What Skills Would you Assume an Inexperienced Mate Has?

Unless it gets explicitly taught it’s going to be be learned by trial and error. If the mate only makes course adjustments at sea a rule of thumb for making turns that does not include pivot point or advance and transfer is not going to have noticeable errors.

You don’t know what you don’t know. If the way it’s being done works why would anyone dig deeper? There are plenty of more urgent tasks to be done.

I’m not criticizing the system, I’m just surprised by your first post. I just figured guys that choose to drive ships for a living would at least have fundamental skills from driving smaller boats…obviously naive, I am.

I meet more mates that grew up in the Midwest or mountains and have rarely if ever operated a small boat. It definitely shows if you ask them to maneuver the lifeboat for a COI.

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That why those guys that raced sailing dingies at the yacht club or went lobstering as kids are a lot better than guys with no small boat handling experience.

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Worked my summers through high school driving people out to their boats on a launch at a marina and towing them on and off the docks for maintenance. Had some good times during those years and met some great people.

I was responding to your comment that it showed a lack of pride, I don’t think that’s really the case. For the most part it’s just a bunch of working stiffs doing their job.

There are a lot of pilots out there that are not Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger that still take pride in their work.

Here is a description of the junior pilot on Air France 447 which crashed in the S. Atlantic on a Rio-Paris flight.

Occupying the right seat was the junior co-pilot, Bonin, whose turn it was to be the Pilot Flying—making the takeoff and landing, and managing the automation in cruising flight. Bonin was a type known as a Company Baby: he had been trained nearly from scratch by Air France and placed directly into Airbuses at a time when he had only a few hundred flight hours under his belt. By now he had accumulated 2,936 hours, but they were of low quality, and his experience was minimal, because almost all of his flight time was in fly-by-wire Airbuses running on autopilot.

I agree completely with this but a lot of other captains do not for some reason.

Here’s what I do, instead of making the turn myself at the sea buoy, getting steady on the GC course I turn the conn over to the green third mate before the turn.

I tell them how much rudder to use (get it started with 10 then go midships) and tell them to keep the buoy “on the beam” That’s a lot of information for someone that only been on the ship for two hours, what the hell does “keep it on the beam” even mean?

Sometimes they use full rudder, a car ship at 18 kts turns quick, hilarity ensues.

We get it sorted out, when they get off in 90 days after going around the world they most often have the basics down.

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In my opinion a green third mate should understand what “keep it on the beam” means. Though a lot of that, if academy trained, comes down to the instructors they had. The guy who was teaching shiphandling at maine while I was there was terrible. To the point where he got banned from the lab.

Mates are officers…officers are “professionals”. Just “doing their job” seems like a description reserved for janitors. Again, it just seems strange that somebody that has never had a desire to drive a ship (drunk idiot redneck boaters) will have more skills than one that is or has attended 4+ years of university focused around the art/skill of seamanship.

As for the scarebus pilot…he was just an idiot and a shitty pilot. Just like the morons that crashed colgan air.

And, I think a lot of this lack of fundamental skills comes from the shift of our society from farmboy/frontiersman to excessive booksmart/classroom training…which now is mostly death-by-powerpoint. We have more credentials and degree paths than ever before, but we seem to be less competent overall.

There is a big difference between kids who grew up in coastal towns that have a seafaring heritage and inland city kids that merely graduated from an academy.

There is a big difference between a guy who is a Mariner because that’s who he is, and a guy who is merely working as a Mariner for the money until he can afford to do something else.

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Conrad say’s it’s all been downhill since the engineers showed up.

And therein I think I can lay my finger upon the difference between the seamen of yesterday, who are still with us, and the seamen of to-morrow, already entered upon the possession of their inheritance. History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which
has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird. Nothing will awaken the same response of pleasurable emotion or conscientious endeavour. And the sailing of any vessel afloat is an art whose fine form seems already receding from us on its way to the overshadowed Valley of Oblivion. The taking of a modern steamship about the world (though one would not minimize its responsibilities) has not the same quality of intimacy with nature, which, after all, is an indispensable condition to the building up of an art. It is less personal and a more exact calling; less arduous, but also less gratifying in the lack of close communion between the artist and the medium of his art. It is, in short, less a matter of love.

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See 46 U.S. Code 8702(d):

An individual having a rating of less than able seaman may not be permitted at the wheel in ports, harbors, and other waters subject to congested vessel traffic, or under conditions of reduced visibility, adverse weather, or other hazardous circumstances.

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What’s the lab? A simulator?

As far as using the relative change in bearing of a buoy to measure rate of turn…in your case, the phrase “keep it on the beam” has a lot of meaning beyond an answer on a multiple choice exam, it’s a term for something you already know, and you “know” it in a deep sense.

For most students, it would just be a piece of information with no context. In practice when the phrase is heard without understanding it doesn’t make sense because the buoy is anchored to the bottom.

I know how to pole vault in the sense I’ve seen it done on TV and I believe I understand the theory.

Since ratings refer to unlicensed personnel, is “less than able seaman” not referring to OSs and such and not to academy graduates with licenses?

The cadets should be trained to operate power and sailing vessels under 100 tons. Plenty of hands on training. They should not graduate until they become proficient.

Cadets should be trained to be ABs, and then get 180 days experience as an AB on a ship before they can graduate.

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Cadets aren’t academy graduates with licenses yet though…they’re cadets. WheN I was a cadet I had a OS/Wiper Z-card, but I’m not sure what they come out with now. I would be surprised if it was an AB ticket since they don’t have any seatime.

We have “Specially Trained” OS’s onboard, and they can’t steer in pilotage waters, exception being if they hold an AB ticket and are just sailing as OS.

It doesn’t take that much. All it takes is a couple months on a tug.

The issue is that a level of understanding of navigation is hidden from watch standers on a fully equipped deep-sea vessel. The basics of navigation have been “abstracted away” by ECDIS and GPS.

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Running a small vessel, especially sailing, forces a guy to learn to observe the elements, set and drift, and use them to advantage.

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My mistake in reading cadet and thinking grad. In my mind they are synonymous. Green 3Ms show up with no more than cadet skills in ship/boat handling. In my opinion, not enough.