Best shoes for sailing and adventure travelling? Here they are!
If you are a sailor, you know that shoes are an important security element for every crew member on board of a sailing boat. Proper deck shoes not only help to avoid painful toe-injuries from contact with very hard and omnipresent deck fittings, but also help to avoid more serious accidents due to a wet and slippery environment on the deck.
I know that classic Crocs flip-flops are for many people the synonym for utmost ugliness, but I genuinely think these Beach Boat Line shoes are actually designed in a very timeless and nice way. I bought my first pair of these Crocs some six or seven years ago, and since then I've been extremely satisfied with them. I still keep and use my first pair, which you can see here below on the pictures, even if I bought two other pairs of the same model since then. I've been using them for all these years to travel across South-East Asian countries for my adventure and scuba-diving trips, as well as for my sailing trips in the Mediterranean, or adventure travelling in Brasil and Dominican Republic.
So why are these shoes so good? Here are the advantages I see:
- Timeless and versatile design: I mostly wear them barefoot with shorts, but you can easily wear them with socks and trousers for a smart-casual dinner or more formal occasions.
- Indestructible: these shoes are made of the typical Crocs plastic material, which is extremely light and soft, but also very solid in terms of abrasiveness or perforation. I typically use these shoes during anchoring, to keep control or break my 10mm anchor chain, while dropping the anchor into the sea, which is quite a heavy-duty exercise.
- Floating: these shoes are extremely light so they float in water, and they make no difference for your luggage weight limits.
- Non marking sole with very efficient anti-slippery rubber pads
- Functionality of a flip-flop, but appearance and good holding of a proper deck shoes. They have side cut-outs to evacuate water , so the water will drain out immediately and the plastic material will dry very quickly.
- Flexible and easy to put on: The leather laces are not easy to tie (use a proper knot!), but you only need to tie them once. The material is so flexible, that it allows you to put them on quickly and without untying them.
- Comfortable and very soft, you can wear them all day long without your feet getting tired
- Cheap and available in man/women versions and in different colour combinations.
The only disadvantage I see is that they are not produced anymore (I hope Crocs will reintroduce them), but you can still find a pair of these shoes (if you are lucky) online or in outlets for 20-40€.