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Similarly,
David Burch is super qualified to create the several CD training products
I tried from his Starpath School of Navigation. The man has 60,000 sea
miles, 20,000 students, and nine navigation books in his wake and holds
a PhD in physics to boot. His enormous expertise, along with a willingness
to try many available teaching technologies, comes through loud and clear
in these products. In fact, to a certain extent, the Weather and Chart
Trainers may be too much for some more novice navigators. Rather than
employing the succinct and linear voice-over technique of Bessmer, Burch
packs massive amounts of information on his CDs along with multiple ways
to access it. For instance, Chart Trainer not only has all the symbols
annotated, and sometimes photographically depicted, but also includes
animations of light characteristics and abbreviations in 26 languages.
And it ships with an online copy of NOAA’s lengthy Chart Reading
Manual.
Some aspiring navigators might get lost in these products, but you can
find out for yourself by checking out Starpath’s excellent online
product demos. If you find yourself looking for a more basic, paper-based
course in using charts—which, remember, is the foundation you need
to really attain proficiency with electronic navigation—one that
I find particularly well done is BoatSafe’s Coastal Navigation Course
(www.boatsafe.com). But don’t
miss Starpath’s Radar Trainer 3, which is a well-designed simulator
that can be as useful to the inquisitive novice as it is to commercial
operators. I don’t think that there’s anything comparable
for understanding the confusing dynamics of radar imagery, excepting the
wonderful bridge-size simulators I’ve seen in action at maritime
academies (and which regrettably have megayacht-size price tags).
Radar
Trainer 3 costs $159 and lets you experience fairly realistic collision-avoidance
scenarios while also (unrealistically) watching the same action play out
on a chart. Thus you can quickly learn that normal radar screens do not
describe other vessels’ true motions very well. Better still is
to print out one of the chartlets and then flip the trainer over to the
all-scope view and see if you can negotiate Puget Sound or the coast of
England in zero visibility without damage! It’s instructive and
rather fun. You’ll have most essential radar functions at hand as
well as control of your vessel’s speed and heading. You can even
jump over to the other guy’s screens and see how things look, build
your own simulations, control subtleties like sea state, and more. And
of course, in Starpath fashion, all sorts of reference and tutorial materials
are included.
Now
modern advances like radar/chart split displays, overlay, and automatic
tracking are all helping to make low-visibility navigation more relaxed,
but again a good grasp of the basics really helps you to understand and
best use on even the fanciest machines. Besides, I’m convinced that
one of boating’s many seductive qualities is that there is always
more to learn. And if you responded that the fast development of modern,
sometimes dauntingly complicated electronics has forced the issue, I wouldn’t
argue. So consider lugging a laptop down to the boat on a slow summer
day and spending some time with a training CD created by someone who knows
what he is doing. It can be rewarding, even pleasurable.
Course
Line PC Navigation Phone: (503) 998-2304. www.courselinepc.com.
Starpath
School of Navigation Phone: (206)-783-1414. www.starpath.com.
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