Sailing in Your 70s: What It Really Takes to Go Cruising as You Age

Yes, you can go cruising in your 70s, and yes, you can keep going well into your 80s. People do it all the time. The honest gates aren’t age itself. They’re physical fitness, balance, mental sharpness, and how much you want it.

My husband, Dave, and I began cruising full-time when he was 64, and I was 42. We cruised together for a total of 17 years, across the Sea of Cortez, Pacific Mexico, Central America, the Florida Keys, and the Bahamas, with a small stretch of land life in the middle. Dave actively cruised until he was 83. We lived aboard until he was 85, when his heart and kidney issues finally made it impractical, and we moved ashore in October 2023. That’s more than two decades of watching how cruising changes as you get older, and what it really takes to keep doing it.

So when someone asks me if they’re too old to start, or too old to keep going, my honest answer is: probably not. But it’s worth understanding what actually changes.

Starting With Some Boating Background vs. Starting From Zero

Readers of this article fall into two rough groups, and the on-ramp looks different for each.

If you have some boating background already, you’re further along than you think. Maybe you sailed as a kid, or owned a powerboat, or chartered a few times. The core skills are still there. What you’ll need is time to build up cruising-specific competence: anchoring, weather, provisioning, boat systems, and handling the boat in close quarters. Chartering for a week or two at a time is a great way to stretch those skills before committing to a boat of your own.

If you’re starting from zero, welcome to the club. Plenty of people do. Many Loopers, the folks who cruise America’s Great Loop, begin with no boating background at all, often in their 60s. The Loop runs mostly through protected water, with a strong community of fellow first-timers and plenty of professional help available along the way. It’s one of the most age-friendly on-ramps into cruising that exists.

If you’re brand new to sailing specifically, our podcast episode with Nica Waters on how to learn to sail walks through the real options: community sailing clubs, formal schools like ASA and US Sailing, chartering with an instructor aboard, and crewing on other people’s boats. There’s no single right path, but there are a lot of good ones.

And if you’re still in the dreaming phase, trying to figure out whether cruising is actually realistic for your situation, may I suggest our course From Dreamer to Cruiser? Pamela Douglas built it for exactly this reader: someone who’s interested in cruising but isn’t yet sure how to get there, or whether they can.

Acknowledge the Limits, Then Work Within Them

The single biggest lesson I took from watching Dave cruise into his 80s is this: honesty about your limits is what lets you keep going.

It’s easy to gloss over limits when you live ashore, or even when you’re tied to a dock. Out cruising, you can’t. You can’t do what you did even five years ago, and pretending otherwise leads to injuries or worse. Once you acknowledge the limits, though, you can figure out how to work within them. That’s where all the rest of this comes from.

Every Person Aboard Must Be Able to Run the Boat, or Accept What Happens If They Can’t

This one matters more the older you get, and it’s the part most people underestimate. The requirement is simple: every person aboard has to be able to run the boat, or understand and willingly accept the consequences if they can’t. That second option is a real option. It’s just one you have to choose with your eyes open.

Cruising as a Couple

The ideal is that both people on board can run the boat. Not at advanced levels, but at working levels: starting and stopping the engine, raising and dropping the anchor, running the radio, reading a chart, handling the boat in and out of a slip. If your partner has resisted learning the boat, that’s a conversation worth having before you go cruising later in life, not after.

Here’s the honest version if that conversation doesn’t go the way you hoped: if one person can’t run the boat, you are effectively single-handing with extra crew aboard. That’s a real option, and plenty of couples cruise that way. But the risks are the single-hander’s risks, not the couple’s risks. And those risks go up with age, because the odds of a stroke, heart attack, fall, or sudden illness climb as you get older. At 45, it’s unlikely the non-skipper will ever have to take over. At 75, it’s no longer unlikely. That’s the tradeoff you’re accepting.

It also means the boat itself has to be set up so whoever’s aboard can operate every system. We wrote years ago about designing boat systems that everyone can use, and the principle matters more every year. Extra mechanical advantage on the dinghy davits. Winches that the smaller person can actually crank. A windlass that doesn’t require brute strength. Smaller jerry cans so nobody has to lift 40 pounds over the lifelines alone.

Single-Handing

For a solo sailor, this same requirement is sharper. If you have a heart attack at anchor three miles from shore, it might be survivable. It might be a mild one. But it’s going to be on you to get yourself the help you need. Nobody else is going to do it for you.

Plenty of older solo cruisers cruise with that reality in full view, and it’s not the same thing as being reckless. It does mean being clear-eyed about it, and it means building every safety net you reasonably can: AIS, reliable communications, a check-in schedule with someone ashore, medications and equipment where you can reach them in a bad moment, and a brutally honest assessment of what you can still do alone on a bad day.

The Bigger Version of This Conversation

What we’re really talking about here is risk, and the risk goes up with age. The older you are, the more likely you are to have a medical event while you’re out cruising. That’s not alarmism, it’s just statistics. Dave and I talked about this, too, long before the heart and kidney issues showed up.

The truth is, either of us could have died out there because of how far we were from medical care. Something that would be survivable in a city, a heart attack, a stroke, a serious injury, can be fatal when you’re a day’s sail from the nearest hospital. At 50, the odds of that mattering on any given passage are small. At 80, they’re not.

And honestly, the odds were higher for Dave than for me. That meant we weren’t making the same calculation. Dave had to accept the possibility of his own death out there. I had to accept the possibility of losing him out there, and being left alone on passage or at anchor, possibly in a foreign country, and then alone in life afterward. Those aren’t the same decision. Mine was harder in some ways. I had to embrace Jimmy Buffett’s “I’d rather die while I’m living” on Dave’s behalf, too, because he’d rather have had those years cruising than spent them sitting on the sofa watching TV. And so would I, for him.

