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Old 10-18-2011, 08:45 AM   #11
twiisted71
Guru
 
Join Date: Aug 2011
Posts: 577
RE: COMPLETELY NEW AT THIS - Please help me with my education

google "trawler training school"

This will give you a ton of places that offer hands-on courses. Depending on where you live you may have to make a vacation out of it. If you are truly a total newbie PLEASE start with a small boat. You can find small boats that will mimick larger boat's behaviors so that you can become familiar with windage AND tidal influence on your handling. These are not toys, you can easily cause lots of property damage, bodily harm, be "kilt" or even worse! Ranger tugs 21'-25' and Shamrocks with keeled hulls and cabins are an excellent trailerable starter boat. Inboard, single screw, cabin cruisers can be had "relatively" cheaply these days. After a couple of years you should have been caught in bad weather, tight quarters docking, anchoring etc to have gotten a realistic albeit small dose of trawler ownership. Then if you have taken good care of the trainer model and used the opportunity to maintain and update it you should be able to sell it and not lose your shirt, esp. if you take into acct. the education it afforded you.
When I first moved to Cape Coral I went to the local fuel dock with my 26' Shamrock Hardtop and watched a brand new (as of about 30 minutes before) upper 20 something foot cabin cruiser proceed to crunch the bow of his boat not once but three times into a concrete dock! He had managed to shove the bow eye through the hull! I couldn't believe it, then he started heading toward the fuel dock yelling to the fuel guy that he had just bought the boat and hadn't figured out how to "park" it yet! I over paid by $10 and threw the dock lines off and got out of the way in time to watch Mario Andretti bump into the dock for what should have been a pretty nice side to docking and then shove the throttle forward tear off one of the dock's bumpers and put a gouge down the back half of his boat before the dock hand got him to just turn it off and pull him in with ropes.
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