Let's talk Q&A!

We get a lot of questions from all sorts of people, we try to answer them as best we can but sometimes we get the same question over and over. So I thought it would be good to talk about one of them on here!

One question we get all the time is whether or not we had sailing experience before going on this adventure. The short answer is no...Well, not really...

Jeremiah had a little bit of sailing experience and I had none, However we both had boating experience. Jeremiah grew up with a father that built sailboats as a hobby. He would take a couple years to build a beautiful 20-something foot boat and then enjoy it until he got inspired to build another. Jeremiah would go out with him and toy around with sailing. Jeremiah didn't enjoy sailing very much as a child.

Once Jeremiah was an adult he purchased a powerboat, a Sea Ray. He would take family and friends out on the water for day trips and that was about it. He just recently admitted that while owning the powerboat he had no clue how to anchor correctly. He would simply just throw the anchor over and that was about it. Which a lot of people still do! 

As for myself, I had no sailing experience at all. The only background I had with boating was spending summers on the water on my parents powerboat. I never actually worked the boat or anything so this left me with pretty much zero knowledge when it came to operating a boat.

When we started together, I depended on Jeremiah to figure out most of the technical stuff. Shortly after moving aboard I decided to enroll in sailing classes. I wasn’t pulling my weight and a lot had fallen on Jeremiah's shoulders. This helped tremendously, it helped build confidence in what we were doing so this made a world of a difference even thought I still wasn't a great sailor.

Today, Jeremiah is still better at sailing and the one that I look to when trying to perfect my skills. It's easy to follow his lead but I know that if anything were to happen to him while we were out there then I could get us back safely. He's always one step ahead in the game and he continues to patiently help me. 

The main difference between he and I is that he has an engineers brain. He runs tons of scenarios through his head before it happens so he's prepared. I learn from allowing the situation to happen and figuring it out once it has taken place.  Which usually puts me a little behind ;) Either way, we're a great team! We know our strengths and weakness’ pretty well. 

I think it's safe to say that no, you do not need to know how to sail before doing this. We took the "crawl, walk, run" approach and it's allowed us to get better and better while staying safe. Now we're looking forward to the next challenged to help increase our skills!