These are short courses that are great introductions in to larger areas of interest. They are lower in cost and take about 90 minutes to complete. There is no instructor involvement but have a forum so that the user can communicate with the National office about longer courses.
Celestial Navigation in a Nutshell (Seminar)
This online seminar can be started as soon as you receive the link or by going to the course calendar drop down on the main web page and selecting Moodle Login. The Seminar is designed to be done in one sitting of about 90 minuets. Before electronic navigation aids like GPS and electronic chartplotters came along, coastal sailors plotted fixes by using natural and man-made references, such as lighthouses, buoys, church steeples, radio/TV towers, and so on, that were plotted in their exact locations on paper navigation charts. They did this by taking quick-succession bearings on two or more of these objects, thus producing lines of position (LOPs) that crossed each other at some point. When these LOPs were plotted on the paper chart, the sailor could see the fix, indicating the boat’s position. This process is called getting a terrestrial fix. However, if the sailor is in the middle of an ocean, there are no lighthouses or church steeples. There is a solution however, and as the Friendly Giant used to say, “Look up … way up,” and there are all those heavenly bodies, “lighthouses in the sky.”
How to use a GPS (Seminar)
This introductory online seminar is for boaters who want to know the basics of how to set up their GPS/Chartplotter, understand how it works, how to use it to and how it can connect to other boat electronics including tablets and smart phones. In this seminar, you will learn about waypoints, routes and how to best use the display options available for charts and data. Knowing how to plan and safely execute a route and interpret what you see on the charts is important A section is included on the capabilities of multi-function displays connected to an autopilot, sensors, radar, AIS or DSC radio. This is an interactive seminar and to help you assess your learning, there are question and answer segments located throughout the various sections
Tropical Weather for Winter Boaters (Seminar)
This online seminar can be started as soon as you receive the link or by going to the course calendar drop down on the main web page and selecting Moodle Login. The Seminar is designed to be done in one sitting of about 90 minuets. Many boaters like to spend all or part of their winters sailing in tropical waters, and no doubt wonder what sort of weather they might encounter. The meteorology behind winter weather in the Tropical Zone is very much different from that which we experience here in the mid-latitudes. This seminar gives provides a quick review of mid-latitude weather, and then explains the differences that we would find in the tropics, and why they are different. A good follow up of this course would be Weather for Boaters which is a multi week course with Tutor support.
Tides and Currents (Seminar)
This online seminar can be started as soon as you receive the link or by going to the course calendar drop down on the main web page and selecting Moodle Login. The Seminar is designed to be done in one sitting of about 90 minuets. For the safety of oneself, the boat’s crew and the boat itself, the boater had best be prepared to take tides and currents into consideration when planning a voyage of any length in tidal waters. Failure to do so can result in the vessel’s running aground or, just as embarrassing and damaging, snapping off a mast in a collision with a bridge or utility cable stretched across a tidal river. It is not possible to cover every detail of the subject of tides and currents within the constraints of this seminar, but it will certainly give the student a solid introduction to the subject. To learn more, we highly recommend boaters take the CPS-ECP courses, Boating 4: Near Shore Marine Navigation Level I and Boating 5: Near Shore Marine Navigation Level II. Tides and currents are covered more extensively in those courses.