My wife and I had talked about sailing away for a few years, but there was always just one more thing standing in our way. There was some unexpected bill, and we couldn't afford to travel, and one excuse after another.
Finally, we decided it was time to stop waiting for everything to be perfect and to take some concrete steps. And the first step was to get some experience on a bigger boat. And to do that, we needed some paper saying we knew what we were doing.
So in early 2015, we signed up for a bunch of sailing classes through ASA. The first two would be here in the Twin Cities, on Lake Minnetonka. We just completed that one last week. As expected, using the wind to move around was the easy part. Managing a boat and all the gear, along with docking and anchoring, was where we got the most out of the class. And having gone through that, I'm very glad we bothered to take a class before we considered getting a boat. There are dozens of ways to make mistakes, and I'd rather make them when someone experienced is preventing real harm from them.
Our next class is scheduled for early August, and is a two-day class on Lake Superior. Then I will be taking the navigation class in October, and in December we are taking the catamaran class in Florida, and staying on the boat for 5 days.
Does the paper matter? It might, eventually, if we want to charter a few boats before we buy one for ourselves. But mostly, it matters to me, to know that I've done what I can to keep my family safe.
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