Sailing Trivia
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98 free Sailing trivia questions with answers — sports quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
45 free Sailing trivia questions with answers. Sailing has its own vocabulary, its own heroes and a racing history stretching back to a schooner beating the Royal Yacht Squadron around the Isle of Wight in 1851. This quiz covers the lot: how sailors name the sides of a boat and why, the difference between a tack and a jibe, sloops versus ketches, what a keel actually does, and how fast a knot really is. Then it heads offshore for the America's Cup and the winged keel that ended a 132-year streak, Joshua Slocum, Robin Knox-Johnston and Ellen MacArthur going round the world alone, the Vendee Globe, the Sydney Hobart and Fastnet disasters, and the clipper era. Easy questions cover port and starboard and Boxing Day starts; the hard ones want the origin of the word spinnaker, the year the Beaufort scale was devised and which yacht set the Golden Globe's only finish. It works for weekend dinghy sailors, armchair Cup watchers and pub quiz teams alike. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the boats, races and sailors involved, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
30 of 98 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What colour is the navigation light on a vessel's starboard side?
Green
Green marks starboard and red marks port, so that two vessels meeting at night can tell which way the other is heading.
Q 02Why was the steering oar on early ships placed on the starboard side?
Most people are right-handed
Most people are right-handed, so a helmsman at the stern held the steering oar on the right; ships then docked on the opposite side, which became the loading or 'port' side.
Q 03What was the older name for the port side of a ship?
Larboard
Larboard probably came from 'ladebord', the loading side; the Royal Navy replaced it with 'port' in 1844 because it sounded too much like starboard when shouted.
Q 04Which manoeuvre turns a boat's bow through the wind so the wind moves to the other side?
Tacking
Tacking turns the bow through the wind; a series of tacks in a zig-zag lets a boat make progress toward a destination directly upwind.
Q 05What is the lowest inside part of a hull, where water collects, called?
Bilge
Bilge water is the seepage and spillage that gathers there until a pump clears it out; bilge is also slang for nonsense.
Q 06A sailboat stalled head to wind, sails flapping and unable to steer, is said to be 'in' what?
Irons
Irons is the word: a boat 'in irons' has stopped inside the no-go zone, where its sails cannot draw, and without headway it cannot be turned in either direction.
Q 07A boat sailing at 90 degrees to the wind is on which point of sail?
Beam reach
Beam reach is named for the beam, the boat's side: the wind arrives square across it at 90 degrees, midway between a close reach and a broad reach.
Q 08The spar that runs along the foot of a mainsail to control its shape is called what?
The boom
The boom takes its name from the Dutch word for a tree or pole; because it can sweep across the boat in an accidental jibe, crews often rig a preventer line to hold it.
Q 09What is the line used to hoist a sail up the mast called?
Halyard
Halyard comes from Middle English 'halier', a rope for hauling; the ending was later reshaped by association with the yard, the spar many halyards hoisted.
Q 10The large balloon-like sail flown when sailing off the wind is thought to be named after which yacht?
Sphinx
Sphinx set such a sail in the Solent in 1865, and one theory is that 'spinnaker' grew from sailors mispronouncing her name; dictionaries call the origin uncertain.
Q 11A sailboat with a single mast, one headsail and one mainsail is called what?
Sloop
Sloop comes from the Dutch 'sloep'; set a second headsail on the same single mast and most sailors would call the boat a cutter instead.
Q 12A two-masted yacht whose shorter mizzen mast is stepped forward of the rudder post is called what?
Ketch
Ketch is the rig with the mizzen ahead of the rudder post; move that mast aft of the post and shrink it, and the boat becomes a yawl.
Q 13The triangular mainsail rig used on most modern yachts takes its name from which island?
Bermuda
Bermuda gave its name to the rig, which is also called the Marconi rig because the tall stayed mast reminded people of early radio masts.
Q 21What informal nickname does the America's Cup trophy go by?
