April 1 will start season eight of Captain Ed's Sailing, since retiring from the Gillette corporation, as well as my last summer teaching basic navigation, for the Boston Harbor Sailing Club in 2005.

 I have now taught at least three hundred different people the basics of operating a sailboat, as well as doing training deliveries of owners boats along the whole coast of the United States, as well as off shore to the USVI.

 I  average around four trips per week, doing both individual basic sailing classes  as well as family learn to sail, and private charters.

  This year we will be adding The SPOT GPS tracking device to our trips. This will be an added safety feature that would enable the coast guard or towing company to pinpoint our location in case of an emergency. The SPOT will also allow folks to follow the track of the boat during our classes on their computers at home, as well as to interact with us through Facebook .

 Click here to see a sample of the SPOT as I do errands for a few days. Keep in mind that the SPOT only holds information for 7 days back. The SPOT is on the dash board of my car.

 I want to thank everyone for their support of Captain Ed's Sailing, from taking sailing lessons, to just reading, and forwarding my newsletters to family, and friends.

 Since weather is the biggest obstacle of my business I thought that I would talk about how I look at it, to give you some insight what summer weather looks like from my perspective.

 First we keep it as safe as we can and still be able to get out on the ocean when we can. If we are looking at just lousy weather no one wants to go out in that especially me. If we are looking at posable thunder storms we take a look and see what area they are talking about. For isolated storms I will show you how to sail around them, we could, and have been hit by them, as they are part of sailing, and summer, they usually last around 20 minutes or so. We turn the boat so that the storm hits the rear starboard quarter and the wind usually blows us out of the storm.

There are three weather sights on the computer that I use, that has kept us safe so far.

Wunder Ground Weather, Maine Harbors, and Passages Weather. 

Wunder Ground Weather, and Maine Harbors, both give a nice local picture of the weather, including the direction of the weather, including radar. I like Maine Harbors while I am north of Long Island Sound. I use Wonder Ground Weather all along the coast. Passages Weather gives an in depth look at the wind and the waves showing the heights and directions of each. You can get much information from this sight, it was a great help during our resent trip to the USVI this past fall. I spend a good part of each day monitoring each of these sights during the summer especially Maine Harbors where I also get my tide information.

Here are the links to those sites

Maine Harbors http://www.maineharbors.com/

Passages Weather http://passageweather.com/

Wunder Ground Weather http://www.wunderground.com/