Three students attended our first Radar Course for 2017 and it is always challenging to fulfil the different requirements that each student brings to the classroom. Two commercial skippers and a yachtsman who sails for pleasure.

The course essentially is the same: How to switch on your Radar and get a picture, how to tune your picture and understand the picture and most importantly what actions to take in restricted visibility and the limitations of radar.

Following the theory of radar the students spent most of the course using the radar simulators and very quickly came to understand why it is so important to know how to use radar.

Rule 19d suddenly has greater meaning, plotting a manual plot is a revelation and a new skill which the students go away with.

The key to the radar course is practice: I always tell my students to go and practice what they have learned so that it becomes second nature to them.

Maybe this raises the query whether the radar course should be run over two days? Theory and simulators on day 1 and a practical on day 2?

5 days of navigation theory can be quite an undertaking for anyone who is not familiar no confident with charts, buoyage, rules of the road, safety, not to mention being in a classroom environment with exams!!!

At OneOcean Sea School our aim is to educate, inspire learning through explanation, demonstration, instructing and coaching. Having been through the RYA scheme ourselves understand what it is to be a student in a learning environment.

Each day we run through a part of the syllabus giving the student the opportunity to do exercises relating to each part of the syllabus. By the end of the course the student is tested on these in the form of two assessments, general assessment covering Rules of The Road, Safety, Pilotage and Meteorology, the second paper covering Chartwork. Nothing too onerous or taxing.

It is a most enjoyable course, worth taking if you have done your Powerboat Level 2 Course or RYA Competent Crew sailing course and look to progress your skills and enjoyment of seafaring.

So, well done to Kate and James on completing their Day Skipper Theory Course. Excellent students who grasped the concepts quickly.