Some years ago I decided that sailing from one place to another preferably unknown to me, was much more interesting than racing around a restricted area, so I made a few short ‘cruises’ around the Gower coast, one to the Isle of Wight, found out about the DCA and joined.

It became obvious very soon that in order to cruise a dinghy safely, I would need to know something about navigation. The nearest ‘evening class’ in navigation is held some twenty miles away from here so clearly I had to find an alternative. Fortunately, I am given each year, by my family, a copy of Reed’s Nautical Almanac as a Christmas present, and from this I found the National Marine Correspondence School.

After going through the prospectus, I enrolled, rather hesitantly, for a basic navigational theory course. The reasons for my hesitation were that I knew that I had planned a very busy year’s work ahead of me and was unsure that I could cope with anything else and also that I have always been very poor at maths and had imagined that navigation would involve endless complicated calculations which would be beyond my ability.

However, I have ‘had a go’ at it and I soon found that navigational theory as taught by the NMCS is really rather more than I had bargained for. It is a very fascinating and absorbing science, which has kept me very busy for rather longer than the time suggested for completing the course!

The particular course, which I have nearly completed, is very thorough, the material provided by the school is well presented, easy to follow, and quite obviously a great deal of work has been done to make sure that it is well within the capacity of anyone, regardless of age or experience, to cope with it. It is divided into six parts, the first a basic instruction on the use of navigational equipment, then, ways in which the information obtained can be used. The third and fourth parts involve the theory and practice of chart plotting and course correction and five and six contain all the information about navigational lights, buoyage and tides. I have spent many happy hours plotting the courses of imaginary boats on the metric instruction chart supplied by the school and have waited with some excitement for the results to come back from the school, of the assignments given at the end of each lesson.

I have personally learnt a great deal from this excellent course and have been able to put some of it into practice already this year so I can highly recommend it to anyone who feels, like me, that some navigational knowledge is necessary before venturing any further.

To those people who don’t like the idea of mathematical calculations, they are nothing like I had imagined and if I can do it, and I did, then anyone can!