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ABOUT US

ABOUT NARRAGANSETT SAILING SCHOOL

Narragansett Sailing School offers sailing lessons and coastal cruising coaching at our Rhode Island based sailing school. We seek to ease the minds of new sailors by offering classes that boost confidence, both in helping our clients determine whether or not to purchase a boat of their own, and in encouraging students to gain the confidence to sail that new boat independently and safely after purchase.

We also offer courses for experienced sailors, designed to hone one’s skills and fill in any knowledge gaps. Whether it’s spending a night on the sailboat at anchor or testing your skills offshore for the first time, Narragansett Sailing School offers a safe, encouraging environment in which to gain those skills.

We have spent a lot of energy crafting a formula where folks can “test the waters” however they would like without having to break the bank. At Narragansett Sailing we offer a multitude of different paths to sample sailing and see if you and/or your family thrive on the water without having to make a big, upfront financial commitment.

Come sail with us!

WHY CHOOSE US

So you have the itch to learn to sail or further your skills?!

How Narragansett Sailing School is different than the rest:

  • Our carefully crafted teaching methodology
  • The boats we use
  • Our small class size
  • The number of days of our classes
  • We have been awarded ASA Instructor of the Year multiple years
  • Our instructors
  • Our Women Teaching Women program

There are plenty of good sailing schools around, each with different philosophies and different methods of teaching the appropriate knowledge and building confidence. That said, the two main accreditation organizations, US Sailing and the American Sailing Association (ASA), do not dictate to a school HOW to teach; they do, however, both provide standards of WHAT to teach. The HOW depends on the philosophy of the individual school, and that HOW varies a lot in HOW it is employed.

Here at Narragansett Sailing School we are an ASA certified facility and teach coastal cruising from the get-go. In an effort to get you comfortable with a cruising boat more quickly, we start our students out on a 30’ sailboat with wheel steering and an inboard diesel engine, which to many is more intuitive than a smaller boat steered with a tiller. We utilize an integrated system that not only will teach you how to sail, but also offers a variety of boat options on which to hone those skills.

After certification through our classes, you can rent a boat for a day or a week, or charter increasingly larger boats as your confidence and skills grow. You can also join ASA’s captained Flotillas and rent a cabin for a week.

HOW OUR TEACHING IS DIFFERENT

We are first and foremost a CRUISING oriented school, where you will learn to sail without an intense initial focus on precise sail trim. We employ a sailing methodology that utilizes fixed boom position, which allows students to maintain an awareness of wind direction and not get bogged down in adjusting the sail constantly for maximum efficiency. The beginning students are then able to focus on all of the other details necessary to learn (the more advanced students play with sail trim and sailing efficiency in the later courses). For our beginners, think of it as learning to sail with training wheels.

We suggest that you only need to know five things to make a sailboat go, and we can teach you those five things in about an hour. That means that by the afternoon of you first day, you are sailing the boat around the harbor, understanding the basics. It does not mean that on day one you know how to make the boat stop, or what the buoys mean, or which way you need to pass another boat…those are the things we teach on day two and three of ASA 101. Some schools say they can teach you the sailing standards in two days. We believe that our students can be exposed to sailing in the first two days, but that the final third day is critical to pull everything together into one, comprehensive picture.

We are a hands-on school. Our average day is two classroom hours and five hours sailing. There is no classroom substitute for doing a maneuver again, and again, and again; that hands-on repetition is a critical part of turning those new skills into intuitive movements. Additional sailing time is available after the class is done if you want to cement your new skills.

Very few schools have an instructor on staff that receives ASA Instructor of the Year, as it is a difficult thing to achieve. The award is based on customer service scores returned to ASA by graduates, and out of the 4,000 certified ASA instructors, only the top 20 achieve this award (or about 1/2 of 1% of all instructors). We can proudly declare that we are home to ASA Instructors of the Year. 

See why we use vintage boats for our beginning sailing.

See why our instructors are different from most schools.

Learn about our women teaching women program.