Our Positive Experience with Trawler School Charters

A Chinese philosopher once said: “ a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step”. My wife and I found this to be true when we started to figure out how we could fulfill our dream of island hopping around the Caribbean in our own boat one day.

The first step was to figure out what kind of boat we were going to need. After seeing some pretty horrific photos of express cruisers crushed to pieces in a marina during hurricane, it quickly became apparent that we would be looking at a trawler style of boat. When I first presented this conclusion to my wife, she thought I meant something that looked like Forrest Gump’s shrimp boat and the dream almost ended right there! But when I showed her photos of the kind of trawler I had in mind and how roomy they were inside, we were soon back on the same page.

The next step turned out to be a little harder:  finding a company that would let us charter one of their boats to get some experience. Trouble was, every company I checked required us to send in an application which included a description of our experience. It was a Catch 22 situation: we wanted to get experience but before these companies would let you take out one their boats on your own, you had to have experience.

That’s when I started looking for boating schools that would provide us with the training we needed and would enable us to qualify for a bareboat charter. When I Googled boating schools, there was a listing that caught my eye: an outfit called Trawler School Charters out of Dania Beach, Florida. Being residents of the Canadian Midwest, a boating school in Florida during the Canadian winter sounded very attractive. It was a good opportunity to leave the deep freeze of winter, enjoy some warm weather and beautiful scenery, and get some valuable boating training and experience.

So we went for it and signed up for a 5-day trawler school with Captain Bob Hamilton at the end of March 2010. As we headed down the Intracoastal Waterway, past downtown Miami and out into the beautiful Bay of Biscayne, Captain Bob instructed us on how to operate his 40-foot trawler and the “rules of the road”. He also gave us classes in diesel engine maintenance and tips on buying our own boat. To top it all off, he even made us our meals (my wife really liked that part!). The whole adventure was well worth the money we paid and it gave us the experience we needed to charter our own trawler the following year.

In May of 2011, we chartered our own 32 foot Grand Banks trawler from Southwest Florida Yachts located in the Fort Myers area on the Gulf side of Florida. We spent a glorious 6 days in the Pine island Sound area cruising past Sanibel and Captiva Islands. We visited Cabbage Key, Useppa Island and Gasparilla Island and explored wild and undeveloped Cayo Costa which is only accessible by boat. Since 2011, we have completed two additional bareboat charters through Southwest Florida Yachts. In May of 2013, we chartered a 34 foot Mainship trawler, and this past May we chartered a twin-engined 42 foot Grand Banks trawler. On our last charter, we left the protection and security of the Intracoastal Waterway and ventured into the Gulf of Mexico. As we experienced the exhilaration of cruising on the open sea, we thought back to how we had got our start with Captain Bob and Trawler School Charters four years ago. Thank you Captain Bob for helping to make our dreams a reality.