Hi there

[Knuspli]

Except some minor sailing experiences in my childhood I´m totally new to this.

I also don´t know if it´s just a silly idea or if I really end up on a yacht.

So the reason for me to be here is to find out what I really want and collect some information.

:-)


I´m from Germany, 42 years old and really bad in introducing myself.

But now you know I´m here. That´s a first step

[Jim Cate]

Welcome aboard knuspli. Hope that we collectively can add to your knowledge base and get you out on the water.

Jim

[TrentePieds]

Knuspli:

Sei willkommen in unserem Forum :-)

Germany is a biggish place even by Canadian standards and varies tremendously in "sailability" from one end to the other.

Sailing out of Echernförde or Kiel into the Danish "South Seas" is a very different thing from sailing out of Greifswald into the Baltic Sea, and that, again, is very different from sailing out of Bremerhaven into the Wattensee. You could of course pop over the border and sail on the Bodensee, and that too is different from the others.

Where you wish to sail, and just how to handle a boat, is dependent on just where you wish to sail and what sort of satisfaction and pleasure you expect to get from the sailing. The type of boat to choose is also dependent on those things. Therefore we will be better able to help you off to a good start if you tell us just where In Germany you are located and what your sailing ambitions are.

Viel Glück:-)!

TrentePieds

[grantmc]

Welcome to the forum.

Hoping that you'll gain help and useful information from joining and posting here. Obviously the more you post yourself, be it questions, ideas, advice, the more you gain from being a member.

My suggestion is to join a yacht club and get out sailing on other people's boats to decide whether it's your thing. Skippers are always looking for crew.

Wishing you the best from Wellington, New Zealand.

[Knuspli]

Thank you very much for the welcome.

@Jim Cate
adding knowledge to my base is the easiest job as it is a really small base :-D

@TrentePieds
I´m living in southern Germany. But the goal is sailing around the world.

The next two years will show, if this is a realistic goal.

@grantmc
That´s the plan. Get on boats, learn to sail and find out if a boat is a suitable environment for me.


There will be questions, ideas, more questions, stupid ideas...........after I read through the boards.

[TrentePieds]

If domiciled in Bayern you are obviously ideally located to undertake a "cruise'n'learn" vacation in the Adriatic Sea. The Adriatic is not really my Gebiet, so I have no specific recommendations for a sailing school that offers such cruises. But I DO recommend such an excursion to all novices. I used to teach 'em in the Salish Sea.

But let me say this: The "boat handling", which is what most people consider is what they have to learn, is the very least of it! Boat handling, taking you far enuff that you could manage a fifty-footer well enuff that you could put the polish on it by "self-study", I could teach you in a long weekend.

What you need to know to become a competent skipper is for the most part book learning, which is why people wishing to become professional seafarers attend Marine Academies (ashore) for up to five years.

For a yottie, coastwise navigation, what we call "pilotage", is the sine qua non, and it relies crucially on the trigonometry you should have learned in public school by the age of 11 or 12. Crossing oceans is a whole different thing, since it relies on celestial navigation, which, while not difficult, is incredibly tedious. In my view, denigrating competence in pilotage and in celestial navigation is very foolish, even in this age of GPS and chart plotters!

You may be familiar with the English expression "different horses for different courses". Just so for boats. The design characteristics of boats reflect the nature of the water wherein they have to sail. Boats optimized for the Adriatic are vastly different from boats optimized for the fjord country of Norway, and they, in turn, are different from boats optimized for the Salish Sea.

I therefore urge you to devote your remaining two years ashore to the study of why that is so. There are, among hundreds of titles that can help you, two books I recommend as starting points. Start with Arthur Beiser's The Proper Yacht and when you've got a grip on how Beiser thinks about yachts - particularly yachts fit for circumnavigations - tackle Francis Kinney's Skene's Elements of Yacht Design* to get a grip on how one design desideratum affects every other design desideratum that goes into designing a "proper yacht".

