The course was advertised as ‘Introduction to Navigation’ — two consecutive weekends at the end of January. The venue was The Earnley Concourse, Earnley Place, Nr. Chichester, Sussex and the tutor was John Hamilton of the Sail Training Association.

That bald synopsis hides a wealth of enjoyment!

Although in my mid 40’s, I have started to sail only in the last 12 months and last autumn acquired a Skipper 14. I had previously spent a week at Bosham Sea School being taught how to sail (to R.Y.A. Elementary Level) and although my ambitions at this stage are very limited, I have been interested in the whole subject of navigation. Reading books was hard going and the prospect of two weekends away, being taught in the company of similar souls, was distinctly appealing, particularly in the middle of winter.

So I booked up!

We gathered for dinner on the Friday evening of the first weekend and afterwards had our introduction to the course, saw the detailed programme, got to know each other (Christian names were the vogue) and our sailing interests. All very civilised and gentle like the calm before the storm! We applied basic navigation to find the bar and other facilities at the Concourse, which incidentally requires considerable expertise in map reading to even find on a dark night — in a car!

With John tailoring his programme according to the previous knowledge of the course members, we covered the basics like boat parts, knots, points of sailing, safety at sea and distress signals fairly quickly and started on charts, chart instruments and basic chartwork. This included distance and direction, conversion of bearings (true, magnetic and compass), position fixing and plotting with as many worked examples as time would allow. We learned about 3-bearing fixes, transits and running fixes, tides and tidal streams.

There was plenty of space with a table each on which to lay the Admiralty Chart provided — there were 12 of us the first weekend and 9 the second including 2 ladies to provide grace and decorum. By the time we left for home after tea on the first Sunday we had covered a helluva lot of ground, were ahead of the programme and I felt a pleasant mixture of saturation and satisfaction at learning hard in a very stimulating atmosphere. We needn’t have been surprised at the pressure for we had, in fact, been warned. If we had only read the small print in the brochure it would have told us that John was ‘an enthusiastic lecturer on this subject’ — they weren’t kidding either!

The second weekend we picked up where we had left off five ‘normal’ days earlier and were soon deep into buoyage, rules of the road, reefing, radio direction fixes and meteorology finishing with the strategy and planning of a voyage. On the last afternoon we had a comprehensive exercise drawing together much of the work we had done in getting ‘our boat’ from Newhaven to Boulogne, with varying degrees of success needless to say. The final bonus was to collect my R.Y.A. Coastal Grade 1 (Theory) Certificate — now for the practical!

The Concourse has residential accommodation, so is completely self-contained; non-residents can also attend as the evenings are free of lectures apart from the opening introduction on the first night, and there is plenty of opportunity over coffee, meals or in the evenings to make new friends or continue discussing some interesting point that had cropped up. It seemed that very quickly there was a lot of interaction between John and his victims! Reasonable familiarity with basic mathematics, whilst not essential, would definitely be helpful, together with a fair amount of stamina.

In setting down my own experience, which I hope Association members will find interesting and helpful, I must point put that the high regard I have for the tutor and the Concourse must in no way be construed as indicating that others may not be equally as good.