Floridaze Sailing

Captain Bob Patroni owns and runs the school: a USCG-licensed, advanced ASA instructor with more than thirty-five years of sailing and years as a college professor, which shows in the format. A second instructor, Bob Kriegle, also USCG-licensed and ASA-certified, teaches alongside him. Everything is private, capped at two students, on a flexible schedule that usually starts around nine in the morning, aboard a 32-foot J Boat (or a Wavelength 24) out of Sabine Marina on Little Sabine Bay.

The certification track runs Basic Keelboat (101) as a three-day course through Basic Coastal Cruising (103), Bareboat Cruising (104), Coastal Navigation (105), and Cruising Catamaran (114), with multi-course combos at package rates and refresher days by the day. The other half of the menu is deliberately test-free: half-day and full-day leisure lessons for vacationers who want to learn without a curriculum, a performance class on spinnaker work, and the school travels to teach aboard your own boat.

Charters fill the rest of the calendar, sunrise through sunset on Santa Rosa Sound and Pensacola Bay, and Captain Bob is licensed to perform weddings and burials at sea, which is the full arc of maritime officiating from one dock. He shares Sabine Marina with Emerald Coast Yachts; between the two of them, Pensacola Beach is unusually well taught. The 101 carries an ASA Veterans Sailing Education Program discount for veterans, active military, and reservists.