d parker wrote:

Yes you scare me, if that's your attitude towards learning without a person
on board to prevent mistakes being made. If you have made it without
injuring someone or breaking boat too much I congratulate you. However,
books only tell you what to do. They rarely tell you what not to do.

Why would I need a person on board to tell me if I was making a
mistake? In my experience real mistakes lead to real consequences that
are pretty obvious. If the only way to detect a mistake is by having
an instructor on board then I would suggest that maybe its not a very
important mistake. Please give me an example of a mistake that:

(1) presents a significant safety risk,
(2) would not be obvious to someone who has carefully read the books
I listed in my other post,
(3) would escape detection without a qualfied instructor, i.e. the
mistake doesn't cause any consequences that would alert an ordinary
person to the fact that something is going wrong.

I would be very interested to see just one example of such a mistake.

Here is an example of a very serious mistake that I doubt is covered in
any course, but which I was aware of from reading books. There is a
certain type of anchor swivel which, if connected directly to the
anchor can fail if there is a strong pull on the rode from
perpendicular to the anchor. You can see the swivel I am talking about
he http://www.reddenmarine.com/site/new...fm?id=SD181206

To use this swivel safely you have to put a shackle on the anchor,
attach the swivel to that, and then attach the chain to the other end
of the swivel. I learned this from one of the books I read, and it was
a good thing since the previous owner of my boat had the anchor rigged
with one of these swivels mounted directly on the anchor. When I was
in Costa Rica I met a woman who lost an anchor in a very rolly and
rocky anchorage because she had one of these swivels incorrectly
mounted. Lucky for her the swivel didn't break until it came time to
raise anchor and she brought up a chain with only a snapped swivel on
the end.

My point with this example is that I doubt something this obscure would
be covered in any standard course, but someone who read a lot of books
would be aware of this issue.

Andy