Sailing Courses & Clinics

Over 50 Years of our family giving you more of what you go to sailing school for!SM

Learn how to sail a boat and earn ASA 101 certification, or progress to be able to rent a real sailing yacht here or abroad!  Skip the Manhattan sailing school and club crowds and join our sailing club.

Whether you’ve never stepped a pair of Sketchers onto a sailboat, or you’re tuning up for advanced cruising and navigation abroad, we’ve got you covered.  We offer a wide array of courses and clinics, including most major American Sailing Association (ASA) certification levels.  You won’t just get a piece of paper with us – you’ll earn the skills the paper is meant to represent.

asa cert circle mediumHere’s what puts our sailing school program at the front of the fleet…

More time on the tiller: maximum of 3 students per boat for learn to sail/Basic Keelboat (the unoffical industry standard is 4).  Max for cruising courses is 4 (most schools do at least 5).  Limiting class size is critical to getting a firm foundation.  Time steering the boat with feedback and coaching from an instructor is the single most valuable thing you can get out of a course.  Of course, it’s also important to trim sails and observe and learn from others.  So, we give you far MORE.

More time on the water:   3 full days with learn-to-sail, plus 2 half-day supervised practice sails schedule later.  We minimize classroom time, cutting out things you can ready about efficiently on your own with fully illustrated text books designed for each course.  We focus on theory, and the why’s of things – and spend MORE time making you do them.  Some topics are discussed over lunch, such as charts & navaids.  And if weather gets in the way, and we lose significant course time that can’t be made op on the scheduled days, we give you a free makegood.

More days of instruction.  Unlike most schools in the region, our course is an honest, full 3 days of mostly on-water instruction.  Your supervised practice sails are scheduled later.  You will come to us at least 5 times to do this entire course!    Read our Rant about this in our blogs.

More methodology.  We structure things to make your time more effective and fun.  Our signature Obstacle Course is the single most effective training aid available.  You’ll sail around a series of markers we set just for class.  Each turn around requires at least one of each sailing maneuver, and anticipation to make it happen at the marker.  You’ll start out sloppily, maybe even losing sight of the Obstacle Course while you’re figuring it out.  Not a drama.  You’ll sail back to it.  But by the end of the course, you might be singlehanding around the course – turning close to each mark!

Even our classroom time is fun and efficient.  We use a huge model boat with real sails.  It leans, pivots, and rolls.  And a large floor fan creates enough wind to make the sails fill or flap (luff) depending on what your instructor shows you – or invites you to come up and do.  Interactive classroom!  Then, bam.  Out on the water to do it for reals.  Of course, some diagrams are helpful, and a large whiteboard does that trick.

As well as having owned and operated two sailing schools over the decades, our entire program benefits from two generations of snowsports instruction, from which we draw some of our pedagogy and methodology.  This constant cross training and re-evaluation of what works is… well, what works.