the 3rd mate should of been in command of a smaller vessel in his training, I think that is the point.
That is the ideal but rarely possible in the merchant navy unless it has a very varied fleet like Maersk.
The navy had patrol boats that I, as a sub lieutenant (lieutenant JG), were given command of.
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As I understand it the argument for small boat training was to make the newly graduating officer a âcompetent seamanâ but deep-sea with a 20 man crew there is no need for the new third mate to meet that standard.
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I find this darkly humorous, but true. 
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I wonder if they will try that with airline pilots, you dont need to fly till you doâŚ
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I was taught to order no man to do what I couldnât do. Oh well life moves on.
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So at what stage of advancement does a deck officer eventually get to berth his ship, do a man overboard manoeuvre and such like?
Depends on the sector. I once joined a tug/barge in Seattle as mate and that night found myself on a container barge with a radio going down the Duwamish Waterway. Itâs partly a reversal of the conning officer / helmsman roles but with a Jeopardy-game-show-like twist where the guidance is provided in the form of a request. (Little tight here, need a touch to port).
On the Aleutian freighter it was routine for the mate to take the ship in and out, come alongside etc. Never been on an ATB but I understand itâs similar.
Deep-sea single screw ship it varies. Almost always going to have a pilot but in a pinch Iâd expect in good conditions either the Captain or experienced C/M would be able to do it. I does sometimes happen in some of the less bureaucratic ports. Pilot directs the tugs.
In the Coast Guard I did see junior officers bring the ship alongside (twin screw with bow thruster). It was agonizingly slow and not at all pretty but they let them do it.
However when the shit was hitting the fan, taking another vessel under tow in a full gale in the Atlantic it was the CWO bosun who had the conn.
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Thatâs interesting. It still seems merchant ships almost never just manoeuvre for the training of the officers. A first manoeuvre is a real one. Some hesitancy may be justified by scheduling or fuel economy constraints but I see ships at anchor off ports waiting for a berth and surely they could do something prior to anchoring if they know thereâs time by dropping a man overboard dummy and doing the full drill for a few times.
All of my deck officers have departed the berth and brought the ship alongside and we schedule a half a day occasionally when no operations are programmed just for this purpose with more emphasis on the most likely to be called on to do it. Nervousness dissipates after four or five runs and more fine points can be made if the officer conning is at least comfortable of the basics.
Finally, talking of single screw ships, I was a deck officer on a naval tanker single screw steam turbine of 26,000 tons displacement (near fully laden) when the captain berthed her at Point Murat, North West Cape (a VLF transmission station for USN and our submarines).
No tugs, no pilot, no thrusters, tiny wharf with dolphins off either end all much shorter than the ship. First and last time I witnessed dredging an anchor in the navy. Messy but successful and I was impressed then and even more now. There was some urgent imperative to supply fuel to the station after normal commercial supplies failed so the task was unusual for a fleet underway replenishment ship and not exactly handy to manoeuvre normally using two tugs at berthing.
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On a modern Aleutian freighter a mate is likely docking the vessel a year after heâs hired. It depends on how ambitious he is.
A green mate out of the academy is going to be navigating the tricky Inside Passage and Peninsula Passage by himself in about six voyages. Deck officers have to be approved by the Canadians before they can supervise a watch by themselves on the B.C. side of the Inside Passage. Several trips under the eyes of a waivered officer through certain geographical zones are needed.
The company has it is own piloting program. New deck officers undertake an eleven-day long voyage, most of it in an open boat, through the Inside Passage. Pure piloting. Nothing more than a compass.
Then the budding mate takes another week-long voyage with a captain in the companyâs 65â training boat. Strictly visual and radar piloting through chains of islands and lots of traffic, re-learning the practical points glossed over in the academy. Making landings and taking the boat away from anchorage. The voyage counts towards B.C. pilotage waiver time.
To keep piloting skills up, the officers go through annual scenarios at Seattle Maritime Academyâs simulator. The scenarios are developed and supervised by our captains and focus specifically on visual and radar piloting, as opposed to collision avoidance.
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An interesting thread. I note that no one has mentioned the grounding of ROYAL MAJESTY off of Nantucket in June of 1995.
