At last....

Light (ok no) blogging the last couple of weeks. I have been working on upgrading to Master 1600GT (O) from 2nd Mate AGT and finally completed testing on Friday. Got Coast Guard approval last year and actually took the the 2 required modules right before thanksgiving which only proved how woefully unprepared I was for the tests. Spent the last few months Studying up both at LAMPI in Houma, Louisiana with Capt. Bruce (money very well spent and quite cheap) also used Lapware to drill Rules of the Road.

The tests weren't that difficult but you definitely need to brush up on the basics. For myself my license was issued in 2002 and there was quite a bit of stuff that I just hadn't used. I used a couple of great books to prepare the best of which was: The Master's Handbook on Ship's Business by Tuuli Anna Messer for stability I started working with Stability & Trim for the Ship's Officer ed. by William E. George unfortunately the current edition is the 4th edition and it has been changed and for the worse in the new (2005) edition.

We will discuss "Ships Business" momentarily but first let