A detailed guide to navigation practice, on your own, underway

Onboard Navigation Exercise Book by David Burch Paperback, 42 pages, coil bound, 8.5" x 11", (Starpath, 2005, Seattle) Discounts are available to schools and organizations for multiple purchases. $24.95   ...item# 1930m

This is the same exercise book (workbook) we use in our onboard training courses, which you can use for your own study underway. It is a navigation course in itself in that once you master the skills of these exercises you can be confindent that you have a practical working knowledge of navigation. These are skills are procedures that every navigator should be familar with. It is designed to be worked in various settings at various times during one voyage or many. Complete forms are provided to document your work. Check the Contents link above to see the Table of Contents which includes a few samples of the many exercises. The Overview and Instructions section of the book are shown below. Overview and Instructions... from the Exercise Book This Exercise Book will serve as your menu of practice exercises and log for onboard navigation training. Please skim through it to see what is covered. There will be group talks on the subjects as well as individual instruction. Once you know what is here, you will always have something to work on if you like, even when the instructor is working with other crewmembers at the moment. At the end of the voyage, it will be your documentation and souvenir of the voyage. The goal is to work as many of these exercises each day as your time and interest permits. Some may require instruction first, but after that you have the forms to carry out more examples on your own. Do not hesitate to ask for help from an instructor or fellow crewmember. You can also work together and share the results you get. There is no order to the projects. Just take whatever project might be convenient at the time, or choose ones related to the day's discussions. The order of the projects in each section corresponds very roughly to the complexity of the exercise. The exercises are grouped in subject headings, although many are interrelated. For most exercises, the first thing to record is the Date, Time, and Position. You get the latter from the chart or the nearest GPS. Record both Lat/Lon and a brief text description, ie 1.5 mi SW of Point Sheridan. In most cases, Lat/Lon to the nearest tenth of a minute will be adequate, ie 47° 34.6' N. That corresponds to ± 600 feet, which is all that is needed. [In a few cases, when more accurate specification might be useful, ie, use 34.56', which is ± 60 ft, or even 34.563' which is ± 6 ft - none of our instrumentation will be that accurate, but it can indeed be more accurate than ± 60 ft.] Some of these exercises are very basic and quick, others will take more time. In either case, it will be instructive to record your results, not just do them. Both you and the instructor will want to document what has been covered. There is always the possibility to learn many things on any extended voyage, so we need some way to organize what we have done so we can be most effective with the time we have. The entry will document when you actually did the exercises and what we have left to do. This is also true for your own sailing. If you keep a written record of navigation experiences (separate from ship's log) you gain "local knowledge" at a much faster rate than just relying on memory alone. You may want to practice some of them on scratch paper before entering in this book… or use pencil so if one gets started that does not get finished, you can erase it. Also for some of them, you may want more detailed records than there are places in the forms, in which case just use your own notebook to supplement this book. If you label your notes such as "GPS-1 on May 22," for example, you will be able to correlate notebook and Exercise Book. Also note a few exercises take some time to complete, involving a longer run, with data gathered at the beginning and end only, or only periodically throughout the day, in which case you might be working on more than one at a time. Start a longer one, then if you like, work on others while the longer one is cooking. More practice: For some of these you may want to do more examples than there are forms for in this book, in which case just do them in your notebook. The main idea of this book is to outline the types of navigation practice that you can do on any voyage, long or short, for more practice on your own. If all equipment is working properly, we would hope that each participant would work a few of each Exercise. If the equipment is not working properly, we will generate new exercises on how to get by without whatever it is that failed.