Dayskipper refresh with NauticEd

I did my Dayskipper and Yachtmaster theory courses about 15 years ago. Now I'm master of Alison (still gives me a frisson to write those words), I need to turn theory into practice
The plan currently is to spend the summer getting to know Alison, practicing all the things I'm not good at (mainly manoeuvring under power and all the stuff we should practice but we don't like Anchoring and Man Overboard). I'll take the practical in the Autumn.
In preparation I've been looking at a way to brush up my theory knowledge. A bit of Googling (of sailing blogs, weirdly) led me to NauticEd. They have a very extensive list of courses, both theory and practical, an on-line resume (or logbook for those of us in the UK) and links to lots of hire companies.
They offer two courses free as tasters: Sail Trimming and the Rules of the Road. I must say I found them both to be very useful and I even learned a couple of things about trimming.
At the moment I'm figuring out whether it's worthwhile paying for one or more of the courses. I'll let you know if I do

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Too windy - more maintenance

Another weekend rolls around and guess what - it's too windy to sail! Yesterday it was blowing an 8 with gusts up to who knows what. Today and tomorrow are both forecast 6 with gusts up to 9. The upshot is, it's another maintenance weekend. A couple of weeks ago I took a look at the dodgers and the spray hood. They've all lost a lot of thread due to UV damage and the spray hood windows are completely opaque. A bit of time on DuckDuckGo revealed AW Marine. They specialise in spray hoods and covers and they offer a spray hood revamp which covers Seam restitching, cleaning and reproofing. They also said they would restitch the dodgers. I'll send them off this morning and let you know what the results look like. The other task for today is to take a look at the impeller. I've got a couple of spare gaskets now so I should be safe to get the cover off and have a go at replacing it. I'm learning that just about everything takes two goes so let's see how we do ...
Read more

Oil change completed

Image
A couple of weeks ago I left you with a cliff hanger - I  had found a vacuum pump extractor that worked, I had successfully removed the extra oil that I had accidentally put in, but the glow plug solenoid was no longer working. Last weekend I finally got the chance for a good run at finishing the job. The first task was to find out why the solenoid wasn't firing. This ended up taking me a couple of hours, not because it was difficult, but because of the time it took me to get all the necessary bits and pieces together. My multimeter has normal probes, so to test that the push switch is working, you've got to press the probes against the two contacts on the back of the switch and then press the switch itself. This requires 3 hands! The answer was to get some croc clips and attach them to the probes. The problem was, I didn't have any and no shop in Scarborough had them either. I ended up having to drive out to Halfords to get some and even then they were hidden behind some...
Read more