My previous sketch of what a watercrawling system might have was low on specifics. It will be helpful to look at some products that purport to help gamemasters run sea-faring adventures, and see how they fit within that framework. I'll start with Wizards of the Coast's Ghosts of Saltmarsh, because I am somewhat familiar with it due to using it for my current campaign.
The book starts with a very compelling description of the town of Saltmarsh, and the factions acting within it. The bulk of the book is a series of adventures adapted from previous editions, and Saltmarsh features in three of those - The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, Danger at Dunwater, and The Final Enemy - except that the dungeon master was tasked with using the tools in the AD&D 1st ed. Dungeon Master's Guide to generate it, while here it is provided for us. The rest of the adventures are only loosely tied to Saltmarsh, but they are all somewhat related to the sea or shore. The book ends with three appendices: the second and third contain the new monsters and treasures, respectively, featuring in the adapted adventures, while the first, titled "Of Ships and the Sea", is the most relevant to our discussion. It includes rules for treating ships essentially as NPCs, with several example stat blocks, deck diagrams, and descriptions; rules for ship-based combat, that integrate into the usual rules; various things for officers and crewmates to do, in and out of battle; and some ship upgrades.
Then it's off to elements that might feature in building your watercrawl, albeit only if you're on the open sea. First there is a restatement of the unspecialized travel rules from the 5th ed. DMG. While traveling, hazards can be rolled for at random on a uniform table, or arbitrarily chosen, with no explanation of how to design tables for keyed regions. Fogs and storms do appear on the table, and can slow down or pull a ship off course if poorly handled by the officers and crew, which is an interesting phenomenon for a watercrawl. Currents are then introduced, and can be taken advantage of, or fought against, although they are presented as phenomena near shore, and their relations to this shore - to or from, along, what causes them, etc - are not further elaborated. After a few magical variations are added to the mundane hazards, we get to monster encounter tables. Here, again, there is no real sense of how to tailor them to regions of the sea; instead, they are split up by challenge rating. Following this there are some tables for providing detail to ship encounters, and a somewhat more interesting section about islands: you can roll or choose their theme, and each theme allows for a variety of further structure, including characterization of the inhabitants and story hooks for engaging with them. This appendix ends with some specific, mapped out underwater locations that can be engaged with as dungeoncrawls, and related plot hooks leading to them.
This is all sparse enough, but what is really missing is guidance about putting all of this together to form a cohesive sea to crawl in. There is no real discussion of how to draw and scale a chart for sea voyages - the characters of the captain and the quartermaster can draw a map and improve navigation, respectively, but that doesn't help the DM manage the ship's location in the world. There is no sense of keying regions or otherwise taking the variety of sea environments into account. The closest to an existing charted open sea is about half of a 10-league hex of the Azure Sea with some shore and an island singled out, as part of a bigger, mostly terrestrial hex map. You would be hard pressed to flesh out the hook of the Sea Princes - an established pirate group attacking shipments to and from Saltmarsh, which attracted some of the attention from outside interests leading to important political developments - into an adventure charting their waters and rooting them out, unless you decided to make a linear trip with some minor rolls causing challenges, delays, and potential failures along the way.
To conclude: assuming you have learned how to chart out an open sea watercrawl, this book can help you figure out how to plug what you already know into the D&D 5e ruleset, and populate it with some interesting locales and adventures. It can help your players structure their ships and use them in battle, provides you with some issues they might run into, like rat infestations or low crew morale, and gives you tools to flesh out ships they might encounter, and islands they might randomly sail through. Beyond that, you are on your own.
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