Modern offshore vessel are usually designed with good bridge equipment ergonomics. The person keeping the watch can sit in a chair where they can see all the screens and look out the window from the same chair, they don’t have to run around the bridge and don’t have to stand all the time.
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I have another theory.
When we went to school travel was difficult, we had no money, I need to find out about activities and events until after they happened. As a result we had to do a lot more “fun” things local the home and, since most of us lived (or attended school) near water that meant spending time on boats.
The young meet today however are flying all over the place. I see him fly to Vegas and fly to Florida and take road trips and, most time consuming of all: they all seem to have 1 million weddings they have to attend for the first 5 to 10 years after they graduate college.
Another “problem” is that it’s a lot easier to date now. I know a lot of her meter going on I have dozen dates a week via tinder.
Then their is video games, Netflix and all the other digital time sucks.
What is this mean? they are spending less time on the water. Specifically less time on small boats.
I believe Small boats are important because you need to put in the hours on the water to train the “eye” and on a ship you just spent too much time below deck to get the 10,000 hours you need i . That plus, IMHO, the only way you can learn to avoid hitting things at sea is to have experience hitting them… which you just can not do on a ship.
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Any experience which requires the awareness developed in certain types of training is bound to help. Notably the scanning habits ingrained in the operation of small sailboats with no radar and small aircraft VFR flight training. The failure to continuously correlate what is going on both inside the craft and outside in the “real world” will quickly result in disaster.
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Don’t they have flotillas of sailboats at the academies?
OK, the special rules between sailboats are not really needed for future mariners; but they may be a useful training complication for the situational awareness…
Small boats! Yes, training acquired actually running small boats is invaluable. Observe the elements. Learn how to use them to your advantage or suffer the consequences. The wonders of experiencing leeway, set and drift, swept path, and course to steer to clear marks by eye, plus the ability to experiment is worth ifs weight in gold.
Yet the silly USCG and deep sea mariners are fixated on their mindless fetish for tonnage and they disparage and dismiss small boat experience.
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Modern bridge equipment such as ECDIS probably means the person keeping the watch can spend more time looking out the windows and not less.
Plotting a position on a paper chart is more time consuming that being able to just glance at an ECDIS and see the vessel’s position, so if the person keeping the watch was using paper charts they would have to keep their eyes off the windows for longer than a person who could just glance at an ECDIS screen.
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Making a distinction between piloting and navigating in open water…IMHO piloting is a relative positioning exercise in which the mariner deduces their position in relation to fixed objects. Visual observation, radar along with electronic sensors are all components of this computation.
ECDIS actively shows you where you are, no deducing. Human nature (and the brain) default to the least effort.
Until the point in the game where it is all controlled electronically, a pro should be able to move between visual referenced navigation and electronic positioning, understanding the limitations of both.
I believe in the aviation model of VFR first and then IFR.
There are two reasons the inexperienced officer to prefer the instruments. The first is as mentioned; the bird-eye view vs surface level view.
The other factor is that using an ECDIS to acquire, select and then do a trial maneuver is a step-by-step procedure that can be learned in a class room.
On the other hand the skill required to judge visually can only be learned by experience and practice.
If this skill is gained using deliberate practice it can be acquired in a relatively short time.
The problem is your bridge is horribly designed.
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Ok, “race back and forth” is not correct. Standard bridge design, ECDIS and both radars are all located next to each other. The mates used to include the chart table in their travels which was a couple steps away but that leg is not used as much.
Should have said something like anxiously switching between various displays with an occasional glance outside.
In that case I think it’s likely to be largely an unfamiliarity with the electronics. When they get confirmable with the electronics and can be sure they have everything right and aren’t missing something then they’ll relax more and be able to free up attention away from them other than occasional glances to check targets.
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It’s interesting that some people assume the instruments will miss something that the visual won’t. It’s just as often the other way around, as the amount of shipwrecks show.
Another thing I should mention is that in the US maritime curriculum, piloting skills are covered for a relatively small amount of time in your one ship handling course that you take. EVERY other course you take during your entire time at the academy is dedicated to ocean passage, collision avoidance, or cargo ops. Junior mates are for sea buoy to sea buoy watches and cargo watches. That’s it. Piloting, bringing the ship to anchor, and visually conning the ship are regarded as the domain of pilots, the old man, and the chief mate when he is getting trained up by the old man to get a captains spot. Again, not saying it’s right just how we were trained.
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sounds like all recruits need small boat experience at night with a compass and paper chart…
Here’s how it goes:
New third mate joins U.S. East Coast (USEC) -we run a few ports then across the N. Atlantic. Not much traffic, mostly about mooring / tugs. It’s in the Atlantic where you can see the third mate is familiar enough to start to feel comfortable.
Then Mediterranean, two or three port calls, new mates first taste of any real traffic, usually this is when they get good with the ARPA. - also some help with collision avoidance.
