Terror on the High Seas - part 2

I never thought I would say this, but we hired a Personal Trainer. And although we are not noticeably more buff, nor are we likely to grace the cover of People, we have become better boaters.

Bob Meng runs a service called On Water Training. He is an ex- airline pilot and licensed ship captain. He comes and spends 2 days on your boat and takes you through docking, systems management, maintenance and emergencies. It was incredibly worth it.

We started off with docking (See Terror on the High Seas, Part 1 for an introduction to our docking experiences). We learned to do things we didn't think possible with a single screw. First we pivoted the boat in the marina. Then we moved on to docking - and the first thing he did was have us aim directly at the dock and swing at the last minute, using alternating forward and reverse to swing the stern into the dock. This is wildly different that anything we had done before (coming in at an angle), so we were both fairly certain he was crazed, but damn - it worked perfectly. After we had practiced docking for a few hours, we had both broken out in sweats and our adrenals were the size of grapefruits, so we moved on to boat systems - we went over the boat from bow to stern. We learned an incredible amount about how things worked, and what to look for, etc. Bob tends to be a bit dogmatic (This is my way to do things, and I don't care what else you may have read, my way is the right way), but for the most part, his advice has been right on.

On our second day, we started with more docking, and then went out on Lake Washington. After going through the radar system with us, he suddenly put a pair of goggles over my face that had the top part opaqued, so that you could only look through the very bottom - enough to see your instruments and nothing else. It was very cool. We were in the middle of the lake in full sunlight, but we were effectively running in a thick fog. We really learned to use the radar, so that we knew where we were, and more importantly where the other boats were, and who was headed in our direction.

At the end of the day, we came back to the slip, and did the unthinkable - Nancy backed the Guillemot into her slip under power. It was beautiful, and she didn't hit anything!