The Federation has created programmes that are culturally enriching from teaching primary school instructors about the maritime culture of the Turks and Caicos, to  hands-on-learning voyages, to investment in the construction of Salt Cay Lighters in contemporary materials.

We  customize a project to your needs. Peruse the list below to get and idea of what we offer:

A basic sailing course on traditional vessels.

Anyone can learn to sail but our emphasis in the Traditional Elements of Sail is on the skillful handling of Caicos Conch Sloops. These descendants of the Bermuda Sloop were purpose built for conch and lobster diving and striking. The vessels sailed with both leg o’mutton and gaff rigs and have long, overhanging booms and no ballast. That takes practice and that is what we preach. Learn the basics and practice. We even move into the area of crew placement to ensure that after the course you will have a place to practice on a Caicos Conch Sloop.

Sailing can provide a lifetime of fun and recreation, but it also requires some basic knowledge and experience. We have observed that the quickest and best way for folks to learn the fundamentals of sailing is by starting out in boats that have some relevance to their lifestyle or heritage. The use of Caicos Conch Sloops is a choice that ensures that bond of place and history, and it is an enjoyable way to spend time.

Our program will get you onto the water quickly, safely, and fully prepared. Under the calm and knowing guidance of our seasoned instructors, you’ll learn the essentials—sailing dynamics, boat rigging and spars, and safety precautions—followed by practical lessons on sailing techniques. Hands-on exercises and drills will take students through getting underway, maneuvering through the points of sail, keeping a course, tacking, returning to a mooring and dock, and much, much more.

You’ll learn to traditional  boats. The Caicos Conch Sloop are suitable for the most timid and the most adventurous of students. We want to take the drama out of sailing—it is a safe and enjoyable sport, and our heavy emphasis on seamanship should go far toward ensuring this goal. You will not find yourself in over your head on a Caicos Sloop. And, you’ll definitely have fun!

When the wind is fickle, you’ll practice rowing and sculling, and there will be daily classroom lessons about charts and navigation, safety equipment and weather conditions, knot tying and heavy-weather strategy. You will work toward handling the Caicos Sloop competently and confidently. Solo sailing will be encouraged, and a variety of more challenging tactical/navigational exercises will be presented. Essentially, this course is about sailing, sailing, and more sailing!

Improving your sailing skills will ultimately increase your enjoyment of the sport. If you have any questions regarding your abilities, please

Tuition: $300.00/ 213.50

Making the Caicos Sloop go fast

The racing tradition in the Turks and Caicos Islands will not die out because we want to compete with our traditional sloops and to do that we need sailors ready to sail them to their utmost potential and to enjoy doing that. There are racers and there are those who just enjoy sailing for the sheer pleasure of it. This course is for racers.

Racing traditionally rigged vessels is a lot different than racing their modern cousins. There is a technique to beating with a gaff or leg o’mutton and thought to be given to tacking around a buoy and consideration for the overhanging boom and weight aloft and tracking without a keel. Those things are to be kept in mind while navigating a course with others wanting to take advantage of your every mistake.

The fisherman, from before, used to race every chance they got and that is normal. That is where racing originated but their boats were rigged for fishing, not racing, and had to either be adapted for racing or left as were, relying upon their readiness for sea and getting out to the product or getting it back to shore. Sloops were not built just to store fish or lobster or conch, but to find them and hunt them and bring them to market. There is a lot of dexterity built into the design and our traditionally designed Caicos Conch Sloops are descendants of that line of thought.

Basic information about the rig will be discussed and put to hands on application. Two Sloops will practice by competing against the other, then exchange members of each crew and pass on what was learned on each vessel. The competition will be to learn more than to beat the other Sloop.

That is what you will learn and practice. The graduates of this course in Racing the Caicos Sloop will, if they wish, be put on a list to crew our Sloops in a schedule of races. You will also be asked, if you want to crew, to assist in a maintenance schedule of the vessels.

