Offshore Passage Planning Workbook PDFRouting Reviews, Consumables & Watch Reality

This workbook publishes no heavy-weather tactic. That is the most important thing about it.

Heaving to, running off, lying a-hull, streaming a drogue or setting a sea anchor: which of those suits a particular hull, in a particular sea, with a particular crew, is a judgement formed by offshore training and by knowing the boat. No table can hold it. A table that pretended to would be consulted at the worst possible moment, by somebody exhausted, in conditions its author never saw.

So Part V records the plan you decided on in advance, where that decision came from, and who aboard has actually practised it. The decision is yours. This page only insists that you made it before you needed it.

No watch length is recommended anywhere in this workbook. The right pattern depends on the crew, the boat and the passage, and every crew that has crossed an ocean has an opinion about it.

What Part VI does is make the actual number visible: hours slept, logged daily by each person, with the average and the worst 24 hours worked out. Most crews discover their own figure is lower than they believed, and by day ten that matters more than anything else in the book. Reconstructed at the end of a passage it is fiction, which is why model O6 only works on numbers written the same day.

Water, food, gas and fuel consumption differ by crew, by climate and by how you cook, and a figure copied from a book is the commonest reason a passage runs short. Model O2 uses a rate you measured on your own boat, with the crew who will actually be aboard, because a rate measured with two people and applied to five is a guess with a decimal point.

Model O5 has you recompute arrival at the speed you are actually making, every noon. A schedule quietly slipping six hours a day is four days late by the end of a long passage, and the person waiting deserves the real figure rather than the one from the plan.

In the Fillable edition every line has a field. Type the distance, the speed you plan on and the number aboard once; in Adobe Acrobat Reader, free on computer, iPhone and Android, the planned days, the days and reserve of every consumable, the distance to run, the average, the days left and the drift against the plan at every noon, the water and fuel used per day with the margin they leave, and the sleep of each person calculate themselves. The Pencil & Print edition is ruled for handwriting in GoodNotes or Notability, or on paper at the chart table. Both come in A4 and US Letter and work offline.

The first ocean crossing. Start at the reference page, and read the insurance lines before you read anything else. Owners discover named latitudes, date windows and minimum crew numbers late, and late is expensive. Then Part V, ashore, with everyone who will be aboard in the room.

The couple sailing long distance, two up. Watch and sleep is your document. Two people cannot share a load designed for four, and the honest number written daily is what tells you whether the pattern you invented is sustainable past day six. It is also the page that makes the argument for self-steering or a third crew, with evidence rather than feeling.

The delivery skipper with a crew who answered an advertisement. You have people whose actual experience you cannot verify. The heavy-weather page has a column for who has practised each measure, and filling that column honestly ashore is more useful than any written CV.

The offshore racer. You are used to routing and to sleep deprivation, so the reviews and the noon log are familiar ground. What racing does not teach is consumables and the failure register, because someone else usually provisions and the boat gets fixed by a shore team. On your own keel those two pages are the ones that decide the passage.

The owner taking their own boat somewhere for the first time. The failure register is the page you will be most grateful for. Everything that annoyed you at sea is forgotten within a week of arriving, and a refit list written at noon on the day it broke is worth more than any amount of remembering.

The coastal plan handles tidal gates, bolt-holes and a shore contact for a passage measured in hours. This one handles a passage measured in weeks: routing that changes several times, consumables that run out, and a crew that gets tired in a way a weekend never makes them. They share the same discipline, record your sources and decide your limits ashore, applied at a different scale.

This workbook publishes no heavy-weather tactic, no watch length, no consumption rate, no weather-window criterion and no reserve. It teaches no navigation and no seamanship, and it is not a substitute for offshore training.

Offshore passage-making carries risks that preparation reduces and cannot remove. Nothing here relieves the person in charge of the vessel of a judgement that is theirs alone.

Instant download. Your links appear on screen the moment payment clears, and a copy arrives by email, usually within a few minutes. They do not expire.

2026 Edition, Revision 2.1, AML-PASS-2026-02. Apex Marine Labs designs the organisational process behind good seamanship. Our documents record and organise; they do not replace offshore training, a qualified instructor, or the judgement of the person in charge of the vessel.