Getting Qualified

From contented middle class landlubbers with 3 kids, a mortgage and a dog to live-aboard sailors is a huge transition which we have made over more than 10 years. And it hasn't been easy!
Before we could really commit, we had to be sure that we both really did like sailing and just as important that we liked doing it together. We decided the best way was to do some chartering in the Med.
To be allowed to skipper a charter a yacht, you need to have a qualification and I decided to go for RYA day skipper (actually L decided and presented me with a booking on a course). Being a fairly arrogant sort of bloke with a lot of confidence in my maths and engineering skills, I bought the RYA course book, took one look at it, and decided I could figure it out and didn't need to do the practical course! So off I went to a weeks live-aboard course with 5 other students and a skipper.
The others were all less than 25 with years of experience and mostly there to get a ticket to sail daddies boat. I was fat and fifty and while I had done plenty of sailing in inland waterways, had never been on board a sailing boat on the sea. On top of that, I knew how to navigate theoretically but had never actually done it. The skipper told us he wasn't there to teach us, just to polish and assess.

I'm sure you can imagine, it was not the best matched crew that has ever sailed the Solent, in fact, the week was among the most stressfull of my life. It probably wasn't the easiest for the rest of them either. Among other adventures, I mis-read the chart and nearly ran us aground under full sail onto Beaulieu spit!
To cut a long story short, after a very stressful week, a huge amount of learning - a lot of it the hard way, The skipper passed me - but emphasised that it was an only just pass. I needed a lot more experience before I could consider myself safe and confident.

Since then I have done the yachmaster theory and L has done dayskipper theory. I thoroughly recommend anyone planning to become a sailor to do things the other way round, but to do them. While experience and reading since then has taught us even more, the grounding that the courses gave us saved our bacon on many occasions.