Coastal Sailing Discovery Learning Guide

By Rosemary O'Donoghue

The Coastal Sailing Discovery Learning Guide provides a fast, structured, and practical way to learn coastal sailing. If you want to go coastal sailing but realise you have a lot to learn and don’t know where to begin, this guide provides a structured, detailed list. It’s a workbook that leads you step by step to progressively tick off activities as you learn.
The Coastal Sailing Discovery Learning Guide not only gives you topics but prompts you to research, consider the options, practice, and develop the resilience you need to deal with unpredictable circumstances. It doesn’t spoon-feed answers, but gives hints and challenges so you can search them out. Beginning with the basics of getting to know your boat, preparing equipment, sailing, working with nature, communicating and safety, you progress through to passage planning, provisioning, managing water, waste and power and managing different sailing situations. As a bonus, the Guide also includes samples of checklists, procedures and a maintenance plan that you can customise to suit your situation.

Many coastal cruisers will tell you that the joy of the lifestyle is that every day brings surprises, both delightful and challenging. So begin discovering now, getting a head start with a targeted, fast way to learn.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rosemary O'Donoghue
• Release date: May 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215139646

Rosemary O'Donoghue

Rosemary O'Donoghue writes for work and for fun. A Technical Writer with a science background, she has published travel books and a business book, Clarity out of Complexity: Writing Effective Workplace Procedures, to share some of the wisdom she has learned from many years of writing for a wide range of industries. She gets excited about how good procedures (as opposed to longwinded, boring, repetitive procedures) can dramatically lift the performance of a business.In between (and often during) jobs, Rosemary enjoys travelling and writes daily to capture her experiences and entertain friends, family and random people she meets. In recent years she has discovered a passion for sailing and spends months at a times on a boat coastal cruising along the NSW and Queensland coast of Australia. She has written about her experiences along the way in her book North on Rocinante and will soon publish Second Season, also about her sailing experiences. She has published travel stories about Italy, Greece, Malta, Hong Kong & China.Rosemary is currently combining her technical writing and training expertise and her passion for sailing creating a self-discovery learning guide about coastal cruising.When she's not on the water, Rosemary lives with her partner, her cat and her pet python in Sydney, Australia.

Book preview

Coastal Sailing Discovery Learning Guide

Rosemary O'Donoghue

Published by Techwriting at Smashwords

Copyright Rosemary O'Donoghue 2023

Table of Contents

Introduction

Your Boat: Outside and In

Before You Leave the Dock

Local Sailing

Planning for Offshore Sailing

Living on a Boat

Boat Systems

Preparing to Leave

Passage Planning

Cruising: Arriving and Staying

Managing Different Sailing Situations

The Boating Community

Do It!

Samples

Essentials to Take to Boat

Leaving from a Marina

Leaving from a Mooring

Leaving an Anchorage

Maintenance Plan

Location of Safety Equipment Example

Distress Call Sample

Equipment Inspection: Before Trip

Passage Planning and Execution Checklist

Other Books by Rosemary O’Donoghue

Introduction

I was in my late fifties before I began sailing, though I’d often wished for the opportunity earlier. So when my partner bought a small yacht, I madly began learning as much as possible. He’d owned boats before but hadn’t sailed for 20 years or more, while I was almost totally green when it came to boats, so I needed to learn in a hurry.

As a technical writer, I’d created training and assessment materials across a range of industries. So, with a professional background in learning, I naturally watched myself learn and had a pretty good idea of how to work out what I needed to know. I also knew the best way to do it: talk to people who know what they’re doing, watch them, copy them and practice. Then ask for feedback and make sure I had it right.

After two seasons of sailing in NSW and Queensland, I’m only scratching the surface of what there is to know about boats, the sea and sailing. But at least I’m very aware of how much there is to learn. And I did manage to get through safely, with no major dramas (though that’s no guarantee it’ll always be that way).

After returning to life on land, I used my writing, training, and assessment skills to put together this learning guide to help others starting out on a sailing journey. I hope you find it useful, that it helps you learn quickly, and that you have as much fun as I have coastal sailing.

What is Covered

This Learning Guide not only gives you a list of topics but prompts you to research, consider the options, practice, and develop the resilience you need to deal with unpredictable circumstances. It begins with the basics of getting to know your boat, preparing equipment, sailing, working with nature, communicating, safety, through to passage planning, provisioning, managing water, waste, and power and much more.

