Learn to sail in Ventura County at Oxnard’s Channel Islands Harbor this Spring. There has never been a better time. We are celebrating five years of operation here by offering the lowest sailing lesson prices ever! That’s right…you can get private sailing lessons at our award winning sailing school and earn American Sailing Association certifications at nearly half off our 2009 prices and at even less cost than when we began our sailing school in 2006.

In addition to our lower lesson rates, for a limited time, we are also offering $1000 off our joining fee to become a Member. When you add this all up, our new pricing saves you thousands of dollars. We want you to keep as much money in your pocket as you can – and – enjoy the SailTime sailing lifestyle at the same time. You can have it all!

The SailTime sailing lifestyle is unlike anything ever before. You sail a new, fully loaded Hunter yacht,

as little or as much as you like each month for a tiny fraction of the actual cost of owning a boat. You pay one monthly fee. No loan payment. No insurance payment. No dock or storage fees. No maintenance fees! When you come down to “your” boat, it is clean and waiting for you. It just doesnt get any better than this! SailTime is perfect as a family pastime on the water. It’s great for couples and it provides an invigorating way for friends to get together and enjoy our remarkable coastal waters.

Sailing lessons are more than just a convenience at our SailTime base. We require that our members be trained to at least the ASA103 level before they are allowed to sail their boat without a Captain on board. Ocean sailing demands a variety of skills and confidence which our private sailing lessons are designed to teach you.

ASA 101 is also known as Basic Keelboat Sailing. In this group of lessons you will spend about 15 hours on the water with your instructor sailing your SailTime boat. In this comprehensive module you will learn all the parts of your boat, rules of the road and basic navigation. You will sail on all points of sail and practice leaving and returning to the dock properly. See the complete course standard here. There is a written test and practical on-water test to earn certification.

ASA 103 is also known as Basic Coastal Cruising. It picks up where 101 leaves off and we like to teach them concurrently so that you are immersed in sailing. This module also consists of about 15 hours of one on one sailing time with your instructor. Time spent deals a lot with safety and seamanship skills designed to create a competent sailor capable of commanding a 33-36 foot yacht in light to moderate conditions. See the complete course standard here. There is a written test and practical on-water test to earn certification.

The great part about SailTime is the end of these first lessons is not the end.

It can be just the beginning. Sailing is the kind of sport that requires you practice it to stay competent. In the “old days” that meant your next step would be to buy a boat. With SailTime that just isn’t necessary any more. Sure, your goal may be to buy a boat. In fact, about 30% of the people who join our program go on to buy their own boat after they gain experience with us. But for about 50% of the people who join, SailTime fulfills their sailing experience entirely. The other 20% were just passing through, which happens too.

Right now, you can pick your dates for lessons. The sooner you get started the looser the schedule is. But there are only so many days available so why not get started now? With our new, highly competitive lesson pricing it’s going to fill up fast.

Tags: asa, learn, lessons, sail, Sailing

It was a rainy morning which is strange in its own right around here when news reports began to make the rounds that a tsunami of some sort might find its way to Southern California. NOAA even set a time of about 12:30 here. So, I set about getting my chores done so I could be ready (to do what I’m not sure) at the boats. At the very least I wanted to see the docks move. The time came and passed and there was nothing that I could see. So after about 15 minutes I drove back home.

As I rounded the corner the water at the harbor mouth looked more like a river than a bay and I dashed up to my room to grab the camera. Any camera. All batteries were dead. Ack. Ran for the VHF. Yup. Dead battery. I plugged everything in and ran onto the deck to watch the show that had at this point subsided.

You can see why the Powers that Be got excited about this Chile Tsunami with this animation of the 1960 Chilean tsunami

The phone rang and it was Mike, a Member of Bodacious who was down at the docks reporting they had just moved significantly. I got enough juice in the VHF to turn it on and hear a “imminent threat by tsunami of 6-8 feet” pan-pan on it. Apparently the peak of the waves was about a half hour away. Soon after, the commercial fishing fleet tore out of the harbor en masse, as did the oil rig tenders and the big CIA looking ship that’s been hanging out at Hueneme lately. I looked down at my truck with a heavy heart and seriously considered getting in and driving away.

Finally, I had enough juice in one camera to catch the “big one” at about 1:45 pm. The water receded about 3 feet from the harbor. That meant over at kidee beach, the swimming area floats, were dry. There was a huge beach below the Jetty and a steep ledge was created where the dredged channel was. The channel itself was full of whirlpools and looked like a running river as the water receded out of the harbor. By now, Mike had come out here and was down on the “beach” in front of my house catching the action as the harbor drained and then in short order, began to fill up again. I think my video will be hard to tell. But I think Mike got some of the dynamics because he was up close on it.

All in all, this was not your average day at the harbor! As soon as I have a charge I will download the video. My heart goes out to the poor people of Chile suffering the consequences of such a massive earthquake.

When I first got to the coast, I had fled from a lifetime of what I referred to as “snow farming”, aka working in the snow skiing industry. I wasn’t going to have to worry much about weather anymore I thought wistfully…after all if there was going to be any weather it was going to be coming from out across that ocean and we would know everything we needed to know about it, right? I really couldn’t have been much more wrong. Weather here. along the upper reaches of the Southern California coast is pretty unpredictable sometimes.

We lie in the lee of North America’s “Cape Horn”, known as Point Conception. It’s interaction with the sea helps create a layer of unknown. To our East lies a mountain range that reaches high alpine altitudes which then spill out onto the Western edge of the Great Basin Desert. To our Southeast are the Santa Monica mountains. They help guarantee our weather will be different than on the other side!

When storms approach from the Northwest as they often do, the location of the low can determine what the outcome may be. It can stay offshore or run down the East side of the Sierra’s creating entirely different storm situations.

Today, the “Dock Commodore” and I had to make the tough decision to cancel our monthly Full Moon Frolic. It’s a popular Member-run fun event that everyone enjoys a lot. Mind you, the general forecast for our impending storm has been revised three times in three days. When the prognostication was that the system had slowed it seemed like it would occur during the Frolic itself so that was the signal to call it off. I like to caveat any of my predictions by saying, “now it can be nice”.

I’ve been running my amateur weather station here for some years now and continue to find new tools to help. The original NOAA graphical is still good to use for comparison against the hybrid SailFlow. Lately I’ve also been using WindMapper and WindFinder. They are good to get to know because in many cases, if you travel to sail they will be what you use. Over on the weather page I also have a variety of jetstream and surface pressure maps as well as radar and hybrid aggregators like StormPulse. Not only are there forecasting tools, you can find out what the weather is like here right now without leaving home.

I’m all set for it to be a beautiful clearing evening tomorrow now that we’ve made our predictions. But I feel better making the call to give people coming from near and far a decision in time for them to be able to change their plans.

Tags: storm, weather, winter