A passage isn't a line between two points. The shortest route often isn't the fastest, the fastest is often the least comfortable, and the same water in October is a different problem from the same water in May. Leave a month late and you don't just turn up late. You turn up into a squeezed season that shoves every decision after it along too.

This is a book about deciding when to go, which way, and where to be when the season turns. It treats a South Pacific year as one connected thing rather than a string of separate passages, because that's what it is.

What makes it different

Deep on one patch, not shallow on all of them. There are excellent books covering every ocean on earth. We haven't sailed every ocean on earth. We know the New Zealand–tropics corridor and the Fiji–Tonga–Vanuatu–New Caledonia triangle from four consecutive seasons, and we go a lot deeper there than a global book has room to.
The gap between the plan and the water. Every chapter has a section called What the guides won't tell you. A routing guide gives you a clean line and a season. It can't tell you what happens when the crew's knackered, the autopilot's sulking, someone wants to stop and fish, and the forecast you built the plan on is three days old.
A straight chapter on what we don't know. Chapter 13 is about researching a leg nobody you trust has sailed, because that's exactly what we do for anything outside our own corridor, and that skill matters more than any one route write-up.

What's inside

Four parts, sixteen chapters, with schematic route maps, season timelines and decision frameworks all the way through.

Part I — Thinking in seasons (the method; it works on any ocean)
  1. The line on the chart is a lie
  2. What actually moves the air down here — trades, the convergence zone, the highs, the squash zone
  3. Climatology is not forecast — the distinction that keeps people alive
  4. The constraint chain — why you plan backwards from the immovable date
Part II — The Pacific year
  1. The year at a glance
  2. The window north
  3. The tropical season — shorter than it looks on a calendar
  4. The window south — the passage with a deadline behind it
  5. Cyclone season: five options, and who really decides
Part III — The passages
  1. New Zealand to the tropics, both directions
  2. The island legs — where the order you visit is the whole decision
  3. The western exit
  4. The legs we haven't sailed — how to research a passage honestly
Part IV — Where the plan meets the water
  1. Waiting well
  2. When the plan breaks at sea
  3. The season that didn't go to plan

The bit most people haven't heard

Ask a room full of cruisers where they're spending cyclone season and you'll get five answers and a lot of opinions about weather. Ask them what the cyclone clause in their insurance policy actually says, the permitted latitudes, the dates, the named-storm exclusion, the crew requirement, and most of them haven't got a clue.

For most boats, the policy decides where the season gets spent, not the skipper's preference. That one chapter's worth the price of the book on its own, because it usually turns out the decision was made months ago and nobody read it.

What this book is not. It's not a pilot, not a chart and not a forecast. Every map in it is a concept schematic marked not for navigation. Seasonal dates are a guide only, they shift year to year, and no date makes anywhere safe. Navigate from current official charts and pilots, check anything that touches safety or legality against current official sources and your own insurer, and remember the call to sail is always the skipper's alone.

USD $49 · one-time · instant download

An illustrated PDF built to be read at anchor and pulled out again every season, with schematic route maps, season timelines and the planning frameworks laid out so you can work through them.

Get The Pacific Year — USD $49

Both books

Cast Off is about deciding to go and actually leaving. The Pacific Year is about getting around once you're out there. One answers whether and how, the other answers when and which way.

USD $79 $98 for both books together.

Get both books — USD $79

Questions we get asked

I'm not sailing the South Pacific. Is this any use?

Part I is a method, not a region. The constraint chain, the climatology-versus-forecast bit and planning backwards from the fixed date all work on any ocean. Parts II and III are our patch and nowhere else. If you're headed somewhere else entirely, you're buying a quarter of the book plus a worked example of how to think. Might still be worth it, but we'd rather you knew that before you paid.

Why not cover every ocean?

Because we'd be making it up. Route and season advice can get people hurt, and it's only worth anything if it comes from someone who's actually been there. We've done four consecutive New Zealand–Fiji seasons. We haven't crossed the Indian Ocean or rounded anything famous, and a book that pretended we had would be worse than useless, it'd be dangerous. Chapter 13 is our honest answer to that.

Do I need a catamaran?

No. Hull type changes a few answers and we say so where it does. Our 1.1 m draft gets us into anchorages a deeper boat can't use, but that's one input, not a verdict. The seasons, the windows and the constraint chain don't care what you sail.

What if it's not useful?

Email us within 30 days and we'll refund it, no questions asked.

Read the free ones first: timing the passage south, where the fleet spends cyclone season and keeping a boat connected under the 2026 rules. If you haven't left yet, start with Cast Off. And the boat that taught us all of it is for sale. The idea the whole book hangs off is free to read: climatology is not a forecast.