Blue Water Sailing Magazine is an American sailing publication, in print and online at bwsailing.com, aimed at offshore cruising sailors and people who own and run their own boats. It started in 1996, founded by George and Rosa Day, a couple who circumnavigated aboard a Mason 43 ketch before turning that experience into a magazine. The editorial does not read like it was assembled by people who have only seen the water from a dock. Blue Water Sailing Magazine is sold in 67 countries, which tells you the audience is genuinely international rather than confined to one coast.
Magazine content and organization
The bwsailing.com site is organised around the kinds of questions a cruising sailor actually has, and the sections track real interests instead of filler categories. Boat Reviews carries in-depth analyses of sailboats and dinghies, going past spec sheets into how a hull behaves and who a particular design suits. Cruising News covers what is happening in the offshore world.
Boat reviews and cruising news
Seamanship deals with the practical craft of handling a boat: docking, boat handling, and safety, the material that keeps people coming back once the new-boat fantasy wears off. There is also a Chartering section for sailing vacations and charter planning, an Electronics section on navigation systems and marine technology, and dedicated Boat Show Coverage with previews and reports from the floor. The Boat Reviews archive in particular goes back years, so a buyer researching a used model can often find a contemporary write-up from the period when that boat was new.
Seamanship, chartering, electronics
Beyond the articles, the site runs webinars and a newsletter, publishes contribution guidelines for would-be authors, and lays out advertising options for marine brands. Blue Water Sailing Magazine sits within a small family of titles from Daylight Publishing, with two sister publications, Cruising Compass and Multihulls Today, the latter aimed squarely at the catamaran and trimaran crowd that a single-hull-focused magazine might otherwise miss. The webinars and author guidelines suggest a title that wants to stay connected to its readership rather than just broadcast at it. It is an editorially serious operation, not one dressed up with stock photography and recycled content.
Webinars, newsletters, sister publications
Credibility is where it is worth being straight with anyone considering a paid subscription. The standing of Blue Water Sailing Magazine as an editorial product is well established: MagazineCafeStore, which sells it, describes it as a leading title for cruisers and offshore sailors, and Wikipedia carries a stub article that confirms the founding year, the founders, and the international distribution. Those are independent corroborations of what the site claims about itself, and they line up cleanly.
Editorial credibility and subscription experience
The wrinkle is on fulfillment, and it has nothing to do with the writing in Blue Water Sailing Magazine. There is a thread on Cruisers and Sailing Forums describing a poor subscription experience, with issues turning up late or not at all. That is one report, not a pattern, and forum complaints skew toward people who had a problem. Still, it is worth knowing before you pay for a year of print, because a magazine lives or dies on whether it reaches your mailbox. Amazon lists individual back issues with the occasional product star rating, but the review volume is too low to draw any real conclusion. No aggregate ratings turned up on Google, Trustpilot, Yelp or similar platforms, so there is no large body of customer feedback to weigh either way.
How reliable is delivery?
On contact, the site keeps things modest. A Contact Us page exists, but a phone number, email, or postal address are not front and centre on the homepage; you have to click through to find the contact route. For a publisher that is normal practice, and the page is there when you go looking.
Contact information and support
What Blue Water Sailing Magazine does well is depth in a niche that rewards it. Offshore cruising is a small, demanding world where bad information can be expensive or dangerous, and Blue Water Sailing Magazine is staffed by people who have actually crossed oceans, which a general boating site cannot replicate. The seamanship and electronics coverage in particular reads like it is written for sailors who already know the basics and want the next layer. Founders who have sailed a Mason 43 around the world give the editorial a grounding that does not come from press releases, and that pedigree shows up in how the writing treats heavy-weather tactics, anchoring, and gear choices.
Writing for experienced offshore sailors
As a reading source, Blue Water Sailing Magazine is an easy recommendation for cruising sailors and prospective bluewater boat owners who want writing grounded in real passages. The free web content lets you judge the editorial quality before paying anything. If you are weighing the print subscription, browse a few articles, then use the contact page to ask directly about current delivery and back-issue fulfillment, given the one delivery complaint on record.
