Now in theory we're Yacht-Masters

We've just passed the Yacht-master exams that we've been studying for the last three weekends over in Morcambe with John Parlane and his Bay sea school. This is a course that teaches you the theory of how to use charts, how to have a basic grasp of the weather, and the International regulations on avoiding collisions at sea. You wouldn't believe how difficult this has been, trying to absorb so much diverse information and computations the like of which I haven't done since I was back at school in the sixties.
Mind you I made quite a few glorious mistakes, mostly stupid ones, like taking 1.3 from 5.7 and getting 7. I'm just no good at logic, somehow my brain turns off for a split second and that throws the whole equation and workings out into chaos. But because my workings out were right John marked it as a pass. Although he has suggested that we may be better off buying a steel boat so when we hit the reef that we thought was a mile off we don't sink immediately, he's probably right.

I just couldn't get my head round secondary ports where the tidal heights and times are different and we have to extrapolate with graphs and tide tables. And then figure when it's GMT plus an hour or is it two hours in the southern hemisphere. I tried and tried and in the end almost got it. But then when I had to calculate how much water I need to anchor I ended up with half a meter too much. Still as Jackie said at least it was on the right side of wrong.
In the real world we'll only be concentrating on one particular event that we have to do. With exams we're expected to jump from one scenario to another, which messes with your brain to such a degree that the mist comes down and your stuck in a fog which descends, the cogs stop turning and all goes blank. Hopefully in the real world we'll be able to apply all this new knowledge to guide us safely into that turquoise bay without hitting the reef, and break out another G&T and watch the sunset in tranquil seas.

But Hey, Yacht-Masters. Well in theory at least, the real test is out there on the oceans with a real boat to sail. That's the frustration, not having a boat, and that in the end is what we need to do, sail. I mean, we haven't even learned how to put a reef in a sail yet. On the practical side there's still a long way to go, but we're a long way from being Novices, now all we need is to put those new navigational skills to good use.

Flotilla in Paxos, Greece.

It's really getting into autumnal weather here, today we had high winds and driving rain, so just the right time to get on a plane and fly to a Greek island. A few weeks ago we had one of those Fxxk it moments and booked ourselves a 7 day flotilla holiday in Paxos, which is a little island on the west coast of Greece.

This will be the next step in our learning curve, and we hope a way to ease us into handling a yacht all by ourselves, albeit with an expert on hand if we go wrong. We did think about going back to Scotland and doing a solo sail back up in Largs but then we spotted this end of season bargain on the net and now it's almost time to pack our grab bags and go do it.

We'll be sailing in a Jaguar 25 footer, which is a lot smaller than we have been training on, but funnily enough the same sort of boat that we almost bought a few weeks back on Windermere.

We're both excited at the prospect of casting off all by ourselves into the blue Med although the forecast is for rain at the start of the week. But Hey, who cares, it can't be anything like when we did our Day skipper up in Largs. The one thing we don't want is no wind, perhaps about force 4 or 5 would be great.

It's just over a year now since we started this adventure and I think we have a grasp of the basics, hopefully by the time next week is over we will have gained the confidence we need to take it to the next level. Day Skipper Coastal is the next one after this and then it's back to the Dominican Republic in January. Whoa, can't wait.

Deeper Deeper Deeper, over.

Another trip to the Morcambe and Heysham yacht club for our course on using VHF radio on Saturday. I had a look at Johns email on Friday night and discovered an attachment that I had missed which told us to learn the phonetic alphabet, which we would need for the course. Whoops, so on the way to Morcambe we took turns in spelling out road signs, or anything else that caught our eye. This is the alphabet in words, like Alpha for A, Golf for G, Lima for L, all the way to Zulu for Z. My favourite was trying to spell Leighton Conyers. By the time we hit Morcambe we figured we just about had it off. Oh Leighton Conyers is Lima, Echo, India, Golf, Hotel, Tango, Oscar, November,
Charlie, Oscar, November, Yankee, Echo, Romeo, Sierra.

There were three of us on the course, Jackie and I plus Peter, who I'ld say was in his early 30s'. He is living on a Westerly 33 at Glasson dock. He seemed to know quite a bit about boats, I think he was an engineer, and said he had just recently bought this boat after selling a Dutch barge that he had sailed across from Holland single handed, with no knowledge of how to use a radio, and we thought we were a little crazy.

We learned all about how to use the radio, and all about DSC, which stands for Digital selective calling which is much too complicated to go into but suffice to say that we eventually got the hang of it. Lot's of the course was to do with sending out distress messages in the event of some catastrophe. What is amazing about these new fangled radios is that it can read your GPS at all times and if you send out a Mayday message it will send your exact position to the coast guard, or to any other vessel within range.

We had a bit of a laugh reading out fictitious scenarios to each other and in the end came away feeling that we now knew what we were doing, although that first call for real will be a bit nerve racking I'm sure.
It was a much longer day than I thought it would be, in fact whilst watching a DVD all about EPIRBs which are basically radio beacons, I nodded off momentarily as did Jackie. At the end of the day we had to take the exam. Jakie got full marks 22 out of 22, I got 21 and Peter, our hardy long time sailor got 20. We passed with flying colours and can now apply for our radio licence.

We now need to build up our sea miles before putting in for our coastal Skipper. We have found a company in Largs that do weekend charter hire. So that will be our next step, to take out a yacht on our own for the weekend, probably a Moody 33. Now that should be very exciting.

This is Deeper Deeper Deeper signing off, Out.