On 2004-03-21, Peter Bennett wrote:

Dunno if a boating course would necessarily help - the CPS Boating
Course manual barely mentions system A and B, without explaining the
differences.

(but a Boating Course is a Good Thing anyway...)

I agree, but probably for different reasons.

My "Coast Guard Safe Boating Course" -- or whatever it was called --
taught me a great deal ... but none of it about boats or safety,
except indirectly.

Mostly I learned what the other folks in the room *didn't* know, which
was pretty amazing, considering that they were all operating boats
every summer. There was one family who had a big ol' powerboat that
they kept in Narragansett Bay, and mom, dad, and 12-year-old son were
all taking the course. When it came to the (multiple choice) final
exam, only the son had a (very slightly) passing grade. Dad had a
score that was lesss than the 25% he'd have gotten by random
guessing. So what I learned was "there are some really clueless people
operating boats out there, clueless beyond anything I'd imagined
before, and some of them can run you down and kill you." And THAT
lesson, friends, was worth the price of admission.

I *did* briefly consider taking the follow-on courses up through
"junior navigator" and "senior navigator" until I realized that when I
LAST wanted to review celestial navigation I got fed up with the whole
discussion of azimuths and just worked it all out with some linear
algebra and "atan2", etc. Somehow I thought I wasn't likely to find
memorizing the rules of spherical trig all that rewarding...

By contrast, I'll put in a plug for the Mass Maritime Academy's
"Fisheries Program," which taught a basic diesel maintenance course
and a "diesel teardown" course that were superb. The second one
involved taking apart an engine just like the one on my boat. The
teardown took all morning. In the afternoon, we put it back together
and fired it up. Very rewarding. And I think the price was $40. You
won't find a better deal anywhere.

--John