That’s the thing about working on an Aleutian freighter, or tug, on the Inside Passage. You are your own pilot. Nowadays you need to be part of your company’s pilotage waiver to stand as OOW on those waters. Many transits as quartermaster before you can qualify. Coastal Transportation also has its own bridge simulator program for transiting those waters. Six hour long exercise.
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I can navigate blindfolded just using two dowsing rods.
Anyone who can’t navigate a ship by dowsing rod is not a real navigator.
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The RCN doesn’t have QMs, the 2OOW fulfills that role to gain experience to become the OOW, so I’d tell them to step away and have the acting OOW do everything like on a commercial ship. Really made them appreciate both ECDIS and GPS, and also realize that they don’t have to be as precise as the machine is. All this navigation used to be done with paper, rulers and a pencil. And that comparing the chart to the visual view was most often all that’s needed.
Edit: it also makes them really appreciate what’s going on in the wheelhouse of all the coastal vessels
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I think the major advances in the size of ships demands a different approach from when I started at sea. The size of the ports haven’t changed. On an OSV most of the vessel can be seen from the con and the manoeuvring can be done by eye. Berthing a 400,000 tonne ULCC requires an aid to keep the berthing speeds to acceptable limits.
Ports are now used by vessels where the pilot’s PPU can give distances off where that part of the ship is not visible from the bridge and every last metre counts.
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Yes, in many cases navigation instruments are very useful when more precision and efficiency is needed. Mooring is one example, piloting in low visibly, open ocean and so forth.
I have seen a few examples of mariners including pilots reluctant to use appropriate tools, I started a thread about it using an example.
The issue I encountered with inexperienced mates was not the reluctance to use tools like ARPA and EDCIS but the over-reliance on such tools. I am not alone it this.
Here’s an article about this topic:
But what exactly gives us this innate navigation ability has eluded scientists for the longest time, and was ultimately awarded a Nobel Prize in 2014.
I think a big part of the issue is how do you keep people in practice without jeopardizing the safety of the vessel?
Playing pretend will only get you so far.
I make time to practice all my nav skills, but I am not deluded that it keeps me in practice to safely run a voyage that way. The skills are there to get me to a safe harbor where I can either repair my nav aids or make a new voyage plan that accounts for their absence.
Too often I see people that think because they remember how to do something they’re still as sharp with it as they used to be, and they don’t need this or that because they did it in the old days just fine. It can be done but it’s a different voyage and needs a different plan.
This ^
If I KNOW I won’t have certain electronics, the way I plan a trip is different than if not. This doesn’t mean I can’t figure out what to do if it all craps out, but I am liable to be in a much bigger fix then if it was all dead before I left.
Example: Approaching Bermuda with a dodgy latitude sight in crap weather and DR, I made SURE I was north by a good margin until St, Georges bore due south on the RDF and then we followed it in.
Going straight to the entrance buoy via GPS, if it croaked on the proverbial dark and stormy night I would be starting off way behind because I wouldn’t have been right in there if I didn’t have the GPS to start with.
Looks similar to sailing the inshore fairway along the Norwegian coast.
In Norway the Sector light system is still widely used to aid in visual navigation.
Even today, with EDIS and ENC it is important keep up with the sectors on the many lights along the fairways, no matter the number of electronic navigation aid available:
https://legacy.iho.int/mtg_docs/com_wg/HSSC/HSSC7/Sector_Lights_NCA_HSSC7_REV_2.pdfPS>
Some light have many and very narrow sectors. IIRC Grasøyane Fyr near Ålesund had 24 sectors, (Now defunct):
PS> It has been many years since I navigated the Norwegian coast as a young 3rd Officer and as Coxswain on MTBs.
Going at 36 kts. transit speed and navigating by eyes only, it was easy to pass through a few sectors without even knowing it, especially when passing at close range to the lights .
I’ve spoken to several people who were recently on ships in the Mediterranean. According to them GPS spoofing would get so sometimes bad they had to go back to the “old ways”.
Most of my career was spent deep sea but I spent 8 years on the
Great Lakes where reliance on landmarks is much more common. I fell right into it and had no problem with it. I also adjusted to North up orientation of the radar all the time.
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If the risk to the vessel is going to be at an unacceptable level the captain is going to have to be in the wheelhouse.
This quote from Hutchins is what a watch officer has to learn what to do:
“establishing correspondences between the features of the environment and the features of some representation of that environment.”
If the watch officer simply conns the ship using the ECDIS without reference to the environment they are not going to learn anything and are going to require assistance each and every time.
Most inexperienced watch officers will feel separation anxiety if not standing right in front of the ECDIS but as their skill level increases so will their confidence.
I think the question was more how do you train someone to navigate without all the electronics without creating an actual emergency?
Absolutely not trying to teach anyone to navigate without electronics, that’d be a violation of the most basic principles of safe navigation.
The goal is to have the watch officer add “visual” to their toolbox.
There’s going to be circumstances where visual alone is not enough.
This is Hutchins which is posted in post #38
…simply having a good sense of the correspondences between what one sees and what is depicted on some representation of the local space is not enough. Now more precision is required. To answer that question the navigator needs to have a more exact determination of where he is.
Hutchins is using somewhat abstract terms to describe a commonplace activity.
“Some representation of that environment” could be a paper chart, an electronic display or a mental map.
When one is “establishing correspondences between features of the environment” he is describing the process of using a map of some kind to orient oneself to the real world.
If the mariner is able to match up the chart with features seen outside (landmarks, shoreline features, aids to navigation etc.) well enough to know where they are, they can be said to be navigating by eye. If more precision is required other methods must be used.
Using an ENS/ECDIS to orient this way is by far more efficient than using paper charts.
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Before ECDIS, deep-sea ship navigation required officers to take and plot a position fix at regular intervals. In restricted waters, this interval could be15 minutes or less. Between fixes, the watch officer could be said to be navigating ‘by eye.’
In practice, inexperienced mates often lacked confidence in their mental map, even for the short interval between fixes. They would shift quickly between glancing out the window, checking the radar, and consulting the chart, moving in a tight loop.
With experience, mates gradually gained confidence. More seasoned third and second mates would check these tools less frequently, while chief mates might spend the entire 15 minutes at the window, calmly observing while drinking coffee.
The Coast Guard’s requirements for federal pilotage reflects this process, a minimum required trips in the area and the requirement to draw key elements of the chart from memory which tests the applicants mental map.
With ECDIS however the new watch officer feels confident, with no need to observe and monitor the ship’s progress visually. As a result they have no mental map and thus lack the confidence to leave their station at the ECDIS.
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