Let me second Peter's remarks. A little formal coursework in safety
and survival will cover subjects and possibilities that you may not
have met in coastal cruising. It may also affect your planning to
some extent.

I would also think about medical training. Before our circumnav, my
wife, Dee, took a one week course qualifying her to be a Ship's
Medical Officer (big ships, not boats) at Maine Maritime Academy -- I
suspect you can find the same thing somewhere in Oz. It's offered
with a very different attitude from the typical first aid course --
which says, "stabilize the patient until help arrives in a few minutes
or hour" -- because the time to professional help may be days or
possibly even weeks. What you get is a little vocabulary, some
reference material, and training in such things as starting an IV and
suturing. If you back this up with one of the radio medical services,
you've improved your chances in many emergencies.

GPS is a blessing and a danger. IMHO the most important single thing
you can do to make GPS use safer is to plot every course on a paper
chart, lay out range and bearing on each leg with dividers and
protractor or parallels, then punch the waypoint locations into the
GPS. If the GPS doesn't come up with the same range and bearing on
each leg, you've made a mistake. And, of course, don't trust the
chart, as they are often wrong.

Jim Woodward
www.mvfintry.com

Moores Family wrote in message ...
Good people all...
Thanks for the well thought advice. While I do think of myself as a
reasonably competent yachtsman, I've thankfully never been near a
potentially life-threatening situation, so we'll certainly act on the
suggestion to do some practical sea safety/ survival training.

I learnt my coastal nav the hard way as a kid, finding the position of
almost every sandbank in Moreton Bay by intimate aquaintance before I
found out how to miss them... I'd vaguely thought I'd fiddle 'round
with celestial nav once we were away, but I guess there's always the
possibility that may be too late even very early in the show, so I'll do
something there, too. One of the factors in our decision to retire to
cruising has been the advent of GPS navigation, I'll have to make sure I
don't start taking it for granted...

I'm getting in early with my basic planning as the first major ocean
passage isn't planned until about 2011, but once we go I don't
anticipate coming back for a good many years. We're on the coast in SEQ
at the moment and will be doing a lot of coastal cruising 'til the big
day, but we want to make sure we've got all the bases covered before we
get too far & have to rethink something major.

Thanks again.

John Moores