Sail Commons
Most sailing knowledge gets handed over in person. That's a good system. It's also a closed one.
Someone who knows stands next to someone who doesn't, on a boat, and explains why the boat is doing what it's doing. It works, but it depends on already knowing a person with a boat.
Sail Commons is an attempt to open it up: an open source approach to sailing knowledge, built for young people who want to get genuinely good at this and who don't have a family mooring or a club membership to start from.
What open source means here
The same thing it means in software.
The material will be free to read and free to reuse, under an open licence (the exact terms aren't chosen yet), so a sailing school on the other side of the world will be able to take a lesson, translate it, adapt it to their water, and publish it without asking anyone's permission.
When something is wrong, anyone will be able to say so in public and have the record corrected. No membership wall, and no sign-up before you're allowed to read something.
Who this is for
Young people learning to sail, and the people teaching them.
A teenager with a borrowed boat
No mooring, no membership, and plenty of drive to learn this properly.
A club instructor putting a season together
Material you can teach straight from and adapt to your water.
Following what your kid is being taught
Plain explanations, in the order they'll meet them, without the club vocabulary.
Someone in their twenties who crewed once
You loved it, and you want to understand the boat instead of following instructions.
Experienced sailors are welcome here, and their corrections are a large part of how this is meant to work, but they aren't who it's built for.
What I want this to be in a year
A body of sailing material that anyone can teach from, written to be understood the first time, and correctable by anyone who knows better.
- How a boat actually works Why the boat does what it's doing: sail, foil, hull and wind, explained in plain language.
- What the rules mean The right of way as an idea you can hold in your head, before you have to know it by number.
- How to read the water you're on Gusts, shifts, tide and shore effects: what to look for, and what it tells you to do next.
Where it is today
I registered the domain in July 2026 and I'm building this over the following year.
If you teach young sailors, or you learned this way yourself and still remember what was missing, I'd like to hear from you.
Tell me what was missing when you learned.