sailing casita

Shortly after we became interested in sailing we started looking for movies  that were either about sailing or that at least had sailing scenes in them. Having read lots of books about how to sail (and having no boat of our own) we were hungry to see some of the stuff we were reading about in action.

Unfortunately Hollywood doesn’t seem to be very interested in sailing but we did find a few  sailing movies.

Here is a list of films we have watched that are in some way related to sailing:

Fiction:

Dead Calm: A decent suspense move with a little bit of sailing on a very nice boat. The MOB recovery is dumb enough it is funny and the ending is lame but overall not a bad movie.

~~~~~

Open Water 2: Adrift: Very little sailing and I didn’t care for the movie (very lame ending).

~~~~~

Captain Ron: I had never seen this one before and enjoyed in more than I thought I would. It actually has one or two decent sailing scenes and is funny besides.

~~~~~

Visitors: Despite the fact that almost the entire movie takes place on a sailboat there is very little sailing and I didn’t like the movie either.

~~~~~

Master and Commander: I tried watching this shortly after it was released on video (before I became interested in sailing) and, despite the great reviews and cast, it just didn’t hold my interest. I may give it another go someday but it isn’t really about the kind of sailing I’m interested in.

~~~~~

White Squall (fictionalized history): Interesting move with a fair amount of sailing (though not on the kind of sailboat I will probably ever crew on). It seemed generally authentic but there is a scene early in the movie where someone is being teased for having been caught “in the jib sheet” with a girl so either they were making out under a bunch of rope or someone got their terminology wrong 🙂

~~~~~

Nonfiction:

Morning Light: A documentary about a group of young sailors selected by Roy Disney to compete in the TransPac on his boat Morning Light. I was a little disappointed in this one but it was still definitely worth watching.

~~~~~

Deep Water (the 2006 documentary I think there is a fictional move of the same name): This one is about the 1968 solo nonstop round the world sailing race. This is an excellent movie and is my favorite of all the movies listed above (fiction or nonfiction).

~~~~~

For anyone that is interested a very comprehensive list of sailing related movies can be found here.

We also found several short instructional videos to stream on Netflix, these seemed to be mostly produced in the 1980s and weren’t great, but a few of them were worth watching.