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Old 01-26-2019, 12:49 PM   #2
DavidM
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City: Litchfield, Ct
Join Date: Aug 2012
Posts: 6,775
Here are two data points (and I am bragging a bit about both ):

Years ago I chartered a 35' sailboat from the Moorings in the BVI. That was my first cruising capable boat. I filled out the experience profile being reasonably honest about it. I had owned and day sailed a Venture 22 centerboard sailboat in the Texas Lakes and Galveston Bay and had owned a few smaller sailboats previously. That was the extent of my cruising experience. Apparently I passed and the charter went off without too many hitches.

A few months later I bought a new Hunter 29.5 and after that followed the boat progression up to a 43' sailboat and now down to my 23' tiny trawler. I started with day sails in Galveston Bay on the Hunter, did some overnights down to Freeport and Port Aransas over the next year and by then considered myself ok competent.

About ten years ago I helped a friend move his new to him CHB 45 from Virginia to Georgia. He had been on a couple of sailboat deliveries as unpaid, unskilled crew so he had maybe a 1,000 miles under his keel but no hands on captain experience and certainly not in a big trawler like the CHB.

We spent a half day practicing docking approaches as well as pulling in to his narrow (for his boat) slip and shoved off the next day. I must admit I helped him out of a few incidents: one an alternator belt failing on the fourth day (but he did have twins) and another when he took a wrong turn off of the ICW for ten minutes until I discovered the error and got us back on course. None of these would have been near disasters assuming he knew to shut the engine down with the failed alternator (and r/w pump) belt and he probably did.

After about a week moving the boat down to Georgia and anchoring 7-8 times and docking a few he was a competent captain and further built his skills over many thousand miles after that cruising from Florida to LI Sound and the Hudson.

So the point of this dissertation is that there are many ways of building cruising skills. I wouldn't necessarily recommend my approach as I would have been safer my first time out with some instruction in cruising issues: anchoring, docking, etc. But if the Hunter were my first cruising boat then spending a half day or day with a captain to develop anchoring, navigation and docking skills would have been enough.

I guess it depends on whether you have time to build skills slowly over time or you were jumping right in to live aboard cruising like my friend did.

David
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