Next Suez Canal, Gulf of Suez, Red Sea, Jeddah, around Arabian Peninsula. - first taste of F/V etc with no lights etc.
Persian Gulf - first real traffic, fast freighters, big tankers, fishing dhows, smugglers, navy vessels, a bit chaotic.
It’s about 3/4 way round the PG that the scenario in the OP occurs. By this point I’m hoping they are starting to comprehend this:
realize that the change in a rough visual ‘bearing’, taken from a fixed point within the wheelhouse, is sometimes good enough to determine if any risk of collision is likely to exist.
Without:
running to the radar every few minutes and playing computer games there for each target.
Because:
It also helps in keeping a good lookout.
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The key idea here is the phrase “losing the plot” which is the title of the linked article in the OP. It’s a Brit term but the meaning is apparent from the context.
For an inexperienced mate the view out the window contains little or no useful information. In traffic any time away from the instruments (ARPA and ECDIS) is going to weakens the mate’s situational awareness (the plot) and increases the chances of them losing the plot.
On the other hand if the (mental) plot is being maintained visually then the switching views to the instruments will not cause the plot to be lost as one is a simplified version of the other and both views contain information.
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What’s missing in the LOTFW (Look Out The F’n Window) discussion is one question: why?
Or maybe it’s not one question (why?) it’s three (why? why? why?).
We really do our best to beat this out of cadets (I can’t tell you how many demerits I got for asking this question repeatedly in school and being called a wiseass) but it’s important.
Why look out the window?
To Improve situational awareness.
Why does it improve situational awareness?
It provides redundant means of verifying the plot.
Why is that important?
A few reasons. First GPS is fed into everything so it has the potential for single point failure. Second, to gain full situational awareness it’s important to activate different parts of the brain. Digital work is mostly left-brain, analytical, and methodical, while visual assessment is mostly right brain. If they are both used then they can check each other. Giving your brain checks and balances is the cornerstone of safe navigation.
Engaging both sides of the brain sounds like a lot of work so why does it improve situational awareness?
Well, here we get to the important part that’s not discussed elsewhere. Remember learning to drive a car. It required a LOT of mental focus, and physical risk, and stress. There is another way to describe this: mental pain and suffering. We subconsciously do everything we can to avoid this, and you’re right, it’s a lot of work.
This is true but deliberate practice is uncomfortable and burns a lot of mental calories. It’s also difficult to do when you are responsible for the safe navigation of a ship (hence, why I am a believer in time spent of small boats).
So why should I put in all that effort when I can just spend the time getting better at digital navigation?
The answer is stress reduction and SPEED.
Driving a car is difficult until you have enough deliberate practice, same goes for visually navigating a ship… but once you have that skill watchstanding becomes a LOT easier.
Once you have that skill you don’t need to walk over to the ecdis and scroll around with the mouse. You don’t need to be 100 certain the AB didn’t change the radar setting. You don’t need to be certain that the ARPA didn’t drop a contact. You can glance up and in a millisecond know excatly how screwed (or safe) you are.
It also reduces stress. If somethign goes wrong (like the GPS antenna fails) you won’t get stressed immediately. You hang out on the bridge wing onger before feeling a fear based need to go to the screens. If a submarine pops up in your track you can make a quick decision without having to acquire the target.
There are many reasons why LOTFW is important, some are even touched on in this discussion, but the real reason is you can perform your job faster and with much less stress if you acquire this skill.
But if you want to spend your career racing the clock under large amounts of stress then feel free not to invest any time on small boats or deliberately looking out the window on large ones.
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Yes, I ran into one of the (few) third mates I was able to convert a couple of years after they’d paid off my ship. They told me that before they sailed with me they had planned to quit sailing because it was too stressful but after our trip they had changed their mind. Last I heard they were sailing C/M
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Great thread, this is peak gCaptain right here.
One thing that hasn’t been touched on yet is how mates are taught “all available means” but not how to prioritize, before they are inundated in more information than anybody could reasonably be expected to process. They are being set up for helmet fire, as the fighter pilots would say.
What’s being discussed here aren’t just the skills of visual navigation and collission avoidance, those are actually so simple and intuitive that they can be taught to a young child. Equally important is the mental framework for prioritizing and corelating information streams, which most of us take for granted, having approached this environment from one that was far more information sparse. What we see is inexperienced navigators building their framework on intuition without due emphasis on skills that take time to develop.
Perhaps systematizing or even formalizing such a framework wouldn’t be a bad idea, at least for training environments? While raising the risk of attention tunneling on demanding tasks (ref Helge Ingstad) it would at least do away with all the accidents that arise from attention tunneling on less demanding ones.
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There are a couple of different smartphone timer apps, usually ones designed for interval training, that I use to ensure I’m doing what’s discussed. The interval depends on conditions, visibility, traffic and so on.
It would be a nice feature to include on a plotter.