RYA Day Skipper 

The 5 day RYA Day Skipper practical sailing course is for aspiring skippers who have some yachting experience, and who are proficient on basic navigation and sailing. This course will teach you new sailing skills, practical navigation and taking control over the yacht and your crew during daytime passages.

Course content

Learn to skipper a short passage with the instructor on hand to give advice and teach you new techniques. Experience being in charge, managing your crew and your yacht, while sailing and executing teamwork manoeuvres during day-time.

This course is available as 5 consecutive days and as course divided over 2 weekends of 2 and 3 days.

Amongst other you will learn

• Preparing a yacht for sea, including checks
• Navigation, position fixing, use of plotter and chart work
• Deck work, such as anchoring
• Pilotage for entering or leaving harbours
• Meteorology and practical weather forecasting
• Rules of the road
• Maintenance and repair work
• Diesel engine, including engine checks and fault finding
• Victualling
• Emergency procedures, including the MOB recovery drill
• Yacht handling under power and under sail
• Passage planning and making
• Night cruising

How to prepare yourself for this course

In order to get the most out of your course, we offer you the possibility to do our online pre-course knowledge quiz. The quiz helps you to test your knowledge and to assess whether you need more preparation in some areas. 

Ability after the course

At the end of the course you should achieve a level of seamanship and boat handling up to the standard required to skipper a small cruising yacht safely by day in familiar tidal and non-tidal waters under normal conditions.

What's included

• Tuition by one of our RYA instructors
• Accommodation on board in your own cabin (no sharing)
• C-MASTERS Pre-course knowledge quiz
• All meals and drink on board 
• All mooring and fuel fees
• Free parking at our premises 
• RYA Day Skipper personalised Certificate of Competence

Next steps

After successfully completing this course, we recommend extending your knowledge with some of our RYA specialist shorebased courses, in particular the RYA Radar, RYA Diesel Engine and the Short Range Certificate VHF course, ideally combined with practical training as part of our C-MASTERCLASSES.

The Day Skipper Certificate of Competence can be commercially endorsed for anyone with ambition to find work as a professional crew member.

After building up experience during daytime passage, it will be time to learn making longer passages both during day-time and night-time, by joining our RYA Coastal Skipper course.

Supporting courses

We recommend attending the RYA Day Skipper shorebased theory course before following the Day Skipper practical course.

My overall satisfaction is 10/10

The instructor is superb. The boat is great. This course increased my interest in navigation and in sailing. Overall, I trully recommend this training centre.

I have completed RYA Dayskipper course here. I am really satisfied and plan to continue my sailing path with this school.

-- Sergey --

Overview of all our RYA practical sailing courses