I am now into the middle of the second day of blessed rest after the gruelling classroom stint in which advanced navigation theory, safety and seamanship was poured into us day after day, with homework of several hours eating away at sleep, until I felt that when I leave school I couldn’t possibly have ‘knowed no more’. I quote from an overheard train conversation about a rise in the school leaving age. What of course this is telling you is that the depths of my ignorance were partially revealed to me, and I regret to say that I over-reacted a bit, again.

Here I am in the background of a typical classroom scene. Mr Brash is in the foreground, his work a wonder to behold!

Although I account myself to be a professional learner, and start from the premise that any man may learn anything ‘if he set himself doggedly to it’ (thanks again Sam), I find a rapid increase in the number of steps needed to produce an answer difficult to absorb. I thrive on a small number of steps but there is a critical limit after which I tend to lose my way. I think I began to learn about this quality of my mind last week, and the best diagnostic clue was that I continually made stupid scaling errors reading the minutes portion of latitudes and longitudes on the scales at the margins of charts. Instead of building on the smaller number of steps we learned in our first classroom  week, I tried to stand back and treat the more advanced topics without the same level of detail, with disastrous consequences for me in the final chartwork examination, in which I performed more poorly than at any other time during this arduous training.

Here is a self-portrait of an over-confidant man.

I was still able to obtain my certificate, but I felt that the examiner was having to draw upon his own previous knowledge of my effective navigation on the sea itself, and possibly to make allowances for my good or extremely good appreciation and performance on other crucial topics of the week, including collision regulations, weather understanding, Beaufort scale, passage planning, and pilotage.

Here is the proof that at last i have learned how to adjust navigational dividers with one hand. You can squeeze between index finger and thumb to close the dividers, and squeeze between lower fingers and upper thumb joint to open them again, using the cross-over ‘bulb’. Cunning eh?

The list of five items above represents only a small proportion of the 44 odd topics listed in the full curriculum shown in the RYA training publication handbook on which the course is based. From this you will see that this part of the training calls for far more than a ‘Noddy’ appreciation of the business of learning to be a Yachtmaster. And so it should, for a Yachtmaster, or Coastal Skipper as I am aspiring to be, is in charge of the lives that share the salty unforgiving element on which they temporarily dwell, and the lives of other sailors in other vessels that on a dark night of fog in a rising gale they may meet on a converging course.

Here is a photo of some actual tide calculations, made during my navigation stint on the Raja Muda.

I am glad that my experiences on this course have again had the effect of cutting down my monstrous ego to size, as like Mr Bennett in Pride and Prejudice, when faced with incontrovertible proof of his errors and misjudgements, I ‘ought to feel it’.

But of course, a short period of rest upon the land, in the luxury of an air-conditioned hotel, has allowed any fugitive feelings that I should withdraw from the course due to incompetence to pass, such that I am ready for last two weeks of this great adventure, which shall be spent in waters quite unknown to me, within that portion of the Andaman Sea claimed by the Kingdom of Thailand.