Outdoors, Navigation & Survival
Skills for moving on water.
9 topics · 9 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
A Thousand Miles in the Rob Roy Canoe
John MacGregor · 1866
A single small paddled-and-sailed canoe can travel where neither a rowing boat nor a yacht can go, and the book that turned that claim into the…
+2 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Weather Book: A Manual of Practical Meteorology
Robert FitzRoy · 1863
A falling barometer read correctly gives a sailor real warning of a coming storm, from the officer who coined the word 'forecast' and set up…
+2 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Modern Seamanship
Austin M. Knight · 1901
Seamanship under steam is still governed by the same physics of wind, sea and ship-handling that governed sail, and systematised the discipline as US…
+2 more at this level
9 works
John MacGregor
A single small paddled-and-sailed canoe can travel where neither a rowing boat nor a yacht can go, and the book that turned that claim into the recreational sport of canoeing across Europe and North America.
about 5.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Joshua Slocum
A small, simply-rigged boat and a self-reliant crew of one are sufficient to circumnavigate the globe, told as the first-person account of the first person to do it.
about 4.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Annette Kellermann
Distance and rough-water swimming are teachable through the same drilled fundamentals as pool strokes, written by a professional ocean swimmer who argues that endurance in open water is technique and breath control rather than raw strength.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Robert FitzRoy
A falling barometer read correctly gives a sailor real warning of a coming storm, from the officer who coined the word 'forecast' and set up Britain's first storm-warning network.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Charles F. Chapman
The amateur boatman needs seamanship, piloting and boat handling taught together as one practical skill rather than as separate technical subjects, a structure later editions kept for over a century.
link checked 17 Sept 2026United States Coast Guard
The Coast Guard's official training manual for small-boat crews, covering boat handling, towing, person-in-the-water recovery, and rescue and firefighting operations under real sea conditions.
292 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Austin M. Knight
Seamanship under steam is still governed by the same physics of wind, sea and ship-handling that governed sail, and systematised the discipline as US naval officers were taught it for the next eighty years.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Paul Schureman
Tides at any port can be predicted years ahead by decomposing observed water levels into a fixed set of harmonic constituents, and set out the method the US Coast and Geodetic Survey used to compute its tide tables for decades.
link checked 17 Sept 2026United States Navy
Revision 7 of the Navy's diving doctrine: safe diving depends on matching the physiological limits of air, mixed-gas and closed-circuit diving to the specific mission, and sets the decompression and gas-management procedures the rest of the diving world still references, updated continuously since the first US Navy diving manual of 1916.
link checked 17 Sept 2026