Only skilled visual navigator need apply:
Leaving Fosnavåg 22.09.2023
Fosnavåg harbour:
I think it’s misleading to suggest that conning / navigation by eye is some kind of esoteric skill processed by only the rare few.
For example this one.
- Avoid a ship crossing ahead CBDR starboard to port by coming right passing astern then turning back onto the original course. 1 mile CPA, not closer then 1/4 mile, not over 3 miles.
The solution (be it in a simulator or a paper exercise) is simply to come right until the other ship is on the port bow. Distance can be judged by using ship lengths.
With the buoys in a straight line they form a natural range. When on that LOP make an easy turn into the channel. Once near the middle the spacing of the buoys on each side will visually appear to be equal. It’s not at all difficult to see if you know what to look for.
Use the last buoy to seaward to make the turn into the channel - The distance between buoys can be used to estimate distance. This is from MacElrevey:
Not easy to understand from the book and it’s not simple to explain. Easy to understand when watching it done.
In a simulator be looking for a 99.9% pass rate more or less so tweak the exercise as required. In practice of course the watch officer would use radar/EDCIS to verify.
Coincidently I’m reading a book now - “A Mind for Numbers” by Oakley. (It came the library at Maine Maritime in Castine via interlibrary loan, good book).
Quote from Sheryl Sorby
“Many people erroneously believe that spatial intelligence is a fixed quantity - either you have it or you don’t. I’m here to say emphatically that this is not the case”
It goes on to say spatial skills can be developed with practice. That’s certainly true in my experience, watch officers show rapid improvement once they dip their toes into the visual waters instead of exclusively using electronics. . .
1 Like
It helps if everyone involved has a precise idea over what is planned. I was impressed with the skill shown by the pilots in Houston.
Yacht racing is excellent training for young cadets and learning the yacht racing rules and applying them is an excellent introduction to beginning their training as a bridge watch keeper .
My seagoing career started before radar was required but I was a keen user when it was available.
By the time I retired with DP, ECDIS, ARPA, and AIS meant that a merchant marine officer has the same information available as the OOW on a destroyer 60 years ago. This with a combat information room and electronic warfare room manned in a cruising watch.
I think that the vast majority of people with experience running small vessels do a lot of navigating by eye (whether they realize it or not).
I started out fishing in an open skiff with nothing more than my good eye, a magnetic box compass (that was only used in the fog), and a wristwatch.
Back in those days we used a lot of “marks” (natural ranges where a certain tree lined up with certain house or a certain part of a hillside.
I still tend to navigate by eye and use the electronics mostly for confirmation.
In places where I have good local knowledge, I don’t need electronics or a chart in clear weather.
3 Likes
To get the required ARPA certificate the class I was in had to demonstrate ability to avoid close quarters situations using radar information alone, no access to any other means. To obtain the ECDIS certificate we had to demonstrate the ability to successfully navigate in restricted waters using only ECDIS, again, no access to any other means.
On this thread I’m making a similar argument, that a deck officer’s should have some level of ability to conn the ship by visual information alone. Teaching visual skills would be negligent and in violation of the rules?
3 Likes
That was poorly worded, if you hit someone and your radar is turned off, you are in trouble.
What I meant was that on a clear day, one should be able to get from A to B if the vessel does not have any modern electronics, not that one would turn them off or sail without the minimum working equipment required for your class.
Kind of like how I teach my flight students to be able to find their way home and land with a total electrical failure but would never suggest one would try and fly an airplane with no electrical power on purpose unless it was some antique that never had electricity.
Besides for that I just crossed several areas of “3 foot deep” water because the charts have been wrong for ages.
