My wife and I took the basic bare boat, Fast Track to Cruising, course, in May 2013. We opted for the couples course instead of 4 person one mainly because we wanted some individual instruction. OSS uses Moorings boats and there base is there.

We arrived on Sunday, spent the night on the boat, and the instructor showed up on Monday morning. We spent an hour or so there going over things, then set off for Virgin Gorda. Monday and Tuesday were spent at a couple of mooring fields there, then Wednesday we sailed to Norman Island and stayed in the bight. Thursday morning we snorkeled around The Indians and Blackbeard’s caves (very, very nice), then sailed to Jost Van Dyke for the night. During our man-overboard training on Thursday, we had some maintenance issues and had to sail in to the mooring area and catch a ball under sail with no power. Friday we sailed to Soper’s Hole where Moorings relunctantly brought another sailboat for us to transfer on to after we dropped our instructor off. You get the boat for your “solo flight” with the recommendation of going back to Norman Island for the night. The winds and seas were both high, so we actually ended up motoring there. We sailed back to the Moorings base on Saturday morning and arrived around 10 a.m. to hand the boat over and pick up our US Sailing certificates.

You really need to read the books that OSS sends you before you arrive—both the Fast Track to Sailing and the 4 other books. The instructor will go over the test materials, but he probably can’t cover each question and there isn’t time in the day to cover each and every topic that you’ll be tested on. We had weak winds for several of the days and had to sail and motor to our anchorages, but did accomplish a lot of training. My wife and I have a sailboat, but we know we’re mostly self taught and wanted to get some formal training for future endeavors. We feel much more comfortable with the idea of casting off and living aboard a sailboat for a week, month, or year. You get a good feel if you’d be comfortable living on a boat with this course. Oh, the course provisions your fridge with about three dinners, and lunches and breakfasts. You may need to use your imagination and it’s a group decision on who cooks, cleans, and what the menu will be. We had dinner on land on Sunday, Thursday, and Friday, and ate on board Monday, Tuesday, and Wednsday. There is a Riteway grocery store close to Moorings where we stocked up on some extras—beer, wine, a few more boxes of trash bags, and a few other items—on Monday morning after meeting with our instructor.

One thing we both agreed on was we wish the instructor had let us go a little farther on some items to figure them out, such as proper sail trim, instead of telling us to sheet in or sheet out, but all in all, he was very good and very knowledgeable.

I pinged the TTOL community about an "acceptable" tip for an instructor and got answers from "a tip--why?" to "15%." We ended up giving him $400 which was $100 day and he seemed both surprised and happy, and we've communicated a few times via e-mail since then. I finally got an answer from an acquaintance of mine who is an instructor, and he recommended $100-$150/day, which I received about a day after we got off the boat. If there had been another couple, we could have felt obligated to tip more. We got the impression that we were pretty low maintenance. In one of our many conversations, our instructor did mention that without gratuities it would be hard to work as an instructor. Being an instructor for low pay is probably one of the opportunity costs for living full time in the BVI.