No. You can't learn to sail on Cruisers Forum.
However, you can learn to be a better, safer, sailor here, or from
books or blogs or yacking or other such malarkey.
Knowledge is crucial, and it is so easy to forget how much of it you have on a topic. There are a thousand technical skills and volumes of technical knowledge that the seasoned cruiser knows, and the
dinghy sailor does not.
The topics are seemingly endless.
There is much to be learnt about handling heavy
weather before you reach 50 knots.
There is much to be learnt about avoiding heavy
weather, gaining & interpreting weather data, cloud gazing, barometer reading, log book entering,
anchor selection, aids to
navigation, how to avoid ticking off neighbors in an anchorage, how to find a decent anchorage, when to reef (not how), why to reef, the side effects of reefing,
radar interpretation,
engine maintenance, proper
engine use, which engine to use to maximise upwind VMG on a cat, how to spell in proper
english, what are all those acronyms telling me (SOG, COG, VMG, DPT, MOB), what is apparant
wind vs true
wind, what do those bits of wools on the
sails tell you, what does the
skipper want we he asks me to grab a sheet, or a sock, or a traveler, or a line, who is cunningham and whats a
furler, why is the bow at the
head of the boat, and the
head (where i bow) in the belly
, how do you deploy a
drogue, or a
sea anchor, how do you read a chart, what do all the numbers mean, what about the
funny shapes, what is dead reckoning and can it be revived with an AED, how do you make a mayday call, when do you make a mayday call, whats a panpanpan and why dont you just say pan, what's a securitie and why do we say it in french, how do you navigate by looking at stars, what is a reciprocal heading, how do boats avoid hitting each other, who gives way to who and when, what's with the coloured lights, how do you know if thats a ship constrained by
draft or a boat at
anchor, whats with the black
funny flags and shapes that boats show, whats usually expected when I cross a border, is the
fuel ok to drink in the islands, how do I best stock my boat with
safety rum, what about ice, how is it best served, ... I'll stop to take a breath and let the wall of text rest. It was intentionally splattered and if you read it all, you're more patient than I.
edit: Here's the point... almost all of that ^^^ can be learnt without setting foot on a boat. Limited experience should be supplemented with education and wise counsel. You could have lived on your boat for 30 years and the teenager up the road may have better seamanship.
Formal education has its place and I would rather have a bay full of trained and socially educated skippers who gained half their knowledge from the
internet, than a bay full of skippers who had just bought a boat and were out there 'giving it a go'.
Practice does NOT make perfect.
Practicing bad habits just reinforces bad behavior.
Perfect practice makes perfect, and perfect practice requires both hands on
The whole notion that you should just go out and there and do it is both stupid and dangerous!
This thread will likely go the same way as this one:
http://www.cruisersforum.com/forums/...ss-138615.html
...I'm not sure what you're
fishing for, but I took your bait this time anyway.
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