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Message: [QUOTE="yzeater, post: 658101, member: 23376"] Hey guys- My dad and I are looking at adding a new hobby to our list...sailing. We have a friend who used to own a ~30' that we went out on a few times on lakes and such. Then when in the Bahamas this year we rented a hobie (not quite a real sailboat), and played around with that for a while. But most recently we went racing with a guy my mom works with. He has a new Beneteau First 36.7 (it's not a cruiser, it's designed for racing). Every wednesday they do a ~2hr race in Maryland that has 50 or so boats. Unfortunately the most wind we got the first 110 minutes was 3.7 knots. But (!) it was still awesome. I was working the halyards in the pit, and that was amazing. We learned to tack (you might think you'd tack less freqeuently if you're not moving, but it's not so), and did it 30 or so times. A storm was coming in when we were 10 yards from the turning point buoy, but in half an hour we couldn't make any progress on it. Then the storm came in. 38.5 knots of wind. Lots of rain, lots of lighting. It was a little scary (we turned on the engines and headed in at this point), but definitely exhilarating. So...we went to Annapolis that weekend to check out the boats and look into sailing schools, and we learned some good stuff. They've got two day classes at the Annapolis Sailing School where you can recieve the qualifications to take out one of their 30'ers. Then they offer group cruises, where there will be a dozen boats of new sailers and a couple instructors in motorboats to help out. The current plan is to going racing with the friends again, take the class, then look at purchasing a 37' cruiser at some point next year. We saw quite a few Jenneau's in Annapolis, and they looked like good boats, anybody know these? So What? I wanted to get some feedback on the sport, maybe hear some of your stories. Let's talk about sailing (we can use nifty words like spinnaker and shrouds ;)) -Stephen [/QUOTE]

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