Playing Sea Of Thieves solo comes with a lot of massive threats that a regular star-studded crew would shake off. Being solo means you have to steer the ship, prepare the ship for take off and landing, repair and flush out the ship, and defend yourself from enemies all at the same time. And that's only the half of it.
Repairing while sailing is a tough task alone. Especially when you're headed straight for a shoreline and need to choose moving out of the way or not sinking. Parking your ship near some shore isn't as hard as it may seem, though. Anyone can do it alone, it's just extra speedy with crew members helping.
Aim For A Spot To Stop
Know where you want to park before you even get there. The best time to decide is before the indicator that you're in range of an island. When you're in range of an island, the music will change and a border will fill your screen telling you which island it is. Before this happens, you can still see the island clearly. Use the spyglass to spot a dock or just willy-nilly decide if you're going to park straight, sideways, or latter. Doing this saves the trouble of panicking to park too late.
Slowing Down Your Boat
The most common mistake new players will do is not touch the sails when doing most of their activities. The sails help you go fast. If you try parking while going fast, you'll either crash into the beach and get a lot of holes, or end up spinning the ship all the way around so it's facing the direction you didn't want.
To use the sails when parking, you need to raise them when you get to your destination. It's best to start raising them halfway when you get the notification on your screen that the island is close. Raise it, or the multiple you have, halfway as you start to slow down and coast into the island. Once the island is as clear as day, start raising all sails completely, then steer in the direction you want. From here you should be able to come to a floating stop. You'll still be bouncing around since the anchor isn't down, but the ship isn't trying to go anywhere.
Using The Anchor
Another common mistake is lowering the anchor quickly when you're already at the island. This may make your boat spin in a circle if the sails are down and most of the time it's not timed correctly when this happens. Timing the lowering of the anchor correctly means pressing it before you get to the direct spot. During this, you want to already be slowed down and right beside the island, with the dock right beside the top of your ship. You want to quickly lower it before the dock is nearing the middle of your ship.
You can lower the anchor by interacting with the top piece, making an emergency stop that should be timed, but there is another way. You can come to a slow stop using the anchor by pressing the top piece, but then immediately grabbing the handles and slowing it down or stopping it from fully releasing. Once you're where you want to be, you would let go. This makes it so it takes less time to park and is more accurate. You mostly want to do this with other crewmates on board, so that one person can be ready to drop anchor completely as the other steers.
Ship Harpoons
A lot of players who are used to the game by now will use a harpoon method in conjunction with everything else. With the harpoon, you can essentially latch onto docks, rocks, or any large object or ground. Doing this will slowly drag the boat in that direction. It won't be entirely accurate and fast, it's just used as a small push and pull as your boat is coasting. People will grab hold of a dock while coasting very slowly, just to center themselves and park extremely accurately without fail. Once they are where they want to be, they drop anchor.