Sailing at night can be a sublime experience - stay on your guard, but enjoy it.
It’s hard to beat reaching over an easy moonlit sea, especially when land is miles away and you haven’t seen a ship all night. It’s a different story close to shore. There’s plenty of traffic along our more populated coastlines, and pilotage can be intricate, so sailing at night can feel like plunging down an unlit highway with no headlights. These are real concerns, so it’s understandable that many skippers avoid a first brush with darkness for as long as they can. Sooner or later, though, any of us with ambitions to cruise beyond our home waters must face up to sailing...