This article was written by Kim Lewis of the Archimedes and originally appeared on her blog.

One thing notable about most cou­ples who take to boat­ing is that when it comes to dock­ing (or gen­er­ally nav­i­gat­ing in tight quar­ters), you’re most likely to find the male at the helm. Note that I didn’t say all, as we have encoun­tered cou­ples where this was not the case at all, it’s just that gen­er­ally speak­ing, it’s the guy who takes the boat into the slip, and the gal who’s stand­ing ready to tie up ashore.

Enter the WOW or Women On Water course offered at the Grand Banks Ren­dezvous, a very pop­u­lar 2 hour course where women can, among other women and in a calm, stress-free envi­ron­ment, learn the sim­ple steps for bring­ing a boat in to a dock. North­west Explo­rations gra­ciously pro­vided the Tyee, a 42′ Grand Banks, for the classes, and Byron Richards served as instruc­tor for most if not all of the sessions. The classes are so pop­u­lar that they fill well in advance of the ren­dezvous with wait lists in case of openings.

For my class, there were five of us, a mix of sin­gle and dual engine trawler own­ers, one with thrusters.  Byron went to great lengths to make it easy for each of us prac­tice the skills we would need to use with our own boats, even while we were tak­ing the class on a boat with two engines — he’s a very calm, patient, accom­mo­dat­ing man (thank you, Byron!)    For a cou­ple of us who were for­mer sail­boat own­ers, han­dling a trawler is quite a bit dif­fer­ent — the boat is so much heav­ier, the wheel doesn’t seem to have as much effect as you’re used to, and hav­ing two engines is quite a change.   For those who have bow and/or stern thrusters, Byron wanted to be sure they learned how to dock with­out them — just in case.   The gist of the train­ing is this — use your engine(s), for­get the wheel (except in a few select cases).  And we all prac­ticed mov­ing away from the dock as well,

For me, the hard­est thing is still to resist the urge to brake too early when headed at the dock — but I real­ize that it’s impor­tant for me to know how to dock the boat in case Rusty is ever unable to do so.   If we ever have an emer­gency on the boat and need to get to port in a hurry, I’d much rather be able to bring the boat in quickly on my own than have to call and wait for help.   This way we’re just that much more self-sufficient, and I like that.