The Auld Mug
The Auld Mug is a bottomless sterling silver ewer made by Garrard & Co in 1848, three years before it was first raced for.
Q 22What design innovation did the 1983 challenger that finally took the America's Cup use?
A winged keel
A winged keel, credited to designer Ben Lexcen, gave Australia II such an edge that the American defenders challenged its legality that summer; the dispute was decided in the Australians' favour.
Q 23Which American skipper lost the Cup in 1983 and won it back in 1987?
Dennis Conner
Dennis Conner lost the Cup with Liberty in 1983 and won it back with Stars & Stripes 87 off Fremantle; the 1992 film Wind was loosely based on the story.
Q 14The word 'catamaran' comes from a word in which language?
Tamil
Tamil kattumaram means 'logs bound together'; the original craft was a raft of lashed logs rather than a twin-hulled boat.
Q 15Which seafaring peoples invented the catamaran and spread across the Indian and Pacific Oceans?
The Austronesians
The Austronesians built the twin-hulled and outrigger canoes whose crab-claw sails carried them from Taiwan as far as Madagascar and Easter Island.
Q 16One knot equals one nautical mile per hour, which is exactly how many kilometres per hour?
1.852
1.852 km/h is exactly one knot because the international nautical mile was fixed at 1,852 metres in 1929; the name comes from the chip log, a knotted line paid out to measure speed.
Q 17A nautical mile was historically defined as one minute of what?
Latitude
Latitude is measured in degrees and minutes of arc along a meridian, and one such minute was the nautical mile; that makes the Earth's polar circumference close to 21,600 nautical miles.
Q 18Francis Beaufort, who devised the wind-force scale in 1805, was a naval officer serving which country?
Britain
Britain's Royal Navy was Beaufort's service; his original 1805 scale described the effect of wind on a frigate's sails rather than wind speeds.
Q 19On which river could early sailors drift downstream and sail back up on the prevailing wind?
The Nile
The Nile flows north while its prevailing wind blows south, so Egyptian boats could ride the current one way and hoist a sail to come back.
Q 20The America's Cup was first raced in 1851 around which island?
Isle of Wight
Isle of Wight was circled in the 1851 race in which the schooner America beat a fleet of Royal Yacht Squadron yachts, and the trophy took her name.
Q 24The 2013 America's Cup was raced in which type of boat?
AC72 foiling wing-sail catamarans
AC72 foiling wing-sail catamarans were the 2013 boats; Oracle Team USA came back from 1-8 down to win 9-8 and keep the Cup in San Francisco.
Q 25Which syndicate won the America's Cup in 2017, then defended it in 2021 and 2024?
Emirates Team New Zealand
Emirates Team New Zealand beat Oracle in 2017, then defended in Auckland in 2021 and Barcelona in 2024, far from the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron's home.
Q 26Who was the first person to sail single-handed around the world?
Joshua Slocum
Joshua Slocum finished the voyage in 1898; his book Sailing Alone Around the World is a travel classic, and he vanished at sea aboard the same boat in 1909.
Q 27What was the rebuilt oyster boat that completed the first solo circumnavigation in the 1890s called?
Spray
Spray, 36 feet long and gaff-rigged, could famously hold a course for long stretches with nobody at the helm.
Q 28Who became the first person to sail solo, non-stop around the world, in 1969?
Robin Knox-Johnston
Robin Knox-Johnston was the only one of nine starters to finish the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, and he gave his prize money to Donald Crowhurst's family.
Q 29Which Golden Globe Race sailor abandoned the race while well placed and sailed on to Tahiti?
Bernard Moitessier
Bernard Moitessier used a slingshot to fire a note onto a passing ship, saying he was carrying on 'because I am happy at sea and perhaps to save my soul'.
Q 30Who made the first solo non-stop circumnavigation westward, against the prevailing winds, in 1971?
Chay Blyth
Chay Blyth sailed British Steel around the world against the prevailing winds in 1971, three years after entering the Golden Globe Race with no sailing experience at all.