Sail Training: Part III Larger Boats

This is the third and final (for now) article in a series about sailing training. If you missed the first two articles you can read them here and here.

In this article I will talk about what to expect in the second class you will take with a U.S. Sailing or ASA affiliated school and where to go from there.

After the Basic Keelboat class, the next sail training class will be called Basic Cruising or something similar. The length of the class is the same as the basic keelboat (three 8 hour days). In my class the ratio of sailing/classroom time tilted a little more towards sailing than in Basic Keelboat. I suspect this had more to do to with the desire of the instructor to go sailing more than anything else, but that was fine with me. I wanted to go sailing too.

The content of this course is very similar to the Basic Keelboat class. The same sailing theory, navigation, anchoring, etc. material is covered again. The main difference is that these skills are practiced on a larger (30-40 ft) boat.

This was both good and bad. I did not find the classroom sessions or the text very useful. I learned all this stuff in Basic Keelboat. I had also been studying the very excellent book ..... by Steven Colgate. I suppose if you had not thought about the material between classes, covering this material again would have been a nice refresher. I thought it was redundant. Read the book stuff on your own. Get a good quality book on basic sailing theory, like the Colgate and a good marine reference book like the Chapman's guide for navigation, rules of the road etc.

Hands on sailing practice is what this class is about. Practicing the same sailing and boat handling skills on the larger boats is a lot of fun and very instructive. All the same principles applied, but the forces were greatly magnified in the larger boat. You will learn to rely on your knowledge and experience more than muscle power to handle the larger boats.

In one of my classes I was trying to haul the anchor up by hand on a 35 foot boat. The boat had a winch, but it was not working properly, so hand over hand it had to be. This is where I found out that the anchor on a 34 foot boat is a lot heavier than on a 25 foot boat. Any bigger and we'd have been sunk without the winch.

During this same class, the wind picked up significantly during the day. That was the first time I had been out in decent wind. The forces applied to the sails and rigging was a real eye opener. That was the day when I realized that I really liked sailing and that you really want to get proper training. When wind and seas are calm, anybody can sail. When conditions "freshen up", things get serious in a hurry. As it was, during this day we happened to blow out the jib (the sail on the front of the boat). A couple of us had to go up on the bow and pull the sail down while we were bouncing around. It was a lot of fun.

Docking is also much different in a larger boat. Sailboats really don't handle that well for docking. They don't have strong engines and tend to keep going forward once they get moving because of the heavy lead keel. This can make docking tricky. We spent an entire morning doing nothing but docking practice. This was very useful and probably worth the price of the class alone.

So what is the main benefit you will you get from this class? Forget about the sailing theory, navigation and other things that you can read in a book. The main advantage to be gained from this class is the practical experience you will get sailing a larger cruising type sailboat. Before I took this class, I would see people leaving the marina on larger (30+ ft) sailboats and think that it looked very intimidating. After practicing in a safe and controlled environment in the Basic Cruising class, I feel pretty confident doing this on my own.

Where to go next?

Both U.S. Sailing and the ASA have further courses you can take. I haven't taken any other sailing classes, so I can't comment on any of them. I would suggest at this point to just go sailing a lot and practice the skills you learned in the first two classes. I've been doing this for a while now and I still learn something new every time I go out.

The next class I take will probably be one of the combination training/sailing vacation trips that I mentioned in the last article. That just looks like a lot of fun.

Even if you don't plan on one of these adventure vacation trips, you want to think about training options outside your local area. If you are serious about sailing, it will be instructive to try sailing in other geographic areas. This is also an opportunity to check out some of the top-ranked sailing schools in the country. I have no affiliation with any of the schools below, but I've noticed the following schools seem to pop up a lot in "Best Sailing School" lists:

http://www.offshore-sailing.com
Steve Colgate's sailing school. There are several campuses on the East Coast.

http://www.bwss.com
Blue Water Sailing School is in Florida and it looks like they do some trips to Bermuda every year.

http://www.jworld-sailing.com
http://www.jworldsf.com
http://www.sailjworld.com
JWorld is affiliated with racer/cruiser boat builder JBoat. In San Diego, San Francisco and Annapolis. They seem to win awards frequently.