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wrote:

Jere Lull wrote:
I am a self-taught sailor, competent on a smaller sailboat (21-foot
daysailer), been sailing for a few years.

I would like to enroll in a sailing school with the goal of eventually
being qualified to do a bareboat charter of a larger boat (prob a 35')
from Charleston, SC to Bermuda and back.

Can anyone recommend a good sailing school either in NC or SC that
will best enable me to achieve this goal?

Bareboating certification, as far as I can tell, is your charge card.
They let me take a 50' boat out even though my primary boat was a 21'
MacGregor, about as close as you can get to a dink in a boat that can be
slept in. (I've done about 30 weeks' chartering since.)

That's not what I've heard about bareboat charters at all. My
understanding is that one must prove he has experience skippering the
same size boat as he wants to charter.

I agree with Jere. If you have the bucks, you can pretty much charter
what you want.

Doing
specialized course work is pretty much wasted money except for your
personal comfort.

What do you mean exactly? All of the big sailing schools I've
researched offer a bareboat charter course. How else am I going to
get the experience I need (short of having a buddy with a 35' boat,
which I don't).

That's one way of them making money. They will be glad to take your
money and give you the course, which may or may not make you really
competent to charter.

Let me put it another way.

I knew almost nothing about sailing. My husband (who learned to sail
knockabouts at the USNA) wanted to buy a sailboat. We did two crewed
charters. Then we bought a boat which is called a CSY 44, but is
really about 50 feet and weighs 37,000 lbs.. My husband's idea was
that we could teach ourselves without paying a whole lot of money to
bareboat (and I'm sure he could have done it if he had been willing to
pay) or to do a bareboat course.

I wanted a bit more than that, so I took the beginning course, and the
advanced beginner course at a sailing school, and then we took the
CGAux Boating and Coastal Navigation courses. The rest has been in
the school of hard knocks.

Chartering to Bermuda is, in my opinion, a waste even if you can find an
outfit that'll let you do it.

Why would an outfit refuse to "let me do it"?

Why would they want you to take a boat out into the Atlantic for 3
weeks?. How would you get in touch with them if something went wrong?
They don't want to lose their equipment. If you really want to go to
Bermuda on a sailboat, volunteer to crew for someone.

After a few hours, it's mostly boring.

Our goal is to do quite a bit of international cruising. I'm sure a
lot of that is "boring" too, if you define boring as open-ocean
sailing. We don't. But whatever floats your boat.

If you want to do international cruising, the stuff between big pieces
of land is really easy. It's the stuff around the edges of the land
that's hard. That's what you have to learn.

There's a reason that the charter operations are where they are.

And that reason is...?

That there is somewhere interesting to sail to without endangering the
boat.
grandma Rosalie