Passed our check out.... we can now charter.

To be honest we were not too bothered about this but today we passed our "check out" exam with the Modern Sailing Club so Audrey and I can charter in The Bay Area in California. 

Our UK RYA skippers qualifications are not recognised in the USA but with the MSC club you can "challenge" based on relevant experience and ability providing you pass the check out exam. This turned out to be a 4 hour practical grilling on the boat.

We were not in a hurry to do the American ASA 102 and 103 courses as it would have been a bunch of stuff we know and do already. We opted to do a club sail as crew with the club and then take a basic "start to charter" one day course which was a bunch of basic stuff with some marina park up and boat bumping practice that we always like doing.

So we arrived at 11AM and went through boat kit and safety inventory. We were then tested and had some value added on our local knowledge of weather and tides in The Bay. Our examiner (Stefan) was a very precise German racing skipper. He was shit hot!

We then had to leave the tight marina in our Catalina 36, prove we could manage all points of sail, show our tack and gybes off (Audrey and I are short handed, Sefan only watched). Finally this bit ended as we proved we could take reefs in on both sails... by now we we were nosing out into the Golden Gate "slot" and we had a good 15 knots of wind.

Then  came the man overboard test that has to be done under sail only.... I missed the bloody thing on first approach and gave us too much to do upwind. I had to bail and go around for a second go. This time my second approach was too biased down wind (we needed to nail it this time) but Audrey was great on dumping power and I finessed a J turn into wind to kill off the speed and Audrey hooked her in. Nice one.

We did ok on all the hidden rules of the road questions being fired at us all the time. 

No time for boat shots

On the way back Stefan forced us into the "narrow marina from hell" to make sure we could prop kick spin the boat. It all ended with a return our actual marina birth for a clean approach and park in a nasty side wind (thank you Jesus!). Final knot tests and boat tidy and we were done.

Audrey was exhausted as she had done most of the sail control and grinding and we did way more manoeuvres in 3 hours than we would normally do in a full day. I was knackered from the mental energy of trying to be spot on all the time.

We passed! "Stay humble and reef early" was Stefan's parting advice.

So next week we have a Catalina 30 for a few days..... 

Finally a picture from our celebration early dinner spot at Salito's. This was not really a photo op day ... too much stress and concentration!