Taking a few minutes to play Hooky

Lee’s Landing, Lake Union, Seattle, WA, 7-MAY-2019 – Tests for my Master’s (Captain’s) license start tomorrow evening. I’ll take a few minutes to play hooky and tell you about the experience before the reckoning.

I row to class in our Portland Pudgy each afternoon, a little after 5pm and then home at 9:30. The row is around 50 minutes, five or ten minutes longer than walking, but if I paid attention to where I am rowing, it might be the same or less. When rowing, I only see where I have been, rather than where I will be.

At night, I will see only three or fewer boats on the lake on my row home.

Lake Union and the PNW boating community is as much my home, as any I have had. I think of the three places I’ve lived where I would run into I people I knew: As a young adult on Long Island, I would always meet people I knew at Smith-Haven Mall. As a slightly older, young adult in New York’s west village, and now sailing here.

On the row yesterday, Dorin, the skipper of Mitlite (pronounced Mit-Leetay), came by to speak, and Derek, who had a charter on board, waved and took pictures of yours truly rowing. I think his
clients were amused.
http://boattourseattle.com/
https://www.facebook.com/MitliteClassicYacht/

To be honest, I’m tired of class. I have learned a lot, but I prefer being an autodidact and learning from books, Youtube (of course) and trial and error based on that learning. In class, we’ve gotten past all the stuff we will use, past all the stuff we would use if there was no electronics and we didn’t have a sextant – all of the Nav stuff seems to have stopped in the 1980s. (For old sailors, we still cover LORAN, though only cursorily – for everyone else, LORAN was turned off years ago.)

It has become a bit of a slog.

On the flip side, I am still having trouble manually plotting courses on paper. I have my eye-hand issues, and I still do stupid things like subtracting when I should be adding, despite having written the proper plus or minus sign.

Rules of the road, sound signals and lights are very relevant, but knowing the difference between a Class A and Class B AIS target would be helpful, as might an overview of common marine electronics, NMEA 2000 and 0183, since absolutely all electronics on a modern boat rely on this.

Much licensing is put in place to protect established professionals from competition. If you have been able to witness new licensing programs put in place for newly emerging professions, you can see this in action.

That the masters license I am studying for has not been updated in decades just reinforces this. I’m not sure anyone really cares. The biggest hurdle is sea time: 360 days for a basic license, 720 for a near coastal. (Sailing your sunfish, or paddling your kayak also count.) The inland passage to Alaska has just been reclassified as near coastal rather than coastal, which is something that defies explanation. With a few exceptions, it is as protected as Long Island Sound or the Chesapeake.

My instructors assure me I will pass. I can retake the tests up to three times (Three different tests covering the same subject matter) and they will tutor me between retests, if I need it.

But basically, I want it done.

If all goes well, I’ll be done with this in nine more days, then I return to planning the trip for late summer, and finishing (well, it’s never finished, shall we say continuing) the work on Caro Babbo.

We’ll also take three weeks for a car trip to Colorado to visit with Jennifer’s matriarchy of cousins and aunts, then continue to Phoenix, stopping in California along the way. We’d love to see you if you’re near our route.