You’ll also find in Samples, towards the end of the guide, checklists and procedures that I created for myself, to help me learn and make sure I didn’t forget critical equipment or checks. You can use these as a starting point for your own cheat sheets and modify them to suit your circumstances.

Will you know everything there is to know about coastal cruising when you’re finished? No way. As long as you’re out on the water you’ll continue to learn. But this will give you a head start, a targeted, fast way to learn. You can leave home with a modicum of confidence rather than naïve bravado.

How to Use the Guide

Read through an activity and ask yourself: Am I confident I know the answer, or I've done it competently before? If yes, check it with an experienced sailor or cruiser. If you're not sure, look for opportunities to learn. Practice until you're confident, then ask an experienced person to check you out. Tick it off and start on the next one.

Do you need to do them in order? The short answer is no. Do them in whatever order you like. This guide is designed to alert you to what you need to learn so that can make the most of every opportunity. While this guide has been carefully structured to make the learning path logical, you may well encounter scenarios in a different order, so if you do, seize the opportunity, and learn.

I'm not sure who originally said it but You can't be a sailor unless you go to sea. Coastal cruising is a life of discovery. So, start your life of discovery now.

1. Is Coastal Cruising for Me?

1.1. Does nature fill you with awe? Are you adventurous? Are you prepared to put up with wet, heat, cold, constant movement and possibly seasickness for the sake of experiencing the cycles and extremes of nature?

1.2. Get out on the water!

Coastal cruising requires a significant investment of time and resources, so it’s best to first find out if you’re really going to like it. You don’t have to go all-in to begin. If you haven’t already done it, go sailing with friends on the sort of boat you have in mind and are likely to afford.

Ideas for getting out on the water if you don’t already have a boat:

• Call friends who sail and ask them for suggestions on how to get experience. Chances are, they’ll offer to take you out.

• Call a sailing club and ask when they run races and if they are looking for crew. Be honest about how much experience you have – many are happy to take beginners.

• Hang around marinas and get talking to people. Let them know you’re looking for experience.

• Pay for a skippered charter

1.3. Try to go out in different conditions:

• Fine weather, in protected waterways

• Marginal weather, in protected waterways

• Windy or stormy weather, in protected waterways

Ask yourself:

• Is this fun?

• Do I feel sick?

• Am I terrified?

• Am I frightened, but excited?

• Do I feel sick but it’s worth it?

1.4. Organise to go on a trip in open waters, on a typical day, say 10 – 15kts wind with seas around 1m. If possible, do at least a day trip from port to port. Ask yourself the same questions as above.

1.5. If you don’t like camping, you may not enjoy coastal sailing, though, if you have the money, you could do the nautical equivalent of glamping. Don’t believe it’s all champagne and sunsets (though there can be plenty of that). On a yacht you need to manage water, waste, power and provisions. For weeks at a time you may need to be self-sufficient. You need to be organised, and prepared to go without washing with fresh water, or having fresh food at times. However, you take your home with you and don’t need to set up a tent or camper at the end of the day. Ask yourself, are you OK with this for medium or long stretches of time?

1.6. Sign up for sailing forums or Facebook pages such as Women Who Sail (WWS) or Cruising Queensland. Read them when you have a spare minute – you’ll learn plenty and get an idea of the life.

Follow YouTube channels such as Sailing La Vagabonde or Motor Sailing for Old Dudes or Kristina’s Travels or read sailing blogs such as sv-anui.com or books such as North on Rocinante (shameless plug) or Sailing in my Sarong Around the World.

1.7. Is the timing right? Consider

• Health

• The people you love

• Pets

• Responsibilities

• Financial situation

There may never be a perfect time, and if you wait for it, you may never leave. But for each of these, put a plan together to manage them and make it workable such that your time cruising is not marred by guilt, anxiety or even tragedy.

1.8. Realistically, can you afford it? You’ve probably heard the saying: Boats are a hole in the water that you pour money into. Aside from the purchase cost, they do require a lot of maintenance and repairs, because they are constantly in a harsh environment and anything marine seems to have a high cost. However, boat costs aside, cruising can be done quite cheaply if you avoid marinas. Work out a realistic budget.

1.9. When you’re planning where you’d like to go, you’ll need to manage your timing and direction such that you avoid extreme weather, and the winds and currents take you in the direction you’d like to go. Talk to experienced cruisers about the best season to sail from your starting point to your destination and the best route to take, if there are options.

1.10. Have you found the right crew?