Tuition:  $250.00/ 228.94
 

Educators voyaging into experiential education

The Turks and Caicos National Trust, the Department of Environmental and Coastal Resources and the Turks and Caicos Maritime Heritage Federation are pleased to announce a new continuing education programme for secondary school educators on maritime history and heritage in the Turks and Caicos archipelago. This course develops a platform for further research in the areas of maritime lore, skills and techniques. It also brings into relevance the ecosystems involved with traditional food gathering by water and vessel. The curriculum focuses on how seemingly isolated maritime histories that we discover on research expeditions play important roles in the overall development of the Turks and Caicos Islands.

Participating fully in the life and operation of the Sloops, teachers will gain personal insight into the lives of fishermen. Under the guidance of sailing fishermen, the teachers will learn the skills and art of traditional fishing and try their hand at navigational methods used to get around the shoals and reefs both outside and inside the Caicos Bank. These hands-on activities combined with discussion will give the teachers a unique and powerful understanding of Turks and Caicos maritime history and culture.

The teachers will travel from Providenciales to Middle Caicos along fishing routes. There meals will be captured and prepared in the traditional manner. They will stop to overnight at a group voted cay. The next day they will travel back to Providenciales using a different route.

This weekend course is available for only a certain number of participants because of the size and number of our Caicos Sloops.  The course is free of charge to the educators and is sponsored by the Ministry of Education. 
Communications will always be maintained with the TCMHF administration office throughout the voyage.

Tuition: $203.00
 

Exploring and studying the Turks and Caicos waterways

The Island Exploration and Seamanship Expedition covers some of the over 200 miles of coasts extending from West Caicos around and down to the Turks Islands. Traditional fishing and cargo routes wind their ways on both sides of the coasts of all the islands and cays in the archipelago. There are saltwater rivers and quiet bays, magnificent capes and desert cays. Two overnight stopovers on this adventure weekend will enhance the voyage for the students as they camp in a wilderness setting.

Our instructors are enthusiastic about teaching the skills needed to move the Sloop through reef and shoal, as well as how to catch a lobster or conch.  Remarkably, the areas that the student will venture are some of the best kept secrets in the archipelago. The practical fishermen of the ol’ days did not usually take tourists along these routes.

Of course the emphasis of this course is to balance the skills and demands of island seamanship with the incredible rewards of time spent ashore on these islands and cays. The students will learn a variety of specialized sail handling and anchoring techniques.

The Island Exploration and Seamanship Expedition is a fine exercise for building confidence. At particularly challenging locations, we will make our own detailed charts of the island anchorage so that return visits may be repeated with ease and certainty.

We intend to spend plenty of time on various cays to allow full enjoyment of the sweeping vistas, examination of the vegetation, bird and sea life, and to undertake photography, sketching, or just relaxing.

At the end of the weekend, we will have enough information to create an island journal to serve both as a remembrance of our explorations, and to share with the rest of the student body.

This course is limited to four participants. Each student will be asked to join TCMHF so that they might have a further input into the future programmes and projects such as the Island Exploration and Seamanship Expedition.

Tuition: $250.00

An experiential cultural tour for the visitor and the resident

The Turks and Caicos National Trust, the Department of Environmental and Coastal Resources and the Turks and Caicos Maritime Heritage Federation are pleased to announce a new cultural tourism programme that will take visitors to Little Water Cay by traditional Caicos Conch Sloops. Working together, under the supervision of TCMHF, we hope to achieve a perfect attraction for tourist visitation, a completely pollutant free environmental tour that combines ecology with Turks and Caicos maritime history and traditions.

This cultural tourism mini-expedition will have the visitor at the helm and tending the sheets of a traditional Caicos Conch Sloop to navigate inside the reefs from Providenciales the four miles to Little Water Cay. The visitor will be told of the old days and the methods of conch and lobster fishing that were carried on and that made such a great contribution to the economy of the islands. The history lesson will continue onto the boat itself, telling of the descendancy from the Bermuda Sloop, the vessel design that changed the shape of sailing, by adapting its sail configuration to beat to windward and come to the Turks and Caicos for salt.

