Sailing

After you get tired of being a land lubber, it's time to sail the high seas! You will want at least 100-200 coins saved up to buy your first ship. There are more expensive ships, but you need to work on your sailing skill before you can captain these beauties.

Buying your ship
Find the ship merchant in Port Royale, he's on the beach right in front of the bow of a ship buried in the sand. He's at the opposite end of the beach from where the jail and guards live. Buy one of the first three ships from him and this step is complete.

Assemble your crew
While you can be the captain of a ship by yourself, it's going to be much more fun and effective if you have a crew to set sail with you! Invite others to join your crew! Be sure to tell them you already own a ship and you'll help them get your sea legs. If they haven't read this, they will be lost without your guidance on the high seas.

Deploy and board
First, you'll need to be out in the water. Have your crew follow you, either just swim out from the beach, or run out the docks and hop in the water, just make sure you're out deep enough before deploying your ship. Bring up the menu bar and click the ship icon. There will be a page where you can view each of your ships, if you own more than one. When you see the ship you want to sail, click the deploy button. The ship will magically appear in the water next to you. Press Control to board your ship, you might have to swim a bit closer to the ship for this to work. Your pirate should swing up a handy rope and plop down on the deck. Help the others in your crew get on board before you set sail, you don't want to leave a man behind!

Assign positions and set sail
As the captain, it's your job to tell these scallywags what to do! Tell each crew member which cannon to man. Your strategy should either be to have everyone manning the guns on one side and leaving the other empty, or spread them out to both sides. As the captain, you'll be sailing her, so you'll need to keep in mind how many cannons you have manned on each side when attempting to sink a ship! Make your way up to the wheel on the poop deck. Everyone presses Control to take command of a cannon or wheel. Now you're sailing!!!

Sail for plunder!
You're going to sail around the seas looking for Navy ships to sink. Use the W, A, S, D keys to sail your ship until you spot one, either on the screen or one your compass. Approach the enemy ship keeping in mind where your cannons are firing from. Do you want to broadside her, or "cross the T" ? you decide! Make sure you keep your crew informed what the target is, you don't want everyone always shooting everything or you might end up fighting more ships at once than you can handle!

Firing your cannons
If you are manning a cannon, it's your job to sink those pesky Navy ships! Aim your cannon and fire away! After three shots, you'll have to reload. As you sink more and more, you'll gain cannon skill and get to upgrade your shots, with either shooting faster or doing more damage. Like man to man combat, you can use the right mouse button to bring up special shots, however there is no chaining of attacks. One of the special moves is the grappling hook. This is used when very close to an enemy vessel for when you want to entangle the ships for some boarding action. You shouldn't just use these unless your captain tells you to "prepare to board me Hearties!" There is some special ammo you can buy in port for cannons, but I haven't gotten this to work yet, so I can't say how to activate it.

Firing broadsides
As the captain while steering the ship, you can press the right mouse button to bring up a special menu to fire your broadsides. This means all cannons on either the left or right side of your ship will fire. These will fire whether you have a crew member manning those cannons or not. The cannons will all fire straight out, so its quite tricky to aim and hit another ship unless you are very close. It takes a relatively long time for your cannons to reload when used in this manner. The good news is that your left and right sides are on separate cooldowns, so you can fire, turn your ship, and fire again. The bad news is this makes for boring and unrealistic ship combat as you tend to just sit in one spot and turn back and forth unloading over and over. It takes a long time to sink a ship this way, but it seems to be the only way to increase your sailing skill.

Sailing Skillups
As you get more points in sailing, you can spend them on upgrading your boardside shots to do 5% more damage. The first new skill you will learn gives you a short but powerful boost to speed!

Solo sailing
Can't find any crew? Well you can actually do everything yourself, it's just not going to be as fun or effective. Pressing ESC while at the wheel of your ship will disengage you from the wheel and then you can run over to a cannon to shoot. Pressing ESC at the cannon will disengage you from that so you can go back to sailing. However, there is a 'bug' where sometimes pressing ESC will just close down the game, so that's really a pain.

Plunder
Each time you sink a ship you can get one or more pieces of plunder. The higher level of the enemy ship, the more plunder it can potentially you. Different ships you are sailing can hold different amounts of plunder, when you get full you should head back to a port to sell and divide the plunder. (Or if the game is really lagging/crashing, you might want to head back more often!)  Sail back close to the beach at a port and a Docking icon will appear in the lower right corner. Press this button and you will pop off your ship. The game will tally up all the killing and plundering you did and divy the treasure up amongst the crew, after all, that's why we all became pirates!!! Arrrrr!!!

Ship Combat Tips
Right now the enemy ships are pretty buggy and even if they are shooting back at you, they miss practically every time. So for fastest leveling, just go after the biggest ships you can find. They take longer to sink, but you get tons more reputation for it. Also, you get a share of each ship you damaged, so if you're on a high population server, you can do pretty well just sailing around and taking pot shots at every single ship you see. Also, since the game crashes so often right now, I recommend running back to shore and anchoring every time you get a piece of plunder. It's very quick to do once you get the hang of it, and it sure beats losing your hard earned plunder when the game crashes! You can sell it anywhere you can drop anchor, however, you can't actually repair your ship unless you anchor close to the docks in Port Royale.