JKU BLUE WATER WORKSHOP for SERIOUS PASSAGE MAKING

The Blue Water Workshop at John Kretschmer Sailing University is all about you getting real experience. Let’s be honest, most cruising seminars present general information and are as much a forum for hawking products as for serious learning. They’re overcrowded and frequently boring. We promise you, JK Sailing University will not be boring! However, it will be a lot of work.

Some of the Topics Covered

This is truly a hands-on workshop. There will be as much time spent on boats as in the classroom. The workshop will have you crawling through bilges to learn about boat structure, and esoteric things like why bilge pumps are often installed to set up dangerous back pressure flows. We will teach you how to bleed a diesel engine, because every cruiser has to know how. You will make sail repairs and rebuild a winch. In this experience, you will even launch a life raft from a boat, not on a classroom floor, and “step up into it” from the water. Too often, cruisers build a false sense of security by only learning these skills in the classroom. This stuff is easy in the classroom. Undeniably there are a lot more variables involved in–and leading up to–these scenarios in the real world.

Logistics of the JKU Blue Water Workshop

It is not easy. Lively discussion is a key component of the workshop. You don’t sit and listen, you participate. This is the workshop serious potential cruisers have been longing for and I am really quite excited to present it to you. This is a weekend when it is okay to talk endlessly about boats, cruising, storms, etc. The four-day format allows enough time to cover topics in detail and is also manageable to schedule as a really long weekend. Additionally, by starting at 1300 on day 1, folks can fly in early that morning and avoid a fourth night in a hotel.

A Few More Perks for You

Captain Bob Pingel, an experienced sailor who writes the Boat Doctor column for Sailing Magazine, assists me with the workshop which adds great value for you. Course materials include a complete manual and a tee shirt. You will also qualify for free access to my consulting service.