Landing at the beach the visitors will be shown indigenous vegetation, mangrove life dependencies, the formation of an island and the life forms that inhabit the small cay. They will then enjoy a smooth sail back to Providenciales with memories and scenes of a complete mini-vacation while on vacation.

Charge: $85.00 per crewmember

     Group and boat rates are available for special tours. 
This little voyage provides a perfect wedding setting.

MARITIME HISTORY AND MARINE SCIENCES EXPEDITION

The Maritime History and Marine Sciences Expedition fits the mandate of the Turks and Caicos Maritime Heritage Federation perfectly. This environmental studies voyage involves studies of marine life in the fragile reefs of the archipelago. The studies, arranged by qualified marine biologists, environmentalists and educators, brings the student to the area of study by a completely non-pollutant Caicos Conch Sloop, using the traditional fishing routes that brought many a Turks and Caicos fisherman to their harvest in the same manner.

Working from the stable platform of the Caicos Sloop the student will have the opportunity to study the life forms that create the islands that they live on with a hands-on approach. The ongoing research can be recording studies that are passed from student to student as the project develops. Whether the study itself is a diving exercise, thigh-high mangrove research or micro-life studies on a small cay, the Sloop will always be evident, reminding them of their history and the many uses it still has in today’s world.

This is an exciting course open to the field of what is pertinent at this moment. With the manoeuvrability of a vessel but without the contamination inherent to the engine, the studies can be based on a consciousness of the entire environment. The students should have taken a traditional seamanship course and be confident in moving the Sloop around.

Tuition: $100.00
 
Salt Cay Lighter
16’ x 7’ x 12”

 16’ x 7’ x 12”

The Salt Cay Lighter was developed to transport fifty pound bags of salt out to waiting ships in the harbour off Salt Cay. Essentially the Lighter was a small sailing barge or scow. They were meant to hold as much as possible without sinking, in incorporated a very wide beam to length ratio. The vessels could not always come alongside the dock and would have to be beached to begin loading and for that reason they had minimum draft allowances. The excess beam supported their stability but just in case an almost flat bottom was brought into the overall design.

The average length of a Salt Cay Lighter was 22-foot overall. They were sloop rigged, supporting a short gaff and an overhanging boom. The sail was brailed, boom uplifted, to add the cargo and handily sailed because of the planning effect of a keen sharp entry, the underwater flatness, an uplifted stern and cut off transom, much like the state of the art, fast is fun, racers of today. The 7/8ths rigged jib was actually roller furling back in the late 19th Century.

The vessel would load up the salt, carefully ballasting the bags for best manoeuvrability, push off from the beach or pier, sail as fast as possible out to the freighter, come alongside and stop. The Lighter would then be sprung lined to sit comfortably so that the salt could be unloaded from the hold and loaded aboard the ship. Once unloaded, the Lighter would have to make its way back to the pier or beach without the assistance of ballast and usually single-handed. And that was in any weather that the ships could be loaded.

The Turks Islands salt industry was developed by the Bermudians around 1678, developing the Cedar planked Bermuda Sloop to get to their windward destination. The Caicos Sloop designs of today are direct descendants of the Bermuda fishing and transport designs. The Lighter was especially developed in the Turks and Caicos for its specialized need.

We decided to design a smaller version of the Lighter for use as an all around sheltered sailing classic vessel. Our intention is to safely take charter guests on sailing cultural tours that will support conducting seamanship training and maritime heritage programmes amongst the youth of the archipelago.

We will construct six of the Salt Cay Lighters and they will be maintained by the Sea Ranger Youth Sailing Club.

We have selected the epoxy saturation of cold moulded laminate construction technique because of the ease and control of method, durability, lightness, inherent built-in safety and low maintenance. It will cost approximately $8,500 to produce one 16-foot Salt Cay Lighter.

The Turks and  Caicos Maritime Heritage Federation will construct six Salt Cay Lighters, representing the six vessel constructing Islands in this archipelago.