Ref: https://towmasters.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/ntsb_royalmajesty_grounding.pdf
âThe National Transportation Safety Board determines that the probable cause of the grounding of the Royal Majesty was the watch officersâ overreliance on the automated features of the integrated bridge systemâŚâ
âAfter the accident, representatives from Majesty Cruise Line and the Coast Guard examined the Royal Majestyâs GPS antenna and receiver. They found that the GPS antenna cable had separated from the factory connection at the antenna. The antenna cable, which was factory assembled, showed no sign of physical damage, other than having been separated from the connection.â
Another source mentions that on the previous passage â
"Satisfied with the accuracy of the fix he just laid on the map, the navigator walked away and joined the captain, who was standing by the large windows. Above them, on the flying bridge, the loose GPS cable was banging freely in the wind and slapping the flying bridgeâs deck; the connection between the GPS cable and the antenna was coming apart. At 2:52 P.M., interruptions in the global positioning data began: after a few seconds of no position signal, a one second alarm chirp sounded, similar to a wristwatch alarm. Nobody heard it; it was barely audible. At 1 P.M., the captain commanded ââchange course to 336, take us up to Boston.ââ Nine minutes later, the global positioning system signal was back again. But it did not last long, because at 1:10 P.M., the connection between the cable and the antenna broke away for good. "
Related - aside. Many year ago I had a safety job at a New Jersey refinery. One ship that was destined to go to the refinery with our oil on board was reported aground in Stapleton anchorage. I was discharged to go out and observe only since our oil was aboard. As i rode out on the launch the ship was broad to the current and the chain was under significant strain.
I made it to the bridge and introduced myself to the Master, and advised why I was there. At which point he kept pointing to the electronic chart and insisting he was not aground. At which point I asked him why he wasnât pointing the same way as every other ship in the anchorage.
Reliance on electronics can make you disbelieve your own eyes. Especially if they are giving you the answer you want.
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I mischaracterized this as instrument vs non-instrument which is not the best way to think about it.
This is also from the linked post in the OP
I usually set the trails to automatic (all targets, including land, are trailed) and relative, with an appropriate and short time interval rarely exceeding 3 minutes. That is all one has to do, once every watch. Henceforth, anything the radar picks up will be trailed. Trails which are parallel or angling away from you can be ignored. Trails which are crossing your path may be a cause for concern. Plot or watch only those on the ARPA.
Using target trails is a way of filtering. It reduces the number of targets that need to be acquired with ARPA. It works the same way as watching the relative movement visually does.
Also mentioned in the post are Parallel indexing. Both target trails and PI reduce cognitive work load.
One mistake less experienced officers make is too long a range. A related mistake is trying to think too many moves ahead. Solve the problems one at a time. If changing course for a closer vessel is going to create a problem later for another vessel, change course and deal with the later problem later.
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Kelvin Hughes made a display for collision avoidance that refreshed itself every 3 or 6 minutes, may have been more. The display was about a 30â cathode tube that didnât need a hood in daylight unlike radars of the period. All it showed were the tails of targets and in a vessel doing 27 knots in the English Channel we thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. We called it the Tadpole bowl.
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How information is displayed is important.
With the target trails the one big ship at speed and crossing can be picked out from a screen full of squid boats that are drifting with just a glance.
In restricted waters a quick look at the difference between CMG and heading vectors on the radar is far quicker and more effective than constant monitoring of the ECDIS and leaves more time for lookout.
This is an important point. A competent mate is able to trust visual information in part because they know how to quickly extract the information required from the instruments (radar, ECDIS and others) to verify what they are seeing.
For example with target trails enabled the signal of tanker Sola TS on radar would have almost certainly been seen in the Helge Ingstad incident.
What if they canât see?
You propose that they should spend most of their time âkeeping a lookoutâ with only occasional glances at ECDIS/ARPA but that only works under conditions of good visibility.
Comparatively putting the focus on skilled use of instruments and confirming that theyâre operating correctly visually works in all visibility conditions, as well as traffic conditions where there are too many targets to effectively monitor visually.
In that case of reduced visibly they would be required to call the master. A new third mate would not be expected to be able to deal with traffic / restricted waters in reduced visibility without assistance.
It works the other way around in South China Sea levels of traffic.
I donât know off hand how many targets an ARPA can track simultaneously but itâs far more than the 5-7 items that a person can track in short-term memory. Thatâs why itâs necessary to be able to filter out vessels that are not a threat but still be able track the relatively few ones that are a threat.
Here is:
A 260-strong Chinese fishing fleet lighting up the horizon
If those boats were ahead of the ship Iâd change course until there was a clear path ahead of the ship and then steer that course. Almost all of them would be drifting, but they will be a few moving. Plus there may be a big ship or two hiding in there somewhere.
Mate is going to be busy acquiring them all and maybe too many for the ARPA to process.
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on our steady run there was always a large fishing fleet of the coast of florida - north of the bahamas. It was usually a call to the Master a few hours early to ask if he wanted to go to work that night, or if he wanted me to " go to sea " and leave them all inside and take a few hours of diversion.
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