Fifty Places to Sail Before You Die

Most sailing bucket lists are built from glossy magazine spreads and aspirational Pinterest grids — beautiful, vague, and almost entirely useless when you're trying to decide where to actually point a boat. Fifty Places to Sail Before You Die by Chris Santella, published by Abrams, takes a different approach entirely. Santella went straight to the people who know these waters by feel: championship racers, professional adventurers, the kind of sailors who've rounded headlands most of us have only seen on maps. The result is a sailing destinations guide built on genuine firsthand authority, not editorial distance.

Fifty locations. Fifty sets of insider coordinates, each one vouched for by someone who earned the opinion. For the sailor who's moved past daydreaming and wants a real framework for the next passage — or the serious trip that's been on the horizon for years — this is the book that makes the shortlist concrete.

• Covers 50 sailing destinations across the globe, personally recommended by elite racers and professional adventurers
• Author Chris Santella conducts firsthand interviews, capturing the specific details and context that standard travel references omit
• Published by Abrams, whose production standards mean photography and layout that hold up to serious reading, not just shelf display
• Recommendations span a wide geographic range — useful for planning passages across different oceans, climates, and sailing conditions
• Each destination entry is grounded in the contributor's actual sailing experience, offering practical texture alongside visual appeal
• Written for adult sailors and committed travel enthusiasts — not an introductory primer, but a reference with real depth
• Functions equally well as a personal planning resource or a considered gift for the sailor who already owns the charts

Books last as long as they're handled well. Keep this Abrams sailing guide away from prolonged humidity — a boat's cabin being the obvious irony here — and store it upright on a shelf where the spine isn't under pressure from neighboring volumes. A light dust with a dry cloth keeps the cover looking as considered as the content. For a book this well-produced, a proper slipcover or a designated shelf spot is worth the small effort. The Fifty Places to Sail Before You Die format, where photography and editorial content share equal weight, rewards that kind of care — the pages stay crisp, the images stay true, and the whole thing remains exactly what it was when it arrived.