My skipper would give the go-ahead only if the previous evening's shipping forecast was favourable. The forecast given the night before our planned departure was not promising so the trip was put back. The following Tuesday evening we got the green light and I met up with the rest of the crew at 9:00am the next morning. The trip went off without a hitch taking just a little longer than expected. It was a very worthwhile experience probably more so because we actually had a job to do rather than just mile building. Before this trip I'd only completed day sails and was used to being safely moored up in some nice marina overnight. Subsisting on a yacht for more than 24 hours underway was quite an eye opener for me. I had been worried about sleeping underway and seasickness but I found that I could sleep even if only for a couple of hours at a time. However, I seemed to be more susceptible to seasickness after dark, which was just annoying more than a real problem. Each of us had paid £45 to be on this trip. One sailing friend to whom I mentioned this said that I should have been paid to do it rather than the other way around. That would have been nice but, to me this is a very cheap way to sail and the skipper took care of meals and transport to and from the boat. You have to remember that delivery trips are one way. If you want to build up your miles I can thoroughly recommend yacht delivery trips if you can get on them. James Comment on this story Tell us your story Your Comments: