Most of us will admit that had we not had driving lessons prior to taking the driving test it is unlikely that we would have passed. It is exactly the same with the Yachtmaster exam, how can a candidate possibly be expected to know what is expected of him or her in order to pass the Yachtmaster without having had some sort of training.

As a result of my long experience as an RYA Instructor and Examiner for sail, the training that I give in preparation for the Yachtmaster exam is exactly what is required for candidates to reach the required level of competence to pass the exam.

Many people who take the exam are extremely nervous and do not perform in examination conditions nearly as well as they are capable. The techniques that I use to teach people boat handling skills quickly builds both ability and confidence, which transform someone with poor to medium ability into someone who can handle a boat under sail and power in all conditions with an impressive style and even a touch of panache!

It is essential for candidates to be proficient at the coastal skipper / yachtmaster theory syllabus. This course is well known to be difficult and easily forgotten without regular practise. Secondary port calculations, tidal diamonds, collision regulations, lights and shapes are all difficult to learn and easy to forget. My teaching methods for both learning these subjects for the first time or just for revision are such that you will quickly become confident of being able to answer questions correctly on any part of the syllabus.

Probably the majority of Yachtmaster candidates do a preparation course and take the exam in a sailing school boat. But if you have your own boat, which you know well, it makes sense to benefit from individual tuition which will give you the skills that you need to handle your own boat with confidence and safety.

My Yachtmaster Preparation Courses cover the following:

Marina boat handling: In just a day, I can transform your ability from ‘just average’ to ‘deeply impressive’. I thoroughly enjoy this work. It is very satisfying to see my clients now able to handle their own boat with confidence and style - in what previously was a difficult berthing situation.

Out at sea: I give relaxed instruction in all aspects of sailing from sail trim to watch keeping to heavy weather tactics, in real not contrived conditions which builds well-found confidence. Often people make reefing a hazardous exercise, I teach them how to do it when 'hove-to', a much easier and safer way of reefing.

My function: is also to guide candidates into understanding what is important and what is not. Then that one percent of the time, when it matters they can still take firm command; but the other 99 per cent of the time they can behave normally, relax and enjoy themselves. This means sometimes allowing such things as helming to be done badly, in their judgement at least as skipper, and not constantly criticising crew, a self-restraint which many people find hard but it is vital if the crew are going to enjoy their sailing and if the skipper is going to command absolute attention when it really does matter.

In addition: to covering all of the Yachtmaster syllabus, I give customised and discreet tuition. My role, as coach and mentor, is to help you build well-founded confidence, to gain increasing pleasure and competence as owner and skipper. I can help you learn things that you won't find in books because they are specific to my experience and your temperament.

My goal: is to help you to become that marvellous thing, a capable and personable skipper, who manoeuvres a yacht with ease and panache, utterly reliable in a crisis and a pleasure to sail with at all times AND most important of all, to pass the Yachtmaster exam.

Where will you go on your RYA Course? - The RYA encourage sailing schools to go on a proper cruise on courses, the Algarve could not be a better place to do exactly that. For more information on cruising in the Algarve click here, and to see my article specifically on the Guadiana river by clicking here. Whilst it may not be possible to go as far as the Guadiana, we will almost definately go to Ria Formosa, to read my article on Ria Formosa click here.

Itinerary - 5 day courses start at 8 pm on Sunday and finish at 5 pm on Friday. Lunch and breakfast are supplied every day, dinner is provided on board only on Monday evening. On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday evenings we eat ashore. Food in Algarve restaurants is excellent and costs between 7.50 euros and 12 euros for a main course. 

Frequency of courses - As will have been realised if you have looked at the menu above &  to the left, I also offer Motor Cruising and Powerboat courses and am generally booked up fairly consistently with these courses, so I am not able to offer sailing courses every week. To be sure of sailing with me when you would like to please enquire well in advance. If I am unable to offer you a course when you would like to do one, I will recommend other schools in the Algarve where you will also receive very good instruction.

RYA Yachtmaster Preparation courses for sail in 2010

Please note:  All the courses shown below actually start at 8 pm on the day before the start date shown in the list below.

March 8th to 12th
March 15th to 19th
March 28th to April 1st
April 19th to 23rd
From May to September I expect to be
too busy with Motor Cruising & Powerboat
courses to be able to offer Yachtmaster prep
courses for sail.
October 4th to 8th
October 18th to 22nd
November 1st to 5th
November 15th to 19th
November 29th to December 3rd
December 13th to 17th

I have a maximum of four people on these courses & when courses are fully booked they will be deleted from the list above

For course prices & any other information on courses please telephone  00 351 965800702 or email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Here are some stories from people who have completed a Yachtmaster preparation course or sailed with me:

James Parnell

I received an email from James Parnell in May 2009 in which he said "We are taking 'Swyn y Mor' our Nicholson 38 from Wales to the Med for a year. We will be in the Algarve in early September. I would like to take the opportunity of preparing for and taking my Yachtmaster exam. My wife Rose would be interested in doing the Day skipper. We will have our 8 year old daughter Rhiannon with us. Is this something that you would be prepared to do ? I replied that I would enjoy to give him a Yachtmaster Preparation course and a Day Skipper course for his wife and we arranged to start the course on August 31st, with the exam on September 5th to give James a full 5 days preparation and to give a Rose a full 5 days for her Day Skipper course.I arranged with RYA Examiner Peter Lightfoot to meet James and I at Faro Marina on September 5th and to be taken out by James to his yacht which we planned to anchor at the anchorage near Faro for the night of September 4th. For the 5 days leading up to the exam, we spent a day doing exercises under engine in Vilamoura Marina and the next four days navigation at sea, pilotage in Ria Formosa plus of course man overboard practise and picking up a mooring. James also practised during several evenings doing passage plans, secondary port calculations and of course lights and shapes. One of the navigation exercises involved finding a small yellow ODAS (Ocean Data Acquisition System) buoy that is marked on the chart 5 miles south of Cabo St Maria, without the use of GPS. James found it by using a bearing on Cabo St Maria lighthouse and having noticed that the buoy was positioned on the 100 meter contour, by doing a tidal height calculation and using his echo sounder.By the end of the 5 days I was confident that James would pass and my parting words were to remind him to use a gybe preventer when sailing off the wind and when doing pilotage to constantly keep an eye on the echo sounder, as an accidental gybe or going aground would result in his not passing the exam.I was not on board for the exam but met James and Rhiannon when they rowed Peter ashore at the end of the exam and was given the news that James had passed and had passed well. I was very pleased, James had worked very hard with me for a week and deserved to pass. In addition he was very well prepared for the exam as a result of his experience prior to doing his yachmaster preparation with me. Successfully passing the Yachtmaster exam is not too different from building a house, you can build a top quality house but if you don't give it good foundations it is not going to stand the test of time. Equally, I can give a client an excellent Yachtmaster preparation course, but if the client does not have some genuine experience prior to doing the course with me then during the pressure of being examined he or she will in one or several ways show their lack of genuine experience during the exam and fail.I asked James, Rose and Rhiannon if he they would mind my writing about my week with them for my web site and I asked if I could include some of the photographs that Rose and I took in my description. They kindly said that would be fine and I also asked James if he would send me details of his sailing experience prior to doing his yachtmaster preparation with me which I have included in this article as follows:
Martin - As requested a short history of our sailing life.My sailing life started at 10 when my best mate’s mother took us sailing on the Deben in Suffolk, he hated it, I loved it and I was never the same again. It took some years before my passion for boats could be realised, 20 years to be precise. I booked into a learn to sail course on a reservoir just off London’s North Circular road. This was quickly followed by the purchase of a GP 14 with my brother in law which we kept on the Norfolk Broads. His sons made good use of it as did I but when they grew up and moved away I bought his share and moved the boat to Brightlingsea. I have always been more interested in cruising than racing and cruising in a dinghy is for the very passionate and very hardy. So I did the RYA courses starting with Competent Crew and then Day Skipper followed by the Coastal / Yachtmaster Skipper Theory course. I became proficient at navigating the kitchen table round Poole harbour but lacked experience. Happily work reunited me with a friend who also sailed. He organised a weeks cruise each year. These 'Lads Trips' as they became known became the foundation of my experience. Owning your own boat is a form of madness and when I realised I could afford, (just), a small cruiser then there was no dissuading me. Our Westerly Centaur was also kept at Brightlingsea and was terrific fun. We took it across the North Sea to Holland several times and did a very interesting cruise up the Thames to Limehouse. Rose, my partner took to this life readily and has always wanted to be involved in working the boat, antifouling, lifting anchors and hauling up sails. We are fortunate too to have the same broad approach to sailing. She is undoubtedly at her best in tough weather. She will take the helm and be completely without fear, long after I have started to think about taking up caravaning! Our daughter was growing, the 2 boys getting big and the Centaur started to get smaller and so was sold. We bridged our boat gap happily and remarkably cheaply by joining a sailing club with a Contessa 32 in Lowestoft and a Barvaria in the Med. We had many weeks exploring the East coast of UK as well as the Costa Brava , South of France Sardinia and Greece.

The madness returned, even more florid than before. We conceived a plan for a year afloat. Our gap year was 5 years in the planning. Our experience of the Contessa vs Barvaria convinced us that old and traditional was best suited to our needs and pockets. A Nicholson 38 seemed ideal, enough space to live aboard, stowage is massive and with a design and build which would look after us in all conditions. The hard cockpit roof serves as a welcome shelter from the UK climate and a convenient bimini for the Med.

We are now 2 months into our year and it is exceeding our expectations. Having Martin on board our boat for a week taught us a lot about her which, we had not discovered and given us more confidence in handling in confined spaces. As always, the learning continues. 

James, Rose and Rhiannon Parnell

I am very grateful to James, Rose and Rhiannon for a very enjoyable week with them on Swyn y Mor, she is a lovely boat and exactly the sort of boat that I enjoy sailing on. My very best wishes to them for the next 10 months as they sail around the Mediterranean. They are writing a blog as they cruise and I shall follow their progress with great interest, to see their Blog click here. My time on board was not just taken up with giving James and Rose instruction, Rhiannon became a great friend and we had a very enjoyable week sharing our common interest in Winnie the Pooh. Finally, well done to Rose for doing so well in her Day Skipper course and my congratulations to James on passing the Yachtmaster exam so well. Also my congratulations to Rhiannon on keeping up with her school work every morning and my thanks to her in particular for her assistance in our 'Rose overboard' simulation when Rhiannon played a very important part by going below to press the distress button on the VHF radio and return with James' lifejackets for him to put on.  Martin.

Mike Paget-Tomlinson

Mike started sailing with me in 1989, in addition to doing the whole range of RYA sailing courses he did several longer passages with me including to the Channel Islands more than once, a cruise to Brittany, Santander back to Poole via the coast of Brittany and many others.

On one memorable occasion when approaching St Helier close hauled in the evening the roast chicken and potatoes flew out of the oven while I was trying to baste them, they landed on the cabin sole near his feet under the chart table, I managed to get it all back in the baking tray & back in the oven without anyone on deck realising what had happened, Mike was vowed to secrecy!

In 1992 he became a Coastal Skipper and in 1999 a Yachtmaster and in 2005 a Cruising Instructor. We have known each other for 20 years and have been in contact recently by email and skype. I asked him recently if he could think of any sailing trips that we did together that he could write about that would be an interesting contribution to my web site, he wrote back very quickly with this story of a delivery trip that we did from Dover to Lymington. It is a trip that I remember well but it is much better told from his perspective than mine. Martin.

Dover to Lymington on board Merak a Contessa 32 on 9th December 1992 by Mike Paget-Tomlinson

I had done many sea miles with Martin on Henry Morgan his Rival 34 over the last three years, and become a coastal skipper, for what that’s worth.
I purchased my first sailing boat a Westerly Corsair, I really wanted a Rival but couldn’t find one that suited my needs and pocket, Paget’s Lady was bought in October 1992 and was based in Lymington Yacht haven. I spent a lot of time living on board preparing her for the trip to the Med in April 1993, learning to sail her in the Solent, but this story is not about Paget’s Lady.

Having sailed at least 1500 nm with Martin I had complete faith in his ability to get us home safely, if a little cold. What I had not bargained for was the drive to Dover, but that is another story!

As I have no access to the log for this trip and it was 17 years ago you will see that the memory still lingers on.

We thanked the fishermen and continued on our way towards the Solent and passing Portsmouth and on course for Southampton, at about this point it must have been getting dark and the tide was turning once again against us, it was very cold, no wind so motoring hopefully nearing the end of the passage, in order to demonstrate to me how to keep out of the tide we kept very close to the beach as we passed the Beaulieu river, and on towards Durns Point, at this point I think we both noticed a fixed red light well out on our port bow. A quick look at the chart showed we were not too far off running into the old submarine defence wall of Durns Point we had been following a contour on the echo sounder I recall thinking that 2 meter contour seemed quite shallow for a 1.5 drought but this was how we kept out of the foul tide.

We were surely right behind a huge breakwater, a quick 90 deg course change to port ( possibly at the time to the left, I am now an RYA instructor) and out to pass the red light close to starboard. Soon after this we were on our way up the river to Lymington with a fair tide, cold and very tired we moored alongside Paget’s Lady in Yacht Haven marina, believe it or not, we actually had to break the ice as we motored in, that’s how cold it had been.

I think I took Martin to the train station in Lymington and he returned to Dover for his car.

The Clinton Family

Phil Thorn

Dear Martin,

It was so very good to meet up with you again last week together with mutual friends and sailing chums. The meeting inspired me to blow the dust off my RYA logbook, which brought back so very many happy memories of the times we sailed together. Do you remember the shy, somewhat nervous student who joined you early in 1994 for YachtMaster Offshore tuition? Your amazing sailing knowledge, combined with patience and encouragement soon gave me confidence, especially when you allowed me to skipper that sturdy Rival of yours `Henry Morgan´ down to the Channel Isles.

You gave me the leg from Poole to Bray and, under your expert guidance, my self-confidence soared. I especially enjoyed the navigation tuition, which you gave me under actual sailing conditions. This seemed so much more sensible than the shore based courses that had been my previous experience. Thanks to you and your expert guidance, as you know, I passed my YachtMaster Offshore exam first time, since when I have had the privilege of sailing with you many times with other students, watching them `blossom´ in the same way as I did. 

Since those happy times, I have owned three craft, confidently sailed the Portuguese coast, the Mediterranean and skipper chartered in the English Channel, the Channel Isles and the Solent, none of which would have been possible without your help and guidance.I find it easier to offer my thanks on paper, as I am a little embarrassed to tell you when we are together! I am sure you understand. However, I hope we will soon have the opportunity of sailing together again.

Philip Thorn, `Fellowship´, Puerto Deportivo, Marina Internacional, Torrevieja, Spain. 

Elsie and John Oliver

"We first met Martin in 99 when we took a Competent Crew Course never having sailed before, and soon found his relaxed but thorough style of teaching, patience, clear instruction, and personable manner in the warm sea off the Algarve coast, the perfect introduction to sailing - he also cooks a mean roast.

We sailed again with Martin in 2002, taking a Coastal Skipper course, his enthusiasm and love of sailing is clearly infections as we are planning to buy our own boat, to live on board for the next few years, making a circumnavigation."

Elsie and John have moved forward with their plans and in March 2004 took delivery of their brand new Oyster 56 which they have named 'Ichi Feet'. The origin of this name has nothing to do with the state of either Elsie's or John's feet, but because 'Ichi' in Japenese means 'First' and this is their first boat.

