Route into sailing.

[maby]

Definitely buy something and learn by sailing it. My only qualification to that would be to observe that sailing boats and motor boats handle very differently and the Solent area is very crowded with some very strong tides - think carefully about where you are going to moor it at least for the first few months of ownership! A crowded marina on the tidal Hamble or in Cowes might not be the best place to learn close quarters manoeuvring by trial and error.

 

[Dab]

Although you say you are not a fan of formal training, unless you can find someone to crew for then courses can be quite a cost effective way to get on the water. If you want to get a boat and base it in the Solent, then the best preparation for that would be sail in the Solent. Chartering a boat in the Solent will probably range from from £500 per weekend or midweek in the winter to £1000 in the summer. You may need more qualifications than you have now between you and you might want more than two of you, at least to start with. If you do a course the going rate is £100 per person per day, and you might be able to find a Day Skipper/Comp Crew course run over 3 weekends which will save you using up holiday time. The benefits are that there is a reasonable degree of assurance that the instructor knows what he is talking about and will start you off with good habits, you will learn quite a bit form seeing how the other students do things and you should also end up with some tickets which will smooth you way to charter if you that later on. You can also do weekend milebuilders to build up experience and visit more places.

You may prefer one to one tuition from someone experienced, but is that on their boat and how good are they at passing on their experience or do on you boat. I would have thought that buying boat and then learning as you go on is quite a high risk approach - how do you know what sort of boat you want before you have sailed a few and any mistakes you make will damage your boat instead of a school one.