Back To School

In March I completed a 60 hour course taught by The Nautical School in preparation for a test for the OUPV (Operator of Uninspected Passenger Vessels or so called “Six Pack”) License. It was taught in  a senior citizens center on East 33^rd Street, east of Second Avenue It consisted of four 8 - 5:30 sessions on two weekends with 6 – 10:30 pm classes during each of the five intervening weekday nights. There were nine of us, taught by Captain Dave Heim, a very experienced mariner, boat builder, delivery captain, etc., standing below.

The class was harder than I had planned. The lessons on navigation required us to learn how to plot a fix based on being given three hand held bearing compass readings, determine the course to steer by calculating the vector created by set and drift (the direction and speed of the current), etc. The information is given in magnetic readings and have to be solved for Variation from true north, which in Long Island Sound is 14 degrees different from true, and for Deviation, which is the measure of the number of degrees that your boat’s magnetic compass is “off” on any given course due to the magnetic configuration of your own boat.  All of this laborious work and much more is done for us instantaneously by the GPS - so this new (actually old) knowledge is useful only if the GPS fails. For me, it was a review of what I have long forgotten from my Navy ROTC course in navigation, about 50 years ago. I had forgotten it all, except for how easy it is to make a mistake. There are so many ways steps in the process each with its own ways to make a mistake: reading the directions, transposing digits, plotting latitude or longitude, not placing the parallel rulers with sufficient accuracy or letting them slip from their setting while sliding them, doing the calculations, subtracting or adding when it should be the other when accounting for set and drift, marking off the reciprocal (180 degrees wrong) while setting in the direction of set, making a mistake in calculating the elapsed time in minutes, and converting to hours and solving for speed, time and distance from any two, etc.

Then there is a major section on the rules of the road, including learning the priority as to who has the right of way among seven different classes of vessels, the proper lights to show at night for each, and what a light configuration tells you about what you see out there, of day shapes to be shown by day (I don’t have the sailboat one - a black cone) and the fog signals. I had thought that the sailboat fog signal was one prolonged (not “long”) blast of the air horn (four to six seconds) every two minutes. But that prolonged blast should be followed by two one-second blasts. I better get some more canisters of compressed air to have enough to sound those blasts in Maine -- “The Fog State” -- this summer.

The knot tying part was easiest for me, and deck seamanship.

Most of my classmates plan to use their licenses to make money. One is a deck hand on one of New York’s small ferry lines and will get a big pay raise as Captain. The others are more entrepreneurial. One couple plans to use their licenses like me. They are architects who live aboard in Jersey City and just want knowledge. It is called a “six pack” license because it permits the holder to take out up to six fee paying passengers. But I plan never to charge my friends a fee.

The acid test is coming up when I can get a few days to cram for it and take it: the test itself. The license also requires a physical and drug tests which involves expenses I don’t need. So I may not actually get the license after (hopefully) passing the test. I will let you know.