You can obviously buy a "ready-made" out of Greifswald and other such places, or a "new to you" boat put up for sale in some remote port by someone who found that seafaring isn't all it's cracked up to be (particularly not circumnavigating), but doing so, if you are going to circumnavigate, does not excuse you from learning and understanding what is in the two cited books and many others besides.

I would think that such knowledge is not usually imbibed by little Bayerische lads with their mothers' milk, whereas for a lad growing up in, say, Külungsborn, much of this knowledge would have been imbibed by the age of 14.

Something else you should be thinking about in anticipation of slipping your Vertäuung is the entire subject of what I call "fo'c's'l living": The art of staying sane for long periods of time in quarters more confining than any landsman can imagine until he's had to deal with it.

Boat size obviously has something to do with it, but bear in mind that ownership expense increases roughly as the third power of any increase in length. My little cockleshell is, as my "handle" implies, thirty feet long. I put Can$1K into the special savings account I call "the boat account" every month. And believe me, it gets spent! Some months are more costly than others, of course, but long term - it gets spent!

So imagine, now, that I went hog wild and got myself a 45-footer. 45 = 1.5 x 30, so therefore I would have to put $1,000 x 1.5 x 1.5 x 1.5 =3,375 into my boat account every month. Ironically such a special savings account is, technically, called a "sinking fund" :-)!

Well, something there for you to think about to get started. We are always here to help.

Viel Vergnügen :-)!

TrentePieds

[Knuspli]

Originally Posted by TrentePieds

I would think that such knowledge is not usually imbibed by little Bayerische lads with their mothers' milk, whereas for a lad growing up in, say, Külungsborn, much of this knowledge would have been imbibed by the age of 14.
TrentePieds

Can´t stop laughing

We were taught nothing about water except it is used to make beer.


That´s a good schedule for my first steps. Thank you for writing it down in such a detailed way.
I just ordered Arthur Beiser´s book. Not available in German so it´s also a good way to improve my English skills.


The financial aspect is the reason why I got 2 years left. Child support for my daughter ends in 2026. Then I´ve got round €700 more every month for myself to start in a new life

[Mr Mac]

Welcome aboard from Pensacola Florida!

[JPA Cate]

@Knuspli,

Does your daughter want to go to university? If not, I'd suggest immediately plunking your 700 euros into your sailing fund. Sailing on other people's boats (often abbreviated OPB's) is a way to learn about crewing and a bit about the boats, both of which will serve you well when you buy your first boat. However, bear in mind always, boats are depreciating assets--do not borrow money to buy one, or maybe borrow from your family, if they can loan you what you need and you know for sure you can pay them back.

You can learn to sail, with a Mirror or similar little dinghy: it will teach you how to pay attention to wind and motion, when to sheet in or out (the why being it will dump you in for a swim if you don't, or the other guy will get there -wherever- before you). You'll see if you find it's fun vs. a midlife crisis.

If you see a future in it, then look at RYC (or similar for your own country), and get some formal training. And ask questions here, you'll get more input than you might think.

Enjoy.

Ann

[Knuspli]

@JPA Cate

she´s not going to university, it will be vocational training. So Autumn 2026 I´ll be financially unleashed.
And of course my plans are based on my own money. As I´m not rich a new boat isn´t an option.
Borrowing money is also no option.
If it comes to it, savings will be divided 50/50. 50% for the boat and 50% remain as sinking fund (dammit, one of the first sailing terms I learned here contains ´sinking´. Great! )

Thank you for your advice


@Mr Mac

thanks for the welcome

[TrentePieds]

Na – du hast Sinn für Humor, sehe ich! That's a relief :-)!

Beiser's book if half a century old, and much has happened in yacht design since then, and much has happened to the market for yachts.

Here is a link to a page from SailboatData.com, a site that gives you the bare minimum of design data for innumerable yachts of every imaginable size and design. I happened to pick the Catalina 27, but the data base has thousands of others. The site is good for making the first tentative comparizons twixt the many “off the shelf” boats available second hand. Or third.... Or fourth...

https://sailboatdata.com/sailboat/catalina-27/

You will find that many of the same data are given by Beiser for the specific yachts discussed by him. In a future missive I'll have things to say about the utility of the various parameters.

