Two Coastal Yachtmasters 👨✈️👩✈️
This fall, we took two sailing theory courses on Monday evenings: starting with the Inshore Diploma (Förarintyg) in September-October, followed by the Coastal Yachtmaster (Kustskepparintyg) in November-December. It was good to get out of the house when the weather turned dreary, stay excited about sailing, and we learned a lot of useful info about navigating and the law of the sea.
Things we learned:
You must help someone in distress at sea, unless it would endanger your own life.
The signals for flags and day and night signals, lights, and sounds. The flag always tested is diver down:
Rules for right-of-way (motorboats yield to sailboats; sailboats yield to big commercial traffic; sailboats upwind yield to downwind, etc.)
Safety equipment onboard (always wear life jackets; we should get a signal flare
Basic first aid (cool burns in water) and fire prevention (don’t have curtains over your stove; have lids for pots to extinguish a pot on fire)
The most fun and interesting part was analogue navigation with paper charts, a compass, protractor, and ruler. The course was very clear that this remains the most important means of navigation, with GPS a useful complement. Phone navigation, which we’ve mostly done so far, is only for total bozo losers (I’m paraphrasing here).
We learned a lot about reading nautical charts (symbols, estimating time, distance, and speed, how to navigate with lighthouses…). We’re excited to nerd out on taking bearings when we get back on the water next spring, correcting for magnetic deviation (which depends on where you are in the boat and which direction it’s going, based on metal objects in the boat) and magnetic variation/declination, which is the difference between compass north and true north, which varies with where you are on Earth and is printed on sailing charts.
Simon is thinking about writing some Math of Navigation posts… stay tuned :).
We were very happy and proud to both pass the Kustskeppar exam - you had to get at least 80% on each of 9 sections. We both got 100% on the navigation, and … less… on sections about things like which countries don’t require rabies vaccines to sail back with your dog. Well, we made it!
Our very nice teacher Karin from Medborgarskolan made us these knots to celebrate passing the Kustskepparexam. 😀
P.S. Here’s a useful translation table from Swedish to English sailing tables. Because we’ve studied all this in Swedish, we don’t know many of the English words! https://www.rorgangare.se/3_engelska_seglingstermer.html