Last year, way before we decided to buy a bigger boat, we booked a sailing holiday in September in the sun. Thanks to our wonderful adventures sailing in America with Hope and Howard on board A-la-Mer, Second Wind and Timing, we have logged a huge number of sea miles, in all the varied distances and conditions that are needed before a Yachtmaster exam assessment. So we booked two weeks with Allabroad Sailing Academy in Gibraltar, with a weekend exam at the end of the ‘holiday’.
Over the summer, we bought all the Imray pilots and read about the various harbours between Portugal, North Africa and Malaga. We practised our lights and buoyage recognition, practised navigation and passage planning without GPS. We read up on Meteorology. We even practised tying knots with our eyes closed. We were ready.
It was brilliant to discover that Allabroad’s training yachts were Jeanneau 38s, very similar to our new Dehler (not as nice, of course!!) with twin wheels, and all the same instrumentation. So we both got fantastic practice manoevering the boat about the harbour, docking, anchoring, mooring, sailing, navigating and practising man-over-board drills.
But a holiday it was not!! We quickly discovered that the standards required of an RYA Yachtmaster do not allow for the lifelong sailors’ have-a-go approach to many tasks, for which there are approved techniques – and these lifelong sailors discovered that the approved techniques were often much superior and more reliable than those we’d used all our sailing lives!
We didn’t make it out of Gibraltar Bay – so much for the pilot books. There was so much to practise, and so much to test us within the Bay.