The Catalina 27 is a boat on which, as a professional sailing instructor half a century ago when the C27 was der letzte Schrei in cruising boats, I have taught many, many people the basics of coastal cruising. It is also a boat I came to loathe! Lotsa people love it. I loathe it. Jedem das seine :-)! The reason for my dislike for the boat we can discuss when you've got a little reading behind you.

At this point in your becoming a seafaring man, it is enough to make note that there is, stated in the broadest of terms, an irresolvable antagonism between living space below-decks and seaworthiness. Lots of below-decks space for a given LWL (Length on the Water Line) = little seaworthiness. And vice-versa! This explains why boats are always compromises, and therefore why boats are designed to do specific jobs in specific waters.

You will find that Hanses, Beneteaus and Jeanneus are designed to sell to WOMEN (and to charter companies which comes to the same thing), who, generally, do not like sailing, but consent to come along provided the boat is something that below decks approximates a room in a shoreside luxury hotel. Women, generally, have neither the educational background nor the interest to know what makes a sailboat a good sea boat. When a yacht is being bought, it is, almost without exception, the woman, if a woman is involved, that makes the ultimate purchase decision. Recall at this point my comment about |”fo'c's'l living”.

Something you need to be keenly aware of is that voyaging under sail is DEADLY SLOW! Sailboats have what's called “displacement hulls”. The physics of the case mean (using feet and knots) that a displacement hull cannot (normally) travel faster through the water than 1.35 x LWL^½ (“1.35 times the square root of the length on the water line”).

So TrentePieds, having an LWL of 25 feet, has a “top speed” of about 6¾ knots or roughly 12½ Km per hour. A boat with a 36-foot waterline, which, as we've discussed, will cost you more than three times as much to own, will top out at 8.1 knots equating to 15 Km/hour. Is the extra expense worth it?

Since I mentioned Külingsborn, the distance from there to Kiel is about 70 NM (“Nautical Miles”) if you go through Femarnsund and 75 NM if you go north around Femarn. So, motoring all the way, the trip would take you something like 10½ hours in a thirty-footer. In a thirty-footer under sail, it would often take 24 or even 36 hours!

Now, the International Rules for the Avoidance of Collissions at Sea (“COLREGS”) state: Every vessel shall at all times maintain a proper lookout by sight and hearing as well as by all available means appropriate to the prevailing circumstances and conditions so as to make a full appraisal of the situation and of the risk of collision. (Rule 5)

Do you think you can do that after 10 hours on the helm? Or even after five or six?

A wise man rang the changes on an old maxim relating to war. He said: “Cruising consists of long periods of utter boredom interspersed with moments of stark terror!” Die Matrosen of the “Flying P” ships out of Hamburg (Potosi, Pommern, Preussen, Passat, Pamir, and even the original Pudel of the Laeisch Line) would agree with that I'm sure :-)!

You will know – or you can easily verify – that these ships were all “squareriggers”. That's because for a cargo-carrying sailing ship there is no money to be made by sailing into the wind “am Wind” in the German phrase, let alone hart am Wind. So cargo carriers always followed sailing routes where the prevailing winds permitted them to sail mit raumer Wind i.e. on a course that let the wind come in over the “quarter” - the corner of the ship where the transom meets the side.

That wisdom of the ancients has come down to us “Sunday sailors” in the dictum that “gentlemen do not beat to weather!” Nothing is more tiring and sick-making that “beating” into the wind for hours on end, so if you need to beat to weather to reach your destination, wait for the wind to change! And if you can't wait for some such reason as your need to report to work on Monday morning, then crank up the “iron wind”

Cheers

TP

[Adelie]

Welcome to CruisersForum!

I would suggest updating your profile with your boat make & model or “Looking” in the "Boat" category. This info shows up under your UserName in every post in the web view. Many questions are boat and/or location dependent and having these tidbits under your UserName saves answering those questions repeatedly. If you need help setting up your profile then click on this link: https://www.cruisersforum.com/forums...ml#post3308797

I would happily help more if the link above is not enough.