Following their taking over the boat at Fox's Marina in Ipswich because of a combination of their relative inexperience and the insistance of their insurance company they set off with a professional skipper on a clockwise circumnavigation of Britain with a minor detour to Norway, finishing up back at Fox's Marina four months later with a fairly long 'snag list' for Oyster to attend to.

After a few weeks there and another detour to Belgium they set off for Portugal, where I saw them again in October 2004. Following just a week in Lagos they sailed down to the Canaries and then across the Atlantic with the ARC in December 2004. I met them again on February 7th 2005 when I took over as 'skipper' and we sailed Ichi Feet up to Antigua, where after two weeks very intensive training with me, they both took the RYA Yachtmaster Exam and passed very well.

Following their exam they sailed 'Ichi Feet' up to Newport, Rhode Island exploring the Bahamas on the way, and cruised on the east coast of the United States in 2006. In 2007 they brought Ichi Feet across to the Meditteranean. To read more about my sailing with John and Elsie in the Caribbean click here and to read about their sailing in the Meditteranean in 2007 & 2008 click here. Now in May 2009 and they are preparing Ichi Feet at Malta for sailing in Croatia this summer. They now have their own excellent web site with lots of photographs, to go to their site click here.

Gerard Verdino

"After sailing extensively in dinghies in my teens, I took a refresher and RYA day skipper course with Martin Northey in Autumn 2001. I had great fun, Martin is very entertaining, always has an interesting story to tell and has a wonderful ability to create a congenial atmosphere in the confined space of a sailing boat between people that have never met before. 

On another level, Martin's range of sea-faring experience is very obviously apparent and he inspires confidence. Martin has a very pleasant way of helping people to learn, which is akin to having a mutual discussion about a subject of common interest, rather than a structured teacher/pupil lecture.I enjoyed the time that I spent on the course with Martin, within months I bought a 43ft boat, skippered over 3,500 miles within the next year and Martin remains a friend in regular contact. Not bad for a 7 day refresher course!"

Gerard Verdino

Johanna Robertson

The course was a great experience, a mix of holiday and learning. I had recently bought a Sun magic 44 and was intending sailing it back to Scotland (as a crew member) once I had completed the course. Although I had done quite a bit of sailing previously and had raced dinghies I needed the additional confidence to sail my own boat. The trip to Scotland added to my experience and I have now had several successful outings on the West Coast with my family. Overall the course has proved to be of great benefit to me both in confidence and boat handling skills. Martin believes in ‘hands-on’ and all aspects of boat handling were practiced over and over until we were competent and confident. The relaxed atmosphere and Martin’s calm management skills certainly added to the success of the course.

Stephen Robertson

The story continues because in June 2003 I flew to Scotland and spent a week sailing with Steve, Anne-Marie (his wife) and Johanna. I had a wonderful time sailing with them on their beautiful boat Triskell in the Western Isles from Ardfern.

We circumnavigated the Island of Mull, visited Iona as can be seen in the photograph above and saw some of the most beautiful and unspoilt coastal scenery that I have ever seen. I was a little apprehensive at first because the area is notorious for it's strong tides and navigational hazards in the form of thousands of rocks!

In these sort of waters there just isn't time to navigate just with GPS, so we had lots of fun studying pilot books and large scale charts (of which Steve had plenty) and frequent use of clearing bearings kept us out of trouble. I had very little to do with navigation, Steve and Johanna did it all and did an excellent job of it.

Every night we either anchored or used a mooring, this was cruising as it should be, and I loved every minute of it. The photographs shown were taken during my cruise with the Robertsons and show I hope how much fun we had and how beautiful and unspoilt the Western Isles are. The photograph of me sleeping just shows how much confidence I had in the skipper and crew! The photograph of Steve, Anne-Maria & Joanna sitting on a dinghy was taken on Iona. The one of Anne-Marie, Johanna and I was taken when we were celebrating our first landfall at Tobermory. The one of Johanna and I was taken whilst we were bottling local water. The Yachts on moorings are at Ardfern. The island is Staffa and the cave is Fingal's Cave which was immortalised by Mendelssohn in 1829 as it was the inspiration for his overture of that name.

Martin.