Good day all. i just passed my last test today in miami to upgrade to 1600ton NC. i learned abit from the guys who have gone before me and took the time to post so i will try and pay it fwd… i took a prep class in december at MPT,expensive but worth it for me. i never would have got the terrestrial stuff self teaching,big hats off to you boys who pulled that off!!
the class lays the ground work but it took 6 weeks of 6 days a week studying with a buddy from the class before we both got it. there are only ten plots in the whole plotting section and we did them all,in class and again after,then reviewed them the day before taking that test. there was not much chance of screwing it up unless you make a really simple mistake.we both got a hundred… most of nav gen could be found in glossary of bowditch of one of the other books available in test room. deck safety was mostly in CFRs and very diverse. deck general took me 3 tries to get as the pool of questions is so big and alot of it unfamiliar to me,shipbuilding,towing,more big ship commercial stuff then i grew up knowing from working on draggers and then yachts.had no tide questions and only afew wx questions… rules of the road were a bitch and there is no easy way other than to be able to write out the whole cheat sheet from memory,i was only able to remember 60% off the top of my poor head,but abit more came back as i went thru the test.
we spent most of the time studying the formulas and way to do the 10 terr nav questions.
we both had exactly the same,1ETA,2 Compass error by azumith,3amplitude of sun,4dist abeam on manuver board,5 new cons with OC, ND,and OD. 6 Dist with rpm,eff,and pitch.7 compass error by vis range,8 Time Tick,9 the dreaded local time of sunset,and last course to steer with gyro error,leeway,and deviation.
you get 3 attempts at each test so i was told by an old capt,“just go in and pass as many as you can” so you can get 2,3maybe4 tests out of the way. he was right. we got thru 3and 4 each and it made the next few weeks easier than trying to study for all of them at once…
it was very daunting at first but alot of work and study paid off… i hope this helps someone who is into it now… im gonna take a few weeks easy until my ticket arrives and then head to louisiana knocking on doors like i read about here… hope they dont mind an exdraggerman from new england down in the gulf…