Hey – thanks for landing here. If you’re looking for a bit of hand-holding or mentoring about sailboats, sailing, maintaining a sailboat, traveling as a family (homeschooing) and more, you’ve come to the right place.
My husband, Simon, and I are on our 5th year of being liveaboard cruisers.
We’ve sailed over 25,000 nautical miles around the Mediterranean, across the Atlantic Ocean, throughout the Caribbean and along the southeast coast of America – all with our young daughter, Sienna, in tow. When we left land Sienna was only 3 ½ years old.
When we started the liveaboard crusing lifestyle we had no clue what we were getting ourselves into. The learning curve was overwhelming. We made so many mistakes – way too often we spent money that we could have saved, made errors that we should have avoided and ultimately reinvented the wheel way too many times.
With so many extensive text-book style boat manuals, sailing forums, YouTube channels and sailing bloggers we got lost. When issues came up we didn’t know where to find the important bit of information we needed.
Sailing books seemed to be overly complicated and confusing.
Responses to questions asked in forums often made us feel bad for asking the question in the first place (duh..how do you not know that?).
YouTube channels can’t be searched so even if you recall seeing a sailing vlog cover something it’s often impossible to find it again!
And sailing bloggers have great content but it’s often hard to find on their website (and I include myself in that! My website has over 400 articles that are very helpful but creating a way that’s easy to find what you need is not so easy).
What I also found once we got into the sailing lifestyle is that there are a whole host of armchair sailors that love to cut you down if you don’t know everything. The sailing world is so full of jargon and even salty seadogs will look at you like you’ve got a third eye when you don’t know the accurate terminology (How dare you ask what reefing means – everyone knows that)!
Looking back, what we needed was to be able to send an email or pick up the phone and call someone.
Sometimes our questions were broad like, ‘what size boat would be best for our situation?’ or ‘where do I start when it comes to homeschooling?’ As time went on, our questions became more specific like, ‘how do we clean our fresh water tank?’ or ‘does our passage plan from A to B make sense?’ or ‘Is this sailing gadget worth the money?’
And the questions, ‘Are we making the right decision? Are we doing things right?’ came up over and over again.
We had a few really go resources that we could go to get questions answered but felt bad asking too many things or taking up people’s time.
We didn’t want to be a burden but we really wanted help.
Eventually, however, the tide turned and instead of seeking answers to hundreds of questions we started answering those that were following in our footsteps. Because of our learning curve, we’ve found answers and offered help, education and insight through our blog articles, YouTube videos, sailing books, guides and…
…Now we’ve started our Sailing Mentoring service to mentor over email and the phone (when not at sea). We’re also offering a two-day Britican Boat Experience for couples and/or families allowing you to see what it’s like to live aboard and pick our brains. We also offer a Boat Buddying Experience where you can join us on your boat as we sail a season. And we offer one-on-one boat handling teaching (yours or our boat).
The Sailing Mentor service is only $250/month unlimited emails and phone correspondence. You’ll save that amount over and over again! For the other services, a bespoke quotation will be created.
The Mentor service is a priority option for those that have questions but don’t want to spend hours and even days looking for the answer.
Whether you’re interested in help on deciding on the right boat, information on costings, how to get educated/skilled enough to get out on a boat, the practicalities of being a liveaboard, passage planning and weather forecasting, anchoring techniques, what’s important to know versus what’s not, important kit needed versus things that are not worth the money and much more. We’ll also be happy to discuss how to set up a travel blog, vlog and make money while enjoying the sailing lifestyle.
Simon and I might not be able to answer all your questions, but after meeting 100’s of sailors and service professionals, the chances are that we’ll know somebody that does.
Please note that there are a limited amount of people that we can mentor at any one time so this offer is available on a first come first serve basis and spaces are limited. Furthermore, it’s important to realize that when we’re sailing or in areas with limited wifi it may take longer for responses.
Interested in any of our mentoring services? Just email me at Kim@SailingBritican.com and we can take things from there.