This question is partly about my wife. I've been sailing all my life, including quite a lot of off shore sailing, and a 6 month stretch of a circumnavigation.
My wife has not. We've done a few week long cruising trips, moored every night, etc. She's quite nervous of sea due to lack of experience with it, and gets sea sick. She's quite excited about our sailing trip though, and our plan is to do fairly costal sailing for first 6 months of the trip.
The question is really how much sailing experience do BOTH of us need before we head off.
I feel pretty comfortable in my ability to single hand the boat.
I feel comfortable in my wifes ability to single hand the boat if she needs to get us to a port in an emmergency. - Im not sure she'd be able to dock the boat by herself though.
When people talk about a boat being too big to handle, is the issue at sea, or in harbour. At sea, it seems to be its like having a big SUV instead of a small car from a ease of handling point of view. I know that the sails need attending to, but if its roller reefed headsail and a slab reefed main - sailed conservatively, is it really that big a deal. From a physical point of view, my wife is the same size as elen mccarthur. She seems to be able to hoist and reef a fairly massive main by herself. I know shes in a league of her own when it comes to sailing experience, but if the issue is how much sail is too much to handle????
Boat size versus sail size. We've sailed in the med on 50 footers (beneteaus, gib seas etc) with smaller sails than the 38 footer that I race or the 40.7 that I used to race on so surely a cruisy bene 50 is easier to handle from a SAILING point of view than a bene 40.7?
On a mooring point of view, predominantly we will be anchoring, and my experience of anchoring a 50 footer is the same as my experience of anchoring a 40 footer. Retrieving a 50 footers
anchor by hand if the
winch breaks would be more effort though I agree, but as a general issue - seems to be that it is not THAT much of an issue?