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From: Joe & Lynn Jelinski (no email)
Date: Fri Dec 03 2004 - 11:12:38 EST
Jerry -
Welcome - there's always room for one more, and there's no lack of opinions
in this group. May I offer a few observations?
The celestial nav class is something you might want to put at a low
priority. Most cruisers don't even bother with sextants any more and I
don't know of any who navigate using celestial (yes, I have one, but have
never had to use it) since the cost of GPS units came down. If you do
decide to do celestial, I'd recommend you get an inexpensive sextant like a
Davis plastic one or the Astra metal one instead of investing a lot in a
really good instrument. And you might want to look into something like the
StarPilot calculator put out by StarPath navigation instead of carrying all
the sight reduction tables and buying a nautical almanac every year.
Getting a ham radio license is a terrific idea. Lots of cruisers are hams,
and there are many radio nets that are only in the ham bands -- although
there are also some in the normal marine SSB bands as well. There are many
local ham clubs, and a lot of them offer the classes as well as the
tests. Check for them on the ARRL website at www.arrl.org. Let me suggest
you select your shipboard radio carefully, since some marine SSB's don't do
ham stuff without a lot of grief, and radios built for ham service are not
legal for use on marine SSB.
The rest of your list seems spot-on for a guy starting out. Good luck.
Joe
At 11:05 PM 12/2/2004, you wrote:
>I am another newbie to this group. But I can already see there is a
>lot of info to be gathered here, so thanks in advance. I am in the
>central valley of California, I have 53 months to go till
>retirement. I am a 49 year old single father with a son who will be
>22 when I retire. I plan to go cruising as soon as the first
>retirement check hits the bank! In the mean time I have set several
>goals to be acomplished prior to that date. If anyone has any
>comments I would greatly appreciate them. The list so far is as
>follows:
>Take USCG coastal nav class (started this week)
>Celestial nav class
>Ham radio license course
>Scuba class
>Marine Diesel repair class
>Blue water sailing class (I have raced J24's but realize Bluewater
>is Different!)
>Read, Read & Read
>Oh yea, I almost forgot BUY BOAT
>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ _/) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Joe Jelinski, KC2KG
s/v Sunshine
411 Walnut Street #1425, Green Cove Springs FL 32043
cell phone (843) 412-4331
See our position on the web at http://www.findu.com/cgi-bin/find.cgi?kc2kg
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