As with car driving, with sailing you learn the basic techniques through tuition and then become an expert through experience. This is why you can learn to sail through an online crewing agency like Onboard Space. You may never even need formal tuition if you get the right skippers!
Sailing as a career
Sailing is far more than tacking and gybing on a calm lake! Those techniques are essential, and are best taught by someone who knows their onions. You could go to a sailing school (sailing schools can use Onboard Space to recruit too!) to learn these techniques on dinghies.
The more you sail the more you learn. For example, everyone on a busy waterway needs to learn the Rules of the Road as to whom has priority when. Simply, these explain why motorboats must give way to sail unless said motorboat is a 1000ft long tanker in a narrow channel where only ships of a similar size in the same channel must pay attention to them!
As your skills develop you need to learn basic engine maintenance, watch keeping, navigation and meteorology – layer by layer you become ever more competent.
Learn to sail through experience
As indicated above there are skills and knowledge such as meteorology and navigation that are best taught in the classroom, but they tend to sit better in your head by using them. Put simply, will you remember cross-tidal passage planning if you never use it in anger?
This is why getting experience as crew is as important as those classroom skills when it comes to someone who wants to learn to sail. You need to get afloat to use that experience and in doing so get to grips with applied knowledge.
If you sign up to Onboard Space as crew looking for a skipper you can develop your skills as you go. At our early stages as a business, we’re likely to hook up more experienced crew with skippers but as we develop we expect to have the full gamut of experienced and inexperienced crew sailing with different skippers. Even the highly experienced old salts will learn something from every time they go to sea, be it from a specific craft or experience gained when something goes wrong.
Sailing schools can use Onboard Space too!
For a small fee for every time you recruit someone, a sailing school can recruit people who wish to learn to sail through Onboard Space. That can be seen as a cheap form of advertising (certainly cheaper than an ad in Yachting World!) and people can learn to sail through you on a formal course.
Sign up with Onboard Space today!
Whether you are crew looking to learn to sail and improve their sailing skills or simply someone looking to get sailing in the coming spring/summer season, it is simple to sign up with Onboard Space. Get online and you never know where you may end up sailing in 2020!
