Things I’ve learnt from seven months of sailing: zero to sailing
Eight months ago I’d never been sailing. I had been on a sailing boat once (on a holiday in Greece, where I mainly read my book and waited for the swimming opportunities), but I’d never pulled a rope, studied a chart or opened a seacock.
I really didn’t think we’d get a boat this quickly. But a bit of luck, combined with us throwing caution to the wind (ha!) meant on the day of our wedding we had our offer accepted on a 30 foot sailing yacht. For our honeymoon we went on a sailing course and ended up completing the sale on the boat a month after getting married.
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The right size boat?
When choosing Lady Jo as mine and Claire’s first boat last summer, we weren’t sure exactly what we wanted, but one particular thing we were unsure of was size – how big did we need her to be so that she could work well for us and what were the compromises that came along with going for a boat of a certain size?
We knew there were couple of things that we didn’t need her to be which helped –
- We had no desire to race our boat, so absolute performance, a size, layout and/or features suited to this didn’t come into our decision.
- We weren’t going to cross oceans in this, our first boat together – this boat was going to help us learn about sailing and explore the South Devon coast, maybe a little beyond, but no Atlantic crossings for us (just yet).
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Bon voyage!
Hello, thanks for stopping by this new blog all about sailing our 30 foot boat from Torquay and making tea, lunch, dinner – just about anything – in our very teeny kitchen abroad.
I’m Claire, I just started sailing. A year ago I’d never pulled a rope, put out the fenders, or made an entry into a log book. That changed when I meet Ollie. He’s very into sailing boats. So much so, that for our honeymoon we somehow ended up going on a week’s sailing course, with me getting Competent Crew and he Day Skipper.
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