That’s not the right calculus for everyone. It’s a calculus you get to make, consciously, rather than having “too old” made up for you by someone else.

Staying Injury-Free Is the Whole Game

Broken bones, pulled muscles, bruised ribs, wrenched backs, all of these take longer to heal as you age, and it’s harder to regain full function afterward. Nearly every practical decision we made as Dave got older traced back to lowering the chance of injury.

That starts with fitness. Dave was firmly in the “use it or lose it” camp and worked to maintain his strength, balance, and agility. Living on a boat helped. It’s a bit of a circular proposition: you have to be physically fit to cruise, and cruising keeps you physically fit. Climbing in and out of the dinghy, moving around the deck, hoisting sails, it all adds up to a pretty solid daily workout.

The mental side matters just as much. Cruising keeps your brain working: figuring routes, solving problems, dealing with whatever the day throws at you. That has to be better for long-term mental sharpness than sitting on the sofa watching reruns.

Choose a Boat That Works With You, Not Against You

When we bought our second boat in 2014, we made her easier to handle on purpose. Our first boat, Que Tal, was a heavy bluewater-capable Tayana 37 with a 66-pound anchor, big sails, and a full keel that, in the words of another Tayana owner, “backs like a drunken elephant.” She was a great boat for what we bought her for, but she wasn’t going to be the right boat for Dave in his late 70s.

Barefoot Gal, our Gemini 105M catamaran, was a deliberate choice in the other direction. Smaller sails are easier to raise and trim. We have a thirty-five-pound anchor instead of sixty-six. It is much more maneuverable in close quarters, which makes anchoring, docking, locking through bridges, and picking up mooring balls far less stressful. Faster under both sail and power, made days shorter, and we arrived less tired. Side entry to the queen berth instead of crawling into a V-berth. No long companionway steps to navigate with an armload of groceries. You can read more about why we picked her if you want the full comparison.

A catamaran isn’t the only right answer. Plenty of older cruisers do beautifully on smaller, simpler monohulls. The principle is what matters: choose a boat that’s easier to handle than you technically need, not harder. It is tempting, as your finances allow, to buy bigger and more complex as the years go by. Dave and I were not at all convinced that bigger is better. For older cruisers, it’s usually the opposite.

Mechanical Advantage Is Your Friend

Anywhere you can replace muscle with leverage, do it. This becomes more important every year. Same principle as before, too: every system has to be set up so whoever’s aboard can operate it alone.

• Dinghy davits with extra purchase. We beefed up the davits and added more mechanical advantage to the lifting lines. We also added a block with an integrated cam cleat so the line cleats automatically as you pull. Pull a foot or two, and reach for the next handful. The line holds itself. No one-handed struggle.
• An outboard crane so the motor goes from the dinghy to the stern rail without being hand-lifted. This also meant we could run a larger outboard than we otherwise would have.
• An electric windlass. We consider this a major safety feature on any cruising boat, and essential as you get older. With it, you’ll re-anchor as many times as you need to, move to a better spot when conditions change, and get off a lee shore when you need to go now. When our windlass motor died in the Bahamas once, we could still manage the 35-pound anchor and quarter-inch chain manually, but only just. A bigger boat with a bigger anchor would have been a different story.
• A watermaker. Lugging 40-pound jerry cans of water from shore gets old fast, and docking for water has its own injury risks. A watermaker eliminates both.
• Bigger winches, longer winch handles, and rigging the jib furler so it runs to a winch. Every bit of mechanical advantage buys you capability you’d otherwise lose.
• Good blocks. Dave was insistent on this. Bigger, better-quality blocks (we liked Harken) make a real difference anywhere a line is under load.

How the Daily Pace Changes

Our style of cruising got slower and less ambitious as we aged, and we were happier for it.

We got more conservative about weather windows. We weren’t waiting for perfect conditions, but we were willing to sit a few extra days for better weather rather than push through something iffy. What good is getting somewhere two days sooner if you spend those two days recovering from a rough passage? We were also quicker to move to a more protected anchorage when conditions looked like they were deteriorating.

We shortened our daily runs. When Dave was in his 70s, we aimed for no more than 50 miles a day. By his 80s, we aimed for 30. We tried to arrive in a new anchorage by late afternoon, not at sunset, so we had light and energy to get settled. Long days and overnight passages still happened sometimes, but we planned around the fact that he didn’t have the stamina he used to.

We made checklists for everything. Most of us don’t have the memory at 80 that we did at 60, and cruising has a lot of small steps that can’t be skipped. Checklists, reminder labels on equipment, and calendar reminders really help.

We also spent more money. Annual haul-outs got more help hired. We took taxis instead of carrying loads back from the grocery store. We ducked into marinas when bad weather threatened rather than toughing it out at anchor. It all added up to higher annual expenses, and it was worth it.

It’s Possible If You Want It Enough

Dave called it “geezer cruising,” cheerfully, right up until the end. He was still out there actively cruising at 83 and living aboard at 85. Starting later, as many Loopers do in their 60s, is very much a real option. Continuing into your 70s and 80s is very much a real option.

The style of cruising may change. The boat may change. The destinations may look different than the original dream. The important thing is figuring out a style that works with whatever you’ve got, and doing everything you reasonably can to avoid the injuries that shut cruising down for good.

If it’s what you want to do, you can almost certainly find a way to make it happen.

Still Figuring Out If This Life Is for You?

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