Navigation: A Newcomer's Guide

Get to grips with navigation at sea. This best-selling book gives you all the information you need to know to do just that! It starts from scratch, uses no jargon and features diagrams and pictures, instead of words, wherever possible. It covers all modern navigation and has been updated to reflect upcoming changes in Admiralty charts. It is recommended by Fernhurst Books for beginners and Day Skipper students.

Written by an RYA Yachtmaster Instructor and Examiner who runs her own RYA Training Centre which specialises in navigation, it is the perfect place for newcomers to navigation to start. It explains simply how to look at charts (paper or digital), find your position, look at tides, plan your passage and determine the course to steer. It will help you find out where you are and how to get to where you want to.

Praise for Navigation: A Newcomer's Guide

"I gave a copy to a dinghy sailor who had very little navigation knowledge and, within an hour or so, she felt confident enough to do the basics to get a boat from A to B using chart navigation. A good first introduction to navigation."
— Sailing Today

"This excellent book has the best explanation of accessing your course to steer I've ever read... simple checklist of getting aboard, preparing for a passage and setting off – simple, clear and impossible to misinterpret. Her no-nonsense approach will be a huge benefit to the novice sailor grappling at home with training, but it will also be welcomed by the harassed skipper, a little rusty from winter lay-up, who just wants a quick reminder of what he's supposed to be doing. I will keep a copy aboard myself."
— Yachting Monthly

About the Author

Sara Hopkinson is an experienced sailor, and a Yachtmaster Instructor and Examiner. She runs an RYA Training Centre at Pin Mill in Suffolk which specialises in navigation, radio, radar and first aid courses. She was a Coastguard Rescue Officer for many years and was the Station Officer of HM Coastguard, Holbrook.

Sara has written books for the RYA and Fernhurst Books' Navigation: A Newcomer's Guide, VHF Afloat and VHF Companion.

About Fernhurst Books

Fernhurst Books was founded in 1979, initially publishing books related to dinghy racing. The list soon expanded to include cruising and other watersports. In 2006 the business was sold to John Wiley, but in 2013 a group of sailing enthusiasts (including the original founder) bought the list and name back, once again creating an independent nautical publisher owned and run by sailors. Fernhurst continues to publish books that instruct, inform and inspire those with a passion on, in or under the water. Their 140+ titles range from how-to guides to narrative to coffee-table books, covering sailing, surfing, canoeing, kayaking, stand up paddleboarding, swimming, diving and fishing.