User blog comment:Nults McKagan/A Critique of POTCO MC/@comment-4958180-20150502212514/@comment-25164591-20150503024049

The best "ship," mod is by all means Archimedes' Ships, but the mod itself is incredibly buggy and has been known to cause crashes in multiplayer servers. The mod also allows players to attach baloons to their ship to literally make it fly. You don't any of that in a pirate themed server.

There is no stable way, to my knowledge, to effectively simulate sailing in a non-modded server.