Never sailed and want to learn

[dr1665]

@midtown - I was you until two days ago.

I wouldn't dream of discounting any of the advice in this thread. To date, I have all of about 12 hours' on a sailboat in total—but I got all that time from a 2-day, ASA basic keelboat (ASA 101) course at the local lake here in Phoenix.

It set me back less than $400 all-in, including $6/day lake access and a couple bloody marys with the skipper around the whiteboard after we parked the boat (a 22ft Capri).

You can read until your eyes bleed. (ASA has a book called "Sailing Made Easy" —*I saw it on the boat, ordered it from the marina parking lot on Amazon. Worth a look, imo.)

You can watch every video there is on YouTube. You can memorize a dozen different points of sail diagrams. Until you've been on the water, with a hand on the tiller, an eye on the fly, and a feel for properly trimmed sails—it might as well all be black magic.

Knowing you're up north—and I haven't seen snow in nearly 20 years down here in the desert—I suspect it might be a bit tricky for you. One thing my ASA captain mentioned was an app called Go Sailing (formerly "Kroocial", too clever). Looks like a neat way to find people going out who might be willing to bring on a rookie crew from time to time. You might give it a try, too.

I went from not knowing a boom vang from a hole in the ground to sailing laps around a small island with the help of my crew (also brand new) and doing figure-eight crew overboard exercises.

I've been a car guy for more than 20 years. For my money, it's hard to beat the feeling of drifting a turbocharged, all-wheel drive sedan around a long bend in a dirt road at 60mph—but feeling a sailboat power up, close hauled at a measly 5 knots is downright magical.

And I might just put my used Sunfish budget toward a few more rentals to get the hang of things.

Fast, right, cheap—you can still get it cheap and right, but you gotta be patient.

#worthit