30 tips for crossing the Atlantic: 6 – 10
This is the second part of a five part article. For Part 1… Mon, 23 Nov 2009 Yachting World Insider’s suggestions to make the big adventure go smoothly. Collated by … Continue Reading
Category: Training
Ocean Sailing Rules: The Salty Dawg Incident of 2013
Here’s a fairly long but very informative article, via the Sailfeed site, about the trouble some people got in while participating on the 2013 Caribbean 1500 rally. Interesting perspective for … Continue Reading
Ready to Set Sail
This week I finished the Sail course through CPS. I spent a lot of time reading through the material (yes, much longer than John took), so I felt pretty confident … Continue Reading
Symbols and Abbreviations Used on Admiralty Paper Charts
Here was a semi-costly lesson that hopefully will help you avoid the same mistake. When we went on our Day Skipper Course, we weren’t smart enough to take anything with … Continue Reading
30 tips for crossing the Atlantic: 1 – 5
In looking for checklists and how to prepare for sailing, we came across this series of articles from Yachting World. While we no Atlantic Crossing in our future, the planning equally … Continue Reading
RYA Membership Package
Our Royal Yachting Association (RYA) membership pack arrived the other day. We joined with a Family Membership, which is for two adults and any number of children under the age of 18 … Continue Reading
Points Of Sail
During our day Day Skipper Course in Malta, Christa was having trouble remember her points of sail. I thought of this when I came across a useful/funny little picture explaining them quite … Continue Reading
Crossing the Atlantic on a Catamaran with the ARC
We are big catamaran fans, so we really liked this article from Sail Magazine Crossing the Atlantic on a Catamaran with the ARC By Meredith Laitos When cruising sailors talk … Continue Reading
Knots
We have a couple books on knots listed on our site, and occasionally we pull out a couple lengths of line to practice, but as we don’t yet own our … Continue Reading
Checklists
Coming from an aviation background, John was used to having a checklist for just about everything. He was interested in what he could find out there in a similar vein for sailing. … Continue Reading
Day Skipper Course in Malta – Part 2
In Part 1, we wrote about what we thought of the boat we spent the week on, and what we think we want in any future boat, either chartering or buying. The … Continue Reading
Day Skipper Course in Malta – Part 1
We just got back from our great trip to Malta. We had reserved a week-long live aboard course with Sailing School Malta. We found the school by checking the directory … Continue Reading
Malta Sailing
John & I just got back from a sailing week in Malta where we qualified to be “Day Skippers” of a sailboat – complete with official ID cards. We lived … Continue Reading
Another Course Out Of The Way
I got one more course out of the way, The Maritime Radio Course, again through the Canadian Power and Sail Squadrons (CPS). As with most CPS courses you can complete The Maritime … Continue Reading
No Boys on This Boat
Here’s an interesting article that we received via the Sail Magazine newletter that shows up periodically in our inbox: http://www.sailmagazine.com/cruising-news/no-boys-boat Sometimes information specifically for women can be in short supply … Continue Reading
PCOC
As John would say, I finally got my Pleasure Craft Operating Course (PCOC) completed online through the CPS website. While it’s not required over here in Italy, it is required to … Continue Reading
Sailing Vacation
All the planning and reading we have been doing is obviously necessary, but at some point we actually will need to spend some real time on a boat…together. While we feel … Continue Reading
More Courses – More Smarts
I now have two more courses out of the way. They were both done as self study through the National Canada Power and Sail Squadrons office. The first one … Continue Reading
Gulf Of Naples Sail
This sail was a minor event in the grand scheme of things, but it was the first time we were sailing together, and it just happens to be in one of the … Continue Reading
Officially Allowed to Operate a Boat
While we have both been around boats our whole lives, neither one of us has ever obtained any official licences or certifications for operating a vessels on the water. Since … Continue Reading