FORT MYERS BEACH -- The sailboat heeled to its starboard side as it sliced through a narrow, finger-shaped inlet off the Gulf of Mexico. Its sails loomed above me, and from where I sat at the stern, confidently steering the vessel between passing boats and a palm-dotted shoreline, I could see across the sparkling, emerald-green water to a rocky outcropping. Here, hundreds of pelicans sunned themselves in the tropical heat of the day.

Suddenly the wind shifted, causing the 26-foot boat to tip dramatically onto its side, until its sails lay parallel to the water, just inches away from touching. I thrust the tiller away from me, as I watched the rail dip below the surface, and braced myself to keep from falling into the water.

''Sheet out the mainsail,'' Beite Cook, 49, my sailing instructor, called out, as he crouched at the front of the cockpit.

While I tried to steer us away from disaster -- in the form of a large wooden pier and a sizable powerboat docked next to it -- fellow student Charles Kiss grabbed the line for the mainsail and played it out, enabling the sail to spill air and the boat to right itself.

In two days of sailing, this was the closest we had come to tipping over. I was rattled by the experience, called a ''knockdown'' in the boating world. At least our custom-designed training boat was ''virtually unsinkable'': the hull's foam-filled compartments help keep the boat afloat.

GAINING EXPERIENCE

At least I was gaining valuable experience in how to handle a boat, though I still had a long way to go before I was as seasoned and as competent behind the tiller as my husband, Howard. He's been a sailor since he was 7 and a boat captain for 15 years. We've talked about chartering a boat with friends and sailing around the Greek islands or Belize, but I want to be a participant, not a passenger. In the interest of preserving friendships and marital bliss, I decided to take a five-day Learn to Sail course through Offshore Sailing School at its Fort Myers Beach location. This intensive course blends classroom and practical training, and provides U.S. Sailing certification to those who pass.

Steve Colgate, a former Olympic competitor and America's Cup sailor, founded the school in 1964. He even designed the training boat we were using, the Colgate 26, with the help of a naval architect. Doris Colgate, Steve's wife and also an accomplished sailor, founded the National Women's Sailing Association, authored Sailing: A Woman's Guide (International Marine/ Ragged Mountain Press, 1999), and developed the school's women-only programs for beginner to seasoned sailors. Offshore now has 11 schools for ages 7 and up, women-only and coed, in the United States and the Caribbean.

For the Fort Myers Beach program, students stay at the Pink Shell Beach Resort overlooking San Carlos Bay -- the training ground for the course. Classes have a maximum of four students per instructor, but Kiss, 52, a local scuba-diving instructor, was the only other student the December week I was there.

LEARNING THE ROPES

The first two days of the course were the most difficult, as we filled our heads with new terminology. We'd already read through the 90-page textbook, Basic Keelboat, sent several weeks before the course.

Even prepped, I felt lost in a foreign language. With patience and precision, Cook explained the parts of a boat, how the sails work (much like an airplane wing), and how a boat reacts when it sails toward, away from or perpendicular to the wind. The writing on his whiteboard looked like a teenager's text-message, with notes on LOA, LWL, CE and CLR -- shorthand for the boat's ''length overall,'' ''length at waterline,'' ''center of effort'' and ``center of lateral resistance.''