WORKSHOPS
Each year we offer JKU, a 4-day blue water workshop that is classroom based but very hands on. We also offer a 4-day Celestial and Natural Navigation workshop that includes world-wide route planning. Our 2-day Cruising Boat Buyer’s Workshop helps clarify what makes a boat a capable blue water cruiser. These workshops are held at Spring Cove Marina in Solomons, MD.
We also offer 5-day “On-Site” workshops that combine classroom work with lively days sails aboard Quetzal and great travel experience. We have conducted “How to Cross the Atlantic,” workshops in the Azores and “How to Cruise the Caribbean Workshops,” in Antigua and Grenada.
Our workshops reflect our sailing philosophy and blend hard won insights and a wide swath of knowledge gleaned from a lifetime at sea. We share useful, current, unvarnished information that makes offshore sailing safer and more enjoyable. We are “out there,” sailing thousands of miles every year, and these blue water miles shape the content of every workshop, there’s nothing canned, stuffy, or old fashioned about what we do.
John Kretschmer Workshop Schedule 2024
Best viewed in landscape mode on mobile devices. Scroll right to left to see full table.
John Kretschmer Workshop Schedule 2025
Best viewed in landscape mode on mobile devices. Scroll right to left to see full table.
I could go on and on about the multiple Kretschmer seminars and workshops my wife and I have attended over the years, including offshore safety and celestial navigation. But that would be only an objective listing of the unlimited universe of information available in this internet age. The value-added features that John brings to that generic information pool are his passion and his storytelling, which, come to think of it, kind of go hand in hand. His passion unwittingly draws you in to his often humorous storytelling, leaving you with the belief that you CAN achieve your dreams despite sobering obstacles. That’s the thing, I think, more than anything else, that is unique and powerful about John: his ability to inspire. To do big things, you need big inspiration.
After a decade of preparing, starting from scratch, my wife and I were poised to make our first double-handed, non-stop, week-long passage across a thousand miles of open ocean. Though we had many coastal miles under our belt in all kinds of weather, still, this passage from Bermuda to Antigua would be different: more fatiguing, more exposed, a new high-bar for us. I wondered if we were really ready.
I emailed John from Bermuda as we awaited a weather window and asked him what he would do. His sparse reply wasn’t very informative or helpful except for his priceless parting shot, “You guys are ready for this.” At that stage of our early cruising years, that was the last piece of the puzzle that completed the picture.
And that’s when we finally believed it, and off we went, riding upon the swells as if upon his shoulders, yet all on our own. All we had was a decent boat and a big dollop of confidence.