FIRST STEPS TO BLUEWATER

YOU CAN GET INTO WORLD CRUISING FROM A STANDING START AND EXPERIENCE THINGS NO OTHER TRAVELLERS DO. CATHERINE LAWSON AND DAVID BRISTOW TALK TO FOUR COUPLES WHO PROVE IT

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All the luckiest kids I know spent their childhoods messing about in boats. They had water-loving parents and garages filled with glassfibre toys, and sailed their dinghies and raced with the wind across bays and lakes at every chance they had. Some grew up and bought boats of their own, while others - like me - were grown before the sea called our names.

There are lots of ways that people get into sailing, at all ages and stages of life. Some of us begin in the classroom, taking lessons with seasoned instructors, while others find the sea the best teacher and do their learning on increasingly daring passages. From Greece to Cape Town and across south-east Asia, these four crews share how they came to live on the sea.

LEARNING BY DOING

Marie, Vernon and Eli Deck

Crowther Windspeed 39 Trade Runner Indonesia

Vernon Deck is a gutsy sailor, a renowned snowsports photographer and a down-to-earth New Zealander whose 'Sailing Learning By Doing' YouTube channel entertains more than 34,000 subscribers every week. Viewers tune in because he tells it like it is, and together with his partner Marie (and new baby Eli), showcases the cruising life in all its guises the good and the bad.

Vernon calls himself "a passionate observer and a seeker of adventure", but it's his remarkable self-taught expertise and eagerness to have a go in the first place that has set him apart from the rest.

"I'd never sailed a day before I bought my boat, and I thought I'd just teach myself. I went out with my brother in the Broadwater on the Gold Coast (Australia), pulled out the whole genoa in 30-knot winds, nearly rolled the boat over and thought "That's not how you do it," he says.