Tuesday18

Wait, I Didn’t Talk About The Ignorance

Yesterday I said I needed money, agreement from the wife, and knowledge before we could go cruising, but only talked about the financial end of things.

Besides working my tail off to create residual income, the other thing I can do right now is to gain knowledge about sailing. I’ve started that by raiding the local libraries of all kinds of books about sailing, reading sailing magazines, and surfing sailing and cruising forums.

I’m reading a lot, and understanding some — there are a lot of things I don’t get, but I keep going through everything and often come across something that answers a question I have. I’m also pretty good about figuring things out based on the context.

We’ve also been listening to sailing/cruising podcasts — yes, I said we. My son seems especially interested, and even asks for me to turn it on when we’re heading down the road for football practice, etc. And on a trip to Anchorage the other day, all four of us listened to two episodes of the Furled Sails podcast — the interview with the crew of Exit Only.

That was a really good episode for my wife to hear, I think, because of Donna Abbott’s perspective on being a wife/Mom/woman while cruising. The next day I made some remark about a sailboat and my wife said, “No, we need to get one of those catamarans, I don’t want to go sailing tipped way over.”

So, the educational process has begun! =;)

– My Other Plans –

One of the other things that we’ll need to know in order to go cruising is navigation — how to read charts, plot a course, figure out where we are using a sextant, compass, whatever. I know GPS units are a dime a dozen, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable at ALL if I had to rely only on that to figure out where I am and where I want to go.

So my plan is to learn to do all of that (of course, at this point I don’t even know what “all” of that encompasses) without a GPS unit, and then probably use a GPS when cruising. But I’ll KNOW that our safety doesn’t reply on something that requires batteries, or that can be accidentally dropped overboard.

I know there are online courses for navigation, but the one I looked at tonight is more than $200 — and if I’m going to be able to afford to go cruising, I think I’ll have to hit the library and see what they have available.

Also, the sailing/cruising forum I found has been really helpful — I know that I can get even “dumb” questions answered quickly.

There are other things I’ll need to learn (for one, I want to learn Spanish since we want to cruise Mexico and Central America), but that’s enough for now.

Later on I’ll create a To-Do checklist and start going down it.

Technorati Tags: sailing, cruising

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 6:36 am and is filed under Sailing / Cruising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.