What is buddy boating? Buddy boating involves two or more cruising sailboats traveling together, particularly for longer or more challenging passages. This could mean loose coordination of plans for a few days or weeks or more structured travel nearby.
We’ve always found our boat buddies on the go. We’ll enter an anchorage, share a beverage with the adults, have the kids go off to play, and the rest is history.
Failing a meeting in an anchorage, there are so many online resources to help you find boat buddies.
My friends Ansley and Sarah met online before they met in person. They discussed buddy boating over a Facebook chat. I think they might have met in the Kids4Sail Facebook Group. When you have children, you look for boats with similar-aged kids. And then you find out where they are, where they’re going, and how you can get the kids together!
Another fantastic online resource for buddy boating is the social website NoForeignLand.com. It’s the FaceBook for Sailors. The site owners, Steve and Helena, have created such a valuable FREE service for the boating community. Simon, Sienna, and I met Steve and Helena during a cruiser sundowners social on the beach in Bequia, an island in St Vincent & the Grenadines.
The lovely couple walked us through their sailor’s social platform, and I was immediately sold on the value. I asked Steve if he would write a guest post for me to share with you. Read the article Steve wrote below, and then go check out NoForeignLand.com.
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It seemed like a good idea at the time.
Like most ideas, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what inspired it. It was that time of year when we were planning to leave our winter marina in Sicily. We were talking to other boats to get an idea of what places we might visit and who we might meet up with again in the summer months. At the time, there was no organized buddy boating system.
That’s when this particular idea struck: wouldn’t it be great if we could get live updates on where our friends were while we were out sailing? We knew for a fact that many boats would be in the same cruising area, but without knowing where they were on any given day or the direction in which they were headed, it was likely that our paths might not cross again until the following winter.
NoForeignLand, and Buddy Boating, Was Born
The first version of NOFOREIGNLAND was a simple Google Map, which allowed us to see where a handful of other boats were.
We encouraged our friends to add their boats to the map, and they, in turn, asked other boats in the marina to join in. By the time we set sail, about seventy boats had registered.
As they headed for their summer cruise, each boat’s journey drew a red line across the map. The resulting explosion of red lines headed north to Sardinia and Corsica, east to Greece and Croatia, west to the Balearics, and south to Malta and Tunisia.
That summer in Greece, we could check where our friends were, and we had a great time meeting them and spending time sailing together.
On returning to our wintering base, it became clear that we were not the only ones who had found the site useful, so we decided it would be fun to make it publicly available for any boats to join. Since we made that decision, thousands of buddy boating boats have joined NOFOREIGNLAND, and the site has grown more quickly than we ever imagined.
Keeping track of it all
We’re currently at anchor in Antigua (it’s a tough life), and as I look on NOFOREIGNLAND, I see that there are no fewer than eleven boats registered that are anchored around us. There are some we know and have been buddy boating with; quite incredibly, no fewer than four are friends from back in Sicily who we’ve met up with after completing Atlantic crossings, and the other boats around us we’ve not yet met. So, given that so many boats are on the map now, how can you determine which ones interest you?
Follow my boat – how to find a buddy boat
The simplest way to keep track of a friend’s boat is to “follow” it. Just click on the heart-shaped Follow button, and you’re done. Your activity feed will then start to fill with stories related to their boat: they published a new blog article, shared a YouTube video, added a new place, or reviewed a place shown on the map, or they have sailed somewhere new. Importantly for staying in touch, whenever a boat moves, you will be notified and shown the distance of that boat from yours:
Ok, now you know they’re on the move and where they are, but are they heading in the same direction as you? Does it look like your wakes will cross any time soon?
You can answer these questions by examining their recent movement and looking at the direction of their track on the map. Remember those red lines that exploded from Sicily? Well, rather than having all the boats scribbling all over the map, you can now selectively show journeys for individual sailboats and easily see the direction in which they are heading:
If you want to contact them, click the Chat button and message them. If they miss it, they’ll be sent an email letting them know they have your message.
How to find a buddy boat on the map
If you’ve used our site for a while and haven’t discovered filters yet, you’re missing out.
There’s a lot of data on the map. Users of our site have added thousands of place markers. Over 1500 boats have joined our community and can all be seen moving around. To declutter and make things easier to find, you can select what’s shown and what’s not shown using filters.
For example, to identify where your friends are, click on the Filters button. The filter button is the one with the funnel icon, second from the top on the right side of the map. Then, turn off all place markers and filter the boats to show just the ones you are following. You’ll then see no place markers, and only the boats you are following will be displayed.
These are our friends in and around the Caribbean; you can see the filter settings on the left:
Make new friends and create a buddy boating network
You can use the Chat button to make contact with any boat. We sometimes use it to contact boats on a similar route to ask specific questions about anchorages or places they’ve visited ahead of us.
If we see them at anchor sometime later, we’ll drop by to say hello and thank them for their advice. In typical cruiser style, this can often take a lot longer than five minutes. It will most likely involve food and drinks, too.
Join groups for Buddy Boating
A great way to meet other boats is to join a group. Our groups are quite different from those you might use on sites like Facebook.
A NOFOREIGNLAND group allows boats with shared interests to get together and exchange simple messages. However, the key difference is that you can find other group members on the map using filters when joining a group.
Boat groups are one of the most popular features we’ve added to the site. We continually get feedback from cruisers we meet telling us how they’ve met many other boats along the way using them.
There are dozens of different groups ranging from boats with kids on board that want to play together (Kids4sail) to those that wish to exchange cultures for making yogurt (Lynta’s Yogurt Culture).
This video illustrates how easy it is to join the Kids4Sail group (how to find a buddy boat) and locate other members:
What if I don’t have a boat?
You don’t need to have a boat to join the NOFOREIGNLAND community. We have thousands of visitors each month who come to read blog articles published by our boats to explore the information and read the reviews our community contributes to the places they have found.
Can friends and family follow our boat?
Yes, they can. To get updates, they just need to click the Follow button on your boat page. You can also invite them to follow your boat by using the Share button at the top of your boat page.
Suppose you’re planning a longer journey, perhaps an ocean crossing, and will be offline for a while. In that case, you might consider configuring your satellite tracker, phone, or SSB radio to automatically update your position on the map, keeping everyone updated on your progress.
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Now you know how to get a boating buddy!
The great thing about the NoForeignLand platform is that it’s free; Steve and Helena hate sites cluttered with ads. They have a Patreon account. This enables those who see value to contribute to the continuation and development of the service. Check out NoForiegnLand.com
Other Articles/Videos About Buddy Boating
Great article, thanks for sharing this great information. Looking forward to more of your posts. Boat buddies are great to find, but we all are in limbo during this coronavirus. Will we ever get back to normal?
I ask myself that question every day. Who knows what life might be like after this is all over?!?! Thank you for commenting, Kim