I had every intention of organizing everything that I learned throughout the process of becoming a baby sailor, but the truth of the matter is that a lack of time and energy caught up with me. I didn’t document the journey, but ultimately I did end up going through and taking all of the classes and attaining ASA 101/103 certifications.
My classes were in Marina Del Rey, California through a company called Blue Pacific Boating. My particular class contained 6 people and the instructor. We were all at different skill levels, but most of us had very little boating experience. Of all of the people in our group, I believe I probably had the least amount of prior boating experience having never piloted a boat before and only having actually been on a boat about five times in my entire life. For me, the key to making it through the class was that I had an interest in the material and studied outside of class so that the classes became a review for me rather than my initial point of learning.
Most of the material wasn’t overly complicated and seemed very common sense. The true difficulty was in the quantity of material in the fairly short time frame and the fact that the process of learning to sail involves acquiring a new vocabularly. Learning the terms isn’t optional, but rather, quite necessary because the terms are the building blocks of communicating and verbalizing while on the boat or dock.
I had five classes on consecutive Sunday’s that were seven hours each. Most of the classes were a few hours of learning on a 34 or 38 foot boat with possibly the application of a process while docked (e.g. raise the sails, etc.), then we were off to attempt the same drills while on the water. I found that the learning of the concepts wasn’t terribly difficult, but that the initial application of many of the principles could sometimes be challenging just because one felt overwhelmed at managing all of the tasks at hand. I found that I would plan in my head what I wanted done, then when I attempted to execute a process I would stumble a bit getting caught up on someones name or a term (…I need you to pull THAT line.) Obviously, that became less and less complicated as the class progressed and it was expected to occur given the fact that if we knew all of the information, we probably wouldn’t have been learning.
Now that the class is over and I’m certified, I am not faced with the age old question: “Now what?”
