Seeking cat sailors in the Chesapeake Bay!

[lyndsaymayer]

Hello!! As I near Navy retirement, my recently-retired-from-the-Air-Force husband Mike and I are planning on taking our four kids cruising full time!

Mike just started teaching HS and I also just received my VA teaching license so we can home school the kiddos. We are looking at catamarans, with a target purchase timeline of early 2023 (which really doesn’t seem all that far away now that 2021 will be here the day after tomorrow!). We have access to some 31’ monohulls we can rent, but we really need some experience sailing cats. We have plans to charter this summer and next, but would love to befriend any cat owners in our area we can learn from! We’ve made some great connections through the Spin Sheet Crew Finder but cats are not too common in Hampton Roads, VA.

In the meantime, we will continue to sail whatever we can get our hands in around here, and learn virtually from the posts and threads here on CF!

I look forward to meeting you all 😁

Lyndsay

[dougweibel]

Hello Lindsay,

Welcome to CF. Don't sweat the cat experience too much. Get whatever sailing experience you can. Most monohull experience will be beneficial when it comes time to get aboard a cat. Yes, there are some differences but it does not take much time to learn these. Several years ago my wife and I took the ASA-106 course and it happened to be taught on a cat, so we got the ASA-114 cat course thrown in as well. We found that was enough cat experience, supplemented with some additional reading and asking plenty of questions of other cat owners, when we transitioned from our monohull to our cat several years later. There was more to learn by experience, like flying the spinnaker on the cat, but we had the basics and were comfortable learning-while-doing.

[GordMay]

Greetings and welcome aboard the CF, Lyndsay.