Announcements

Memberships

Join the club and sail a beautiful cruising sailboat on your schedule.

Don't settle for the high costs of owning a boat and spending your time and effort maintaining it. With unlimited 48 hour access and advanced scheduling on line, you spend your time doing one thing: Sailing !

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Sailing Lessons

Learn to sail with confidence with ASA sailing Lessons.

We are a certified ASA Sailing School offering private lessons in Basic Sailing, Coastal Cruising, Bareboat Cruising, Coastal Navigation, Docking, and Catamaran Cruising.

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Captained Charters

Private sailing cruises with just you and your loved one(s)

Treat your family, friends, or that special someone to a spectacular sunset, moonlight, or daytime cruise on beautiful Lake Travis. Just sit back and relax, or join in the sailing. It’s your charter!

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Caribbean

Adventure Learning Cruises give you real life, hands on, practical cruising experience.

Learn by doing as your sailing adventure takes you offshore and to out of the way islands while you learn the real life, practical aspects of cruising from an experienced Captain.

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Welcome to Outbound Sailing

Whether it’s membership in our Sailing Club, ASA Sailing Lessons, Captained Charters, Sailboat Rentals or Caribbean Adventure Learning, Outbound Sailing offers everything you need for you, your family, and friends to enjoy the sailing lifestyle on beautiful Lake Travis and around the world.

Our Sailing Club provides you with full access to a beautiful sailboat for a monthly fee that is not much more than slip rent. It’s the easiest, and most economical way to enjoy sailing on Lake Travis. Imagine having all the fun of owning a sailboat but without all the time consuming hassles that go along with ownership.

World class instructors teach all the ASA Sailing School courses from Basic Sailing to Bareboat Chartering, Coastal Navigation, Catamaran Cruising, and Advanced Coastal Cruising. You can even take your advanced courses while you cruise the US, Spanish, and British Virgin Islands on one of our Caribbean Adventure Learning cruises.

Our Captained Charters will treat you to a wonderful daytime or sunset cruise on Lake Travis. Our charters are private, so it’s just the two of you, or your group, enjoying a peaceful, relaxing time under sail.

Do you have visions of chartering a sailboat in exotic locations around the world? We’ll teach you all the required courses, and Our Caribbean Adventure Learning course will give you 9 days of live aboard, hands on experience that will prepare you to charter with knowledge, skills, and confidence anywhere in the world you want to go.

So come on in and check out our site. You’ll be really excited by what we have to offer you!

Practical Navigation – 3 day Classroom Course – Includes ASA105 certification

There is a desperate need for sailors and other boaters to learn how to navigate. Some courses that I see offered are simply academic, extremely dry, and of not much practical use. On the other hand, using electronic navigation without understanding the fundamentals of navigation is destined to failures of many kinds.

As an ASA Instructor I have been teaching ASA105 – Coastal Navigation and Piloting – for many years. It is a wonderful course for learning the concepts, the principles, and the methods of classical navigation. We used paper charts, parallel rules, dividers, etc and it was a laborious, yet satisfying, enterprise. But that is not how people navigate today. At the other end of the spectrum is the modern mind which immediately says “there’s an app for that”. That is absolutely true and unfortunately, they buy one of the many available apps, install it on their phone, and off they go “navigating”, much to their peril.

I developed my Practical Navigation course to address this problem: On the one hand you have extremely important information in classical navigation that is very difficult to put into practice. On the other hand, today it is frighteningly simple – get a phone, a nav app, and a captain’s hat, and presto chango, you’re a navigator. There is a huge gap here, and I’m afraid many boaters will fall into it.

In this course we will look at practical things that we can do as sailors to take advantage of the electronics available to us, but not to get lulled into a false sense of security. We will learn the basics of classical navigation so we can understand and utilize the benefits of our electronic charts and instruments, without losing sight of their limitations.

Outbound Sailing Community

In our ongoing commitment to help our students maintain their sailing skills we are introducing a new program we call Outbound Sailing Community.

You may know of our Monthly and Bareboat Memberships, Pico rentals, our Refresher courses, Carib trips, and other skill maintenance programs we offer. This is a bit different. It also brings a more social aspect to your sailing and will result in more opportunities for you to go sailing with other students.

The primary purpose of this Community is to help our students get out on the water so you can practice and improve your sailing skills. But it will also introduce you to other sailors with similar interests and objectives, it will build sailing relationships, and you will have more opportunities to get on a sailboat. Several of our Members, Instructors, and other sailors who have boats at Sail & Ski Marina have expressed an interest in skippering these events and expanding their sailing networks, so you might find some more opportunities there. It’s amazing how much you can learn just by hanging out with other sailors.

Starting out, we will be offering Community Sailing 2 to 3 times per month with the typical sailing time being about 2½ to 3 hours. The cost is $25 per person. We will be using Boomerang, which gives us plenty of room for the skipper and 5 students. Each person will get time at the helm and crew time, and the skipper will accommodate requests for training in particular areas of sailing or seamanship.

ASA strongly suggests that 101 students get 24 hours on the water sailing practice before taking 103, and that 103 students get 80 hours sailing before taking 104. This is very difficult to achieve, but we are committed to helping our students get as much practice as possible before the next class.
The program is open to all of our students who have taken 101 with us and are currently registered for, or have already completed, 103.

Save 20% on private, Captained charters

SAVINGS! – 20% off our captained charters.
It’s just you and your guests enjoying a spectacular cruise on a beautiful 31 foot Catalina sailboat. Daytime, or amazing sunset sailing.
Click here for more info

Caribbean Adventure Learning – can it get any better than this?

We’ve been super busy with our Carib trips, despite covid. In Jan 2021 we went to the Bahamas. In Jun we did two incredible back to back trips to the US Virgin Islands, and in October we were back again spending lots of time in the pristine anchorages of St John. Our May 2022 trip took us to the BVI which was our 8th time down there. As usual, it was perfect. Not a surprise!

On the Bahamas adventure, we discovered that one of our crew, David Buono, is an amazing photographer/videographer. Check out this absolutely incredible video!

More Classes Added – check the calendar on our Lessons page

Sailing is getting more and more popular on Lake Travis, and we have everything you need to get out on the water and capture the breeze.

We have added more courses to our calendar so it’s easier than ever to get the training you need to start sailing. Here’s the link. It just takes a click to get started!

https://www.outboundsailing.com/sailing-lessons/#schedule

Coastal Navigation (ASA 105) now available online

ASA 105, Coastal Navigation

Learn practical navigation on inland and coastal waters, including chart reading, piloting, rules of the road, tides and currents, and more. Includes both echart and paper chart training. This course is a prerequisite for ASA 106, Advanced Coastal Cruising.

Course Length & Prerequisites

You can reasonably expect to spend approximately 40 to 60 hours on this course at your own pace. The number varies based on how much optional material you choose to cover. You have the option to control how much work you do during each session. There are no prerequisites for this course.