pros:
extremely detailed
everything seems right to me (i have not operated a sail boat in real life so I'm probably not the best judge for realism)
very relaxing
i have a better understanding of how sailboats work

cons
would love to see a real world map akin to msfs. would be awesome to just set sail across the Atlantic
wouldn't mind more boats
i cant stop looking at cheap craigslist sail boats


tldr
it floats my boat

eSail + eSail Pro: ~$47
Boat insurance deductable: $3500

The choice is yours.

its not a game, although it does have some competitive activities. Its a training platform for someone who is getting into sailing. It is simple but interactive enough to allow for basic handling experiance and educational purpose. Too bad it does not allow for more options like selecting type of boat, or different maps, including an abilty for a long term passages.

TL;DR If you want to learn, save your money for sailing lessons in real life. If you want a game, almost every other simulation genre title is better than this.

THE BUGS
- Strange random bugs in the tutorials.
- Mouse becomes frozen can't click things.
- Boat becomes frozen and won't move.
- Time/simulation becomes frozen.
- I can get it to move briefly between pauses by rapidly pausing/unpausing
- but it still glitches everything to be unusable requiring a hard restart

TIME, WEATHER AND PERFORMANCE
- I've never had remotely this level of terrible performance problems in a product with 1990s era graphics and nothing to do.
- Frequent jarring stutters that chop/cut between stuff (what stuff exactly I'm not sure but I think probably environment changes like wave height) feels as though my boat has been picked up, paused, and then released in the air a few feet above the water, mildly annoying at first, really annoying when you start to see how frequent it is.
- No ability to set the weather yourself, can't set the windspeed, can't set the wind direction, can't set the time, can't set the wave height, can't set sun/rain/clouds, can't set temperature, nothing. Creative mode has some of this, but is literally empty and also sucks, not interesting outside of some limited experimental testing.
- Time and weather are tightly coupled. Speeding up time speeds up how fast the weather changes - this is bad design. I should be able to set my day night cycle without affecting how fast the weather changes and vice versa.
- If you want different weather, your only option is to speed up time and wait and hope for what you want, and then slow time to a crawl once you get what you want. This is cumbersome and annoying. It's mystifying to me how a simulator would miss so badly something so important, and so standard in other sims.
- Time and weather coupling would be less of a problem if simply the act of the radio man telling you the weather didn't hang the game for so long I'd think it was frozen/crashed, and multiple times in rapid succession - it hangs for each of the several messages he sends in each report.
- This would also be less of a problem if, on e.g. a 20 minute day cycle length to add some variety to a very bland game, the radio weren't literally constantly giving a weather update every 2 seconds, turning the game into a permanently sticky stuttering unplayable mess.
- I know it's simply the act of the audio playing because when the radio is changed to a different channel such that the weather guy doesn't do his thing, then there's no issue, yet the weather still changes. However, then I can't get the forecast.
- In a real time simulation this is inexcusable, and this hints to me at incompetent programmers. This conclusion would further explain why the UI and autopilot are such garbage

THE AUTOPILOT
- The autopilot is basically worthless in waves larger than one millimeter.
- Useless autopilot means the only activity I can reasonably engage in while on the move is steering, not tacking/gybing etc, which takes a limited and boring "simulator" and makes it even more limiting and more boring.
- The autopilot steering always starts adjusting too hard and releases the correction too late, causing a runaway feedback loop, resulting in never ending swings from left to right up to 50 degrees each, i.e. 100 degrees in total. This is bad. As PID controllers go this one is terrible. It never continues to incrementally adjust as needed when the inputs don't yield results, leading me to believe the autopilot probably doesn't contain a PID controller at all, which might further confirm my suspicion that the devs are incompetent.

THE USER EXPERIENCE
- Mediocre, amateur level, ugly user interface, terrible unintuitive user experience.
- The view control look inversion isn't decoupled, so when you invert the Y axis as would be natural for an airplane or joystick, then you also invert the X axis. This does not[/b] happen on real controls in real life like airplanes and it makes the inversion pointless and useless to anyone who would have wanted to use it. 99% of other games manage to at least get this much right, I'm not sure why the devs couldn't figure this out. There is no way to change/fix this.
- In addition to the axis inversion problem, the camera controls are abysmal, infuriating, a complete joke. There is no way to change/fix this.
- It is often near impossible to click on the winches etc in waves because of view bobbing. There is no way to change/fix this.
- The map similarly suffers from usability problems in waves because it's a 3D model in the cabin you must click on.
- Lacking keybinds for useful important things like the map or radio or winch commands etc.
- The quests are mildly entertaining, but extremely poorly explained how to or the criteria to actually complete them. Even once you figure it out, the garbage camera controls cause frustration and wasted time.

