Step 2: Come up with a plan to learn to sail

We are admittedly impulsive. But I like to think we are not blindly impulsive. We're good at research and impulsive or not, try to research our decisions, with more research going into more impactful decisions. This particular change of course (getting On a New Tack?) was going to take a lot of research and a lot of reining in our (or really mainly my) impulsive tendencies.

So, knowing that we liked the thought of living on a sailboat, it's probably time to spend some time on a sailboat and actually learn to sail. We both love a challenge and we are both engineers so figuring our new things, especially thing that involve mechanics, levers and pullers, is second nature.

So, how do we learn to sail?

Fortunately, there are two large Sailing Organizations in the US; the ASA (American Sailing Association) and USSailing. The ASA seems to be more prevalent when it comes to course availability and having sailing certifications from them makes things like chartering and getting insurance a lot easier. We opted to take a "Catamaran +" certification class from Blue Water Sailing School, in Ft. Lauderdale, FL. This course is on a 4 cabin sailing catamaran and when successfully completed, students are awarded:

We chose Blue Water Sailing School because of their reputation and because of their location, which is an easy flight from Raleigh. The Miami Boat Show was coming up in February 2019 at the time and we were able to find a class that would allow us to fly down for Thursday and Friday of the boat show, then start the weeklong class on Saturday. (Ironically, we later found out that BWSS is the school that the Wynn's used to learn to sail.)

We invited our friends Lisa and Jesse from Annapolis to join us for either or both the sailing school and the boat show. Jesse, having sailed most of his life, couldn't justify the time and expense of the course, but there were both up for going to the boat show with us.

At this point, we just had to wait until January (it was around October when we signed up) and continue our research vis-à-vis, watch Gone with the Wynns and read the textbooks shipped to us for preparation for the ASA courses.

-Mike

Comments

Using a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device on a boat as your own personal Cloud.

Living on a self-sufficient boat without giving up The Cloud?! If you are at all like me, you've begun to rely more and more on one or more Cloud Services. Apple iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive and many, many more basically all offer the same solution: "You have digital things that are important to you; you pay us a small amount per month and we'll manage keeping it safe and protect you from hardware failures and data loss." I firmly believe that hosted cloud storage is one of the great conveniences that just about anyone under the age of 70 should be using. The solutions are downright cheap, given how much storage capacity you can get and how much you would pay to get that data back if you lost it. I have used all of the above and my provider of choice is Google Drive, though we also use Apple iCloud to automatically backup our iDevices, as least for now. Life 2.0 We will still have a cloud storage provider when we set sail, but what are we going ...

Victron Isolation Transformer - How to lower the output voltage

Re-configuring a Victron Energy isolation transformer This is a companion article to a YouTube video covering the same topic. What are they and why do I need one? Victron Energy isolation transformers are often used on boats that connect to shore power in order to provide a means of providing isolation between the shore power and the AC power that exists on the boat. The transformer sits in between those two worlds and isolates that two power supplies through magnetic flux and an air-gap. The reason this is needed on a marine vessel is because without it, small leakage currents can flow between the earth ground for shore power and the "earth ground" connection on the boat, which is usually connected to water through a propeller shaft, out-drive, sail-drive or sacrificial zincs. That creates a loop and that small leakage current greatly accelerates any galvanic corrosion that naturally happens. Current flows through the water because of the salt content, or even in fresh-wat...

Common Questions from other Vision Owners

Update: 7 Oct 2024 Before we get to the blog article, which I wrote in March of 2023, I want to let you know that I just found out about Google's NotebookLM, which is an AI powered tool that allows you to create a Podcast style audio piece based off of whatever input you provide, in this case, the following article. Here is a link to the "podcast" it created . Honestly, I'm blown away! Original Article follows... Introduction I received a list of questions from Steve and Lisa Heidenthal (Hull #13, Sla'inte) about how we set up our boat, where we purchased things in SA and instead of just answering them for Steve, I thought I might as well make a blog article to also help others. All of these answers will be from the following perspective: sailing the boat over from SA to where-ever having the boat built with strictly 230V/50Hz power If the boat is being shipped, I wouldn't suggest buying much in SA, as you will have an easier time finding more options (and us...

On A New Tack

Search This Blog