Sailing Courses Available For Everyone

NauticEd’s sailing courses cover a wide range of sailing education. They cover from beginner information designed to help a new sailor become familiar with the goings on on a sailboat all the way to extremely advanced information like what to do if your mast breaks 1000 nautical miles off shore.

Sailing courses availability

All the courses are online and available worldwide. The information has been internationalized meaning that as you travel around the world you’ll be able to adhere to the various standards. For example,  the lighting and buoyage system covers both IALA-A and IALA-B information. In addition to that NauticEd is engaged in a project to make all the sailing courses available in multiple languages.

At first thoughts, some sailing instructors have been against the idea of using the Internet, citing such comments as “you can’t learn to sail online”. However once they start to interact with students who have done their theory work using NauticEd’s multimedia approach to learning, they have started to turn around.

Virtual sailing instructor

As a practical sailing instructor for many years, in many instances I would battle with trying to have students really understand and “get” how the sails should be set for each wind direction. For that reason we invented NED. NED is a virtual sailing instructor that students can interact with to learn the set of the sail. They can see the boat speed up and slow down depending on the set of the sails and the different wind angles.

In other circumstances, we have created interactive educational animations that show how wind creates lift and how turbulence is created. When showing a student on an actual boat in real practice, the student can’t actually see the turbulence if the sail is over trimmed. These kind of things are best left to diagrams and even better than a diagram is an actual interactive animation where by the student can move the sails themselves and see wind spawning off into eddies.

Sailing certification

In addition to the sailing courses that NauticEd offers, we also worked with the world’s yacht charter companies to create a sailing certification that would be acceptable and desirable by them. What we overwhelmingly found during our interviews is that the bareboat yacht charter companies wanted to see lots of practical sailing experience in addition to theory knowledge. For this reason we created a free online sailors logbook allowing students to enter their past experience in a manner with which the charter companies were familiar and in a similar manner that the United States Coast Guard require when applying for a captain’s license. Then combining the theory courses that were completed with the practical experience we were able to electronically create and display a very useful sailing resume and thus sailing certification.

Thus the NauticEd sailing certification inherently contains more information about the student’s real knowledge than any other sailing certification because in order to get the certification, a student must fill out their practical experience logbook. With other certifications, if you do a weekend class you can get a certificate and the charter companies said to us that that was not enough to allow a client to take out a boat. The NauticEd certification covers everything a yacht charter company needs to know.

So in summary, and perhaps tooting our own horn a little, NauticEd has the best sailing courses available and the most useful sailing certification when it comes to chartering a bareboat yacht.

Learn more about NauticEd’s sailing courses.

 

 

My vision for NauticEd is to provide the highest quality sailing and boating education available - and deliver competence wherever sailors live and go.
Grant Headifen
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Last updated on July 12th, 2022