AUDIO AND THE RADIO
- The radio is annoyingly loud even at its lowest setting. The radio cannot be turned all the way down and it cannot be turned off. There is no way to change this.
- Squelch might be realistic but is annoying AF to listen to for hours.
- Can't adjust sounds independently of each other, e.g. can't adjust music or radio sounds independently there is only the one master volume slider.
- The knobs on the radio are obtuse, with no obvious or clear way they work, I believe you're supposed to actually move the mouse in circular motions, but this is cumbersome, non-obvious, and really doesn't actually help much, it's still a terrible user experience and frequently gets stuck.
- The directional audio is wrong by some weird angle like 127 degrees, especially noticeable in a particular location that I won't reveal for spoilers. This is both disorienting and distracting.
- There is no way to communicate with other ships over the radio so I can't get traffic alerts, like with ATC at an airport, or just the local frequency at an untowered airport. I have frequently been either run over by the NPC ships as I was e.g. looking at the map, or I get out of the map and I might as well be sunk.

AESTHETICS AND VARIETY
- My dog frequently vomits more pleasing works of art.
- There is one sad beige ground texture, and there are about three trees across the entire game.
- Art direction wise, everything is butt ugly, I mean like really barf level bad.
- Zero variety at all. You have one boat: your boat. NPCs have one boat: the NPC big cargo ship and the NPC small cargo ship, nothing else. They all look terrible, though the NPC ships are a bit worse.
- You can't even give your boat a different color.
- I'm not asking for silly hats, and it certainly doesn't need cartoonish bling, but at least some more variety than NO VARIETY would be nice, and something that looks better than a carpet stain.
- There is one rather small starter location. The map expands a bit after you complete some quests, giving you basically one more island and one other tiny meaningless sad beige destination.
- This is a small fictional region, there are no real world landmarks, no compelling reason to go see what the world does have, given how small and bland it is. There are no other regions, no other maps, no other locations. You get a map that is mostly empty ocean, which, I suppose is realistic, but in real life there are thousands ports with interesting people, beautiful sights, and things to do.
- There is nothing to do and nothing to see, and what is there looks like something my dog ate last night.

Not a great experience, 3/10, would not recommend.

THE END

If you're looking for a realistic sailing simulator to get introduced to sailing or practice your skills, this is probably the best option you'll find. While it doesn't have the best graphics, it excels in physics and realism. I've been using eSail to practice while studying for my sailing license, and it has really helped me apply many concepts. The tutorials are excellent for beginners, and there are additional challenges for more advanced users. I did encounter some minor issues, but I'm confident the developer is working to improve them. The pros definitely outweigh the cons, and the customer support is great.

eSail has got to be one of the best sailing simulators currently out there. I have a background in racing sailboats and have tried many sailing simulator over the years. eSail does a fantastic job of providing many of the important sail controls and for the most part responds to controls as expected. While there are a few things I would love to see them improve in this simulator, but I can absolutely recommend this simulator for anybody interested in sailing on your computer.

Bought the game to learn how to sail and educate myself more.
Made it to the 3rd training buoy, a race.
Became obsessed with race.
Got the number one spot on the leader board in under an hour of gameplay.
i really enjoyed that. Time to learn how to sail!!!
so far very enjoyable and informative.

** corrected below: eSail won't run on Steam Deck. You can't get past the launcher demanding a non-supported resolution for some reason. What a shame. ** (I've left this here in case another user googles it not running).

Correction : you can force the resolution in the properties section of the eSail entry in your steam library. It's not a perfect aspect ratio unfortunately, with my tv/desk combo but playable now on my external TV. Thanks to the developer for a quick response.

Without a doubt the best sailing simulator out there. I literally learned to sail from this game, and I now sail in real life. Honestly if it wasn't for hte docking simulator, I'd be way more nervous at the wheel. It was so good to spend time in lots of weather conditions learning to dock.

excellent simulation , too bad the lighting is not the one in red dead redemption ;)
The sim quality with red ded graphics would be astoning

and after 44.9 hours I cannot say better,; this sim is excellent