ETERNAUT

December 2015

So, here we were.

Caribbean, Paradise.

“Just a few offshore legs, my Yachtmaster preparation week and then the Yachtmaster practical exam. In between your day skipper“, I had promised my wife.

It sounded like a relaxing sailing holiday in the Caribbean, at least that’s what I had thought.

The preceding months to our sailing holiday had been quite busy. In my off time from work I had studied the yachtmaster theory. It had taken me about six months to prep up my knowledge of chart work, navigation, tidal calculations, weather, passage planning,… luckily my background knowledge as Airline Pilot helped a lot.

Surely the study was more difficult for Rita as she had never been confronted with those topics before.

Unfortunately it turned out that fellow students needed all the mileage… so there was not much of relaxing holiday as I had promised Rita, this was tough work.

The school boats were normal size, between 40 and 46ft. It’s only that Rita and I were not really accustomed to a crew of up to 6 people on that size of yacht. If the crew had been consisted of friends or family it would have been a different story. But if a fellow student does not clean up after her galley work, or another yachtmaster student treats the crew like incompetent slaves… that’s a total different story.

One fellow student tried to sink us twice by leaving the port hole to her shower room wide open during offshore passages. Thankfully she did not succeed…

During the first incident we had to find out that the manual bilge pump did not work.

Neither EPIRB nor liferaft were on board, that was not re-assuring.

On the other hand the two instructors and the RYA examiner we encountered were very nice, helpful and knowledgeable. Once again many thanks to all of you!

Luckily these sailing trips in the Caribbean brought us to some beautiful and interesting places which we were able to explore on short excursions: St. Kitts, Nevis, St. Lucia, Dominca, Grenada and Cariacou just to name a few islands where we dropped anchor.

So, if you read these lines and you are thinking to join a sailing school for some offshore passages: Get yourself an AIS-SART and/or PLB. I wish I would have brought some for our own safety!

Also consider doing the course with a group of close friends or family members.

There are plenty of Courses and Schools available on the RYA website. Just make sure your country of residency recognizes the RYA certificates.