Sailing Lessons Day 1

Had our first sailing lesson on Monday evening from 7~10pm.  No, we didn't go sailing in the dark, the lessons include two classroom sessions and this was the first.  The school hasn't actually launched their boats yet...they apparently don't have ice skates.  I guess they will be available starting sometime next month.

As would be my usual luck, I ended up coming down with a cold over the weekend, so sitting thru a 3 hour class wasn't the best.  The class was an OK introduction to sailing and sailing terms but the instructor skipped around his slides a lot.  The claim is there are only four maneuvers in sailing:

• Heading Up: Turning toward the wind.
• Bearing Away: Turning away from the wind.
• Tacking: Turning the bow thru the  wind.
• Gybing: Turning the stern thru the wind.

On a sailboat everything seems to be based on the wind (yeah, duh, just call me captian obvious). We also got our course materials at this first class.  Fortunately I had been doing research ahead of time, so it was mostly review of what I had already read...good thing...as comprehension definitely goes down on cold meds.

One of the "materials" for the class is a Personal Flotation Device (PFD). A basic one is included in the tuition as I guess a student drowning would be bad for business.  The thing I didn't know ahead of time is they had three "better" options to choose from for a small additional fee (the total cost for students is below retail).  We decided to go with the auto-inflating ones with integrated safety harnesses.  Since the plan is offshore cruising, these sounded like better options than the basic ones that were manual inflation only and didn't have an integrated harness.  Hope it was a reasonable choice.

Next classroom class is all about knots (tying ones, not measurement ones)...then we'll finally go sailing.