I coach sailors to sail anywhere.

Paul Exner

I believe confidence and self-reliance are central to a sailor’s mindset. Fostering these qualities can take decades of practice…

I offer a coaching method that drastically shortens the learning curve to master sailing.

My success is backed by the accomplishments of many students.

Life experiences and talents contribute to your readiness to sail anywhere — whereby everything you know and believe affects the decisions you make.

To grow, we adapt our methods to an ever-changing future and strive to do well — we don’t grow by acquiring new skills alone; we only advance by applying good practices in the real world where we experience the consequences of our decisions and actions.

Sailing is undoubtedly easy to learn — but, its masterful practice uses a nuanced approach.

There exists a small set of fundamentals needed to sail a boat. In truth, all boats fundamentally sail the same way.

I coach the raw fundamentals of sailing — I help you apply them proficiently at the master sailor level — I do this by helping you highlight your personal-affinities for the sailing art no matter where you are on the competency-continuum between novice and master.

Since 1975 I’ve helped thousands of sailors improve and achieve any sailing goal they worked for from beginner to round-the-world sailor or racing champion.

By respecting your talents and work ethic, I will help you advance beyond what you imagined possible as a sailor.

Paul Exner leads sail-training expeditions in Hawaii aboard his SV Solstice — and coaches sailors virtually, or aboard their boat, helping his students sail anywhere their goals may lead them.

Essay: the historical iteration of Paul Exner’s methods and philosophy on sailing education.

It’s debatable, but in addition to being the most senior sailing instructor actively teaching applied-sailing (full time) today, I also use the most effective sail-training curricula — a coaching methodology I’ve iterated professionally since I began teaching in1986.

My program is not productized nor franchised like other sailing schools. Instead, I’ve steadily improved my approach to coaching and center my work around the individual student’s development. The student becomes the beneficiary of my efforts, and that’s what education should be about — not the oligopoly structure of the sailing industry today.

I began developing my sailing education programs, and testing various coaching-paradigms when I studied at the University of Wisconsin - Madison in the late 1980’s. What I learned was how to create my own sail-training programs based on what I thought was interesting, not what students wanted which was mostly a certificate so they could go forth and sail badly. My sessions becamepopular not because they were “sexy,” students wanted to learn from me because they began to realize there was actually a lot to learn. My instruction colleagues never had the same passion I had for teaching sailing so they didn’t bother learning from me; instead, my students became better instructors than my old colleagues.

Rather than “package” my courses and proliferate their outline for profit, I’ve worked hard to improve myself as a coach, and know that small groups of students or one-on-one coaching is the best paradigm for helping a sailor improve and acheive their goals — basically, I do what I do because it’s the best way.

Paul Exner combines his sixth-sense for seamanship with his acumen for coaching — tapping decades of yachting experience to create actionable plans for boat owners; he shares his analytic experience about all-things oceanographic and teaches how to use “seamanship” as a managerial art in practice.

“Seamanship scenarios are learning opportunities” says Exner: “Each event we negotiate at sea is approached with fresh eyes and absorbed experientially so the learned-material is gleaned from the front-line, as we live it!” This hands-on learning approach is always reinforced by Paul’s expert-level debrief.