With an eventual goal of living on a boat for six months, we need to get experience. We live near a large inland lake, and sail an O’Day 322. Clearly that would be too small a boat with three active young boys. So, we needed to figure out how to get experience on bigger boats. The obvious answer to this is bareboat chartering.
So last year , we chartered a 34′ catamaran through the moorings in the BVI. This certainly isn’t a boat we could afford, but was a great way for the family to get a gentle introduction to sailing in the sea.
This year, in fact in a few weeks we are heading to the USVI to do a second charter. This time I wanted to be on a boat that might be much more representative of the one we might live on. In this case it’s a 43′ Gib Sea, bareboat charters through Fairwinds Charters in St Thomas.
This second charter will probably be the last one we go on, but I hope to use it as an important step along our road to The Big Trip. We’ll see what’s it like to be on, and to handle, a bigger monohull. The wife will get a feel for handling, the boys will see how much less from the monohull has compared to the cat. I’ll see if I can really handle a boat this big.
I’ll tell you how it goes!
