Hello,

I am looking for some advice and/or connections. We have chartered in the BVIs a couple of times. All our experience is on monohulls. We have a cat booked this year. My wife has no formal training, I have had a few formal courses and certificates, plus I crew in races. I understand transitioning to a catamaran may not be really complex but since we are hosting a couple of people this next trip we thought we would like to get some cat time prior to December. I was hoping to get my wife and I aboard for some lessons. She could get some basic formal training from someone other than me, and I could get some cat time. We have some long term cruising dreams so I figure the more formal training the better. We are from the Toronto area but don't mind flying somewhere this summer to take course. There doesn't seem to be a great deal of Catamaran training happening locally.
In summary we have different experience and abilities but would like to take a course together.
Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Brian

This is basically where we started in the early 1980's.
We had no problem chartering a small monohull to gain experience. We now charter cats up to 50-feet.

You'll probably find that a small cat, under 40-feet, will be fairly easy to sail and easier to handle around a dock than a small monohull of about the same length.

Taking a course together would be fun, but your wife might get more out of taking a class by herself where she can't look to you as a crutch. My wife has had a couple of courses through Womenship to provide her more self-reliance. One I would highly recommend is one called "Sail Yourself Safely Home." It's focused on what she'd do if you because incapacitated.

There are also a lot of resources on line.

see: http://www.sailingvideos.com/product/1107/

You could be describing us before our last visit to the BVI in May/June!

I took ASA114 before going down to the BVI and it was surely helpful getting some experience with docking and the more complex systems on a cat (compared to our ancient monohull). But in fact our checkout in the BVIs was more help.

We rented a 39 ft cat from the Moorings who insisted we take a "Friendly Captain" for the first couple hours (for free) - we had been warned about this before arriving in the islands because of our lack of experience with cats. He took the boat out of the slip and then put us all through our paces. He had us launch and retrieve the dinghy, motor, maneuver under power, hoist sails, put in a reef, then sail to Peter Island, moor and anchor, then sail back to Tortola and drop him at the head of the Moorings dock. It was really useful because the active crew members (5 of the 6 in our party) got to work together for the first time and really learn about the boat. Despite all this our charter started pretty much on time (maybe at 1:00 rather than 12:00 because we started the training well before 12:00) and we then sailed to Norman and started a highly successful, damage free, and fun week.