The short cruise, an audition rather than a compromise

There is a habit of talking about short cruises as though they were an apology: a taster, a trial, a smaller helping of the real thing while you make up your mind. This undersells them. A one- or two-night sailing from a British port is not a diminished fortnight; it is a different holiday altogether, built around a single question a fortnight rarely bothers asking, which is what can be done with a weekend if the weekend includes a ship.

The one-night sailing, taken seriously

At the very short end of the scale sits the one-night sailing, a round trip from a port such as Newcastle that puts you to sea, feeds you dinner, gives you a night's sleep with the engines somewhere beneath you, and brings you home the next day. It sounds almost too brief to bother with, and that is rather the point: it removes every excuse. No annual leave to book, no long drive to a further-flung port, no real financial commitment. What is left is simply the experience of being at sea, which turns out to be worth having on its own account, independent of any destination at the other end.

The weekend that reaches Europe

A step up from that, a two-night sailing to somewhere like Bruges turns the ship into the transport rather than the destination. You board on a Friday evening, wake up docked or close to it, spend a day in a city built almost entirely around chocolate, lace and canals, and are back at your own front door by Sunday night, having covered more ground than a long weekend by budget airline usually manages once the transfers are added up. The appeal here has less to do with cruising as an idea and more to do with efficiency: the ship does the travelling for you overnight, so the waking hours are spent somewhere else entirely.

Amsterdam works on the same principle from London Tilbury, three nights that deliver a proper weekend in one of Europe's more walkable capitals without a single queue at an airport gate. The canals, the density of museums within a short walk of each other, and a city built to be explored on foot or bicycle rather than by coach, all suit a short, self-contained break better than they suit a stop bolted onto a longer itinerary.

What a short sailing actually tests

The genuine use of a short cruise, beyond its own merits as a weekend away, is as an honest trial of the things a longer cruise depends on: whether you sleep well with a ship's gentle motion, whether the set mealtimes suit you, whether a cabin without a window feels snug or claustrophobic by the second night. Two nights will not answer every question a fortnight would raise, but it answers the expensive ones, at a fraction of the cost of finding out the hard way on a longer booking.

What to pack, and what to skip

Short sailings ask less of you than longer ones, and it is worth travelling accordingly. One smart outfit for dinner, comfortable shoes for cobbled European streets, and a coat that can cope with a colder deck than the weather ashore suggests are usually enough; there is little sense in packing for a fortnight's worth of contingencies over a weekend. The other thing worth doing in advance is checking exactly which port you return to. Some short sailings are round trips that put you back where you started; others, like the taster routes along the British coast, finish somewhere else entirely, which is a different kind of adventure but one worth planning a train ticket around.

Choosing your short cruise

If what you want is simply to have been to sea, without much fuss, the one-night sailing does that job with nothing left over.

If you want a weekend city break with the journey included in the price of admission, a two- or three-night hop to Bruges or Amsterdam delivers considerably more than the nights on board suggest. Either way, the short cruise deserves to be booked on its own merits, not treated as the diet version of something longer.