Worth noting that the Ever Forward, if operated with no electronics by just following the very well bouyed channel, would not have been stuck in view of everyone driving off the island to work every morning 
There is nothing wrong with teaching these skills. Thats not what you had said though, you just said a new officer should just be able to do these things without the use of GPS or Radar:
No one should be doing these without GPS or Radar (on vessels large enough to require them, which most of us are). This is all you gave us in your orignal post and title. Sure, I have no problem with folks doing this exercise in a simulator before graduation, but licenses are not for learning. With the principles of BRM, it would be unreasonable for any officer to do this alone on a large vessel, let alone a new junior officer. It would be negligent to operate this way in the real world. Even then, Simulator exercises should reflect real world scenarios to be benefitial, there’s a whole chapter on it in MacElrevey which you posted above. I have a hard time thinking of more than two trades where someone fresh out of training is ribbed by the old timers asking “yeah but can you do it without your tools?” “Can you use the principles of ICS to form a bucket bregade circa 1800 rather than hooking to a hydrant to fight the fire?.. You should be able to fight a fire without an SCBA!” “Yeah but can you frame a house with a handsaw instead of a truck full of Milwaukeet?”
No, youre being paid to use your tools.
Im still a little irked I had to do a minefeild exercise on a simulator with only a Radar and a chart in a foreign language, a “cleared” channel about a mile wild with three 90 degree turns, and two 45 degree turns in a 3 mile stretch, and no buoys. Its an exercise youre designed to fail, especially a 2nd year academy student. Almost everyone died, my main takeaway from that exercise is that sophomores are inexperienced navigators, what a shock. Judging the backlash to the notorious Crolwey Simulator exercise, there are quite a few expereinced mariners who still wouldnt pass the minefeild exercise.
Sure, a new mate should be able to do what you listed above, but in a practical sense Id much rather they know how to use the tools at their disposal, that they are obligated to use. I think a Junior officer who does not change the bridge watch condition when they have no GPS or Radar approaching a buoyed channel with crossing traffic is much more of an issue than being burried in the ARPA.
Are you getting the “be able to do something” and “is it a good idea to do something” difference? It seems to me like a basic skill set one should have. Things can break.
Your minefield exercise shows a skill you were lacking, you needed to hack the simulator and move the mines Kobayashi Maru style 
Is it really too much to expect a ship driver to be able to drive a ship just by looking out the window?
Wow…I guess expectations have truly dropped!
2 Likes
I know people that can’t get to the 7-11 without a GPS, so there is that.
1 Like
Looking at incident reports it’s almost exclusively guys that don’t know how to effectively use their equipment getting in trouble because ‘they know how to do it by eye’.
If every near incident was an actual incident there would probably be less of this talk.
Yes, that’s all I’m saying. And not necessarily specifically those skills. If new mates lack those skills they should be able to acquire them relatively quickly aboard ship.
That’s rarely an issue in my experience. Deck officers are required to have the training. If a joining officer lacks those skills likely they would quickly be fired. Or at least they should be.
Isn’t doing it by eye the primary method? Do not pleasure boaters, tug captains, airplane pilots, car drivers, and many others primarily “do it by eye”?
Again, have we fallen so far as an industry that a jr officer can’t drive a ship between two big buoys “by eye”?
Must be like those engineers who have to call a tech for everything.
Good thread on this same subject here:
An example for a nearly perfect navigation, by eye only, are pedestrians crisscrossing crowded places or at street crossings. Videos from Tokyo street crossings are astonishing; but even centers of small cities are crowded.
Pedestrians do not think about their navigation, intuitively they register what their ‘adversaries’ could do, within the local habitudes. Collisions are rare. Even fools looking permanently into their smart phone, at GoogleMaps or important videos, are taken care of as an unpredictable obstacle.
Only when two smart phonies are on a collision course, there could be a problem. Future phones will certainly have an app for collision warnings.
2 Likes
Senior officer here to tell you that most of the ships have gotten so big that you can’t see the “two big buoys” once they pass your bow.
I think we may have strayed very far from the original intention of this thread though. When I show up on the bridge in traffic, I am going to be much happier if the mate on watch is actively using all of the tools at their disposal. Conversing with their lookout, tasking them with watching certain targets for aspect change or telling them to take a bearing with the compass and watch for drift while also using the electronic aids to form a fully informed decision. Visual navigation is very much a part of the day to day, but new officers have to be taught that. Up until this point, about the only thing they’ve been given significant training on is the radars and ECDIS, and that was not exactly how to manage these during the course of a watch.
Everyone has to learn somewhere
2 Likes