East Anglian Sea School Ltd

unfortunately my experience doesn't tally at all with previous reviews. i did a 5 day competent crew course over 2 weekends in June 2022 with an instructor named Peter. the teaching style was shocking: quiz-style questions were asked before giving any explanation, leaving you feel unprepared and hopeless for not knowing the answer (despite this being supposedly a beginner course). key syllabus topics, like knots, were never demonstrated and instead I was given time to learn them from a book. thankfully I found YouTube videos to practice, since I was then asked to demo I had mastered them! during the five days on board, the instructor never once cooked any meal nor did any washing up; he split the tasks between the 4 students on board and was then simply served (never even made coffee/tea, but asked several times for tea/coffee to be served!). on the first day, he told us he needed his own private cabin, leaving one of the students to sleep in the galley. the boat we were on needed attention: the hob was not working, and the oven had not been cleaned in ages. the heads smelled horrendously of damp (thankfully the facilities at the marina were top notch!). at the end of the first weekend, Peter told us to clean the boat ready for the next school - which happened to be us again the following weekend (needless to say, he didn't help with the cleaning either). all in all, my experience with this school could not have been worse!
Aug 20th, 2022

A superb sailing school. One of the best in the UK. Have mostly used for shore based courses and just the Powerboat Level 2.
Aug 16th, 2022

I attended the Day Skipper course in June, and unfortunately everything was not as described in the other reviews. The yacht was quite good, but badly maintained. The heads/toilets were almost unusable due to the latrine smell: leaving the head/toilet door open was a serious issues as all the galley was quickly inhabitable. The ropes of the boats (halyard, outhall and reefs) were impregnated with salt and they were difficult to handle, as the front sail that was difficult to roll-in back. The instructor Peter was not up to the job as he lacked the main capability of an instructor: teaching. I found him quite unpleasant to deal with, and I did not learn much - as also we did not do much: we stick to the bare minimum in the syllabus. Once he also shouted at me 'not on my boat!!' as I was trying to explain to a newbie what to do, and as the newbie did not know what an outhall was, I said the 'blue rope' that triggered Peter shouting. We also learned that the school has recently changed hands, and from a 'one man' company passionated about sailing it has become a stream-line business focusing on money.
Aug 16th, 2022

I attended the Powerboat Level 2 course over two days in June 2022. Fantastic course. Mark the instructor was brilliant, Enthuastic, patient and informative. Will definitely be recommending this course to others. 10/10
Jun 21st, 2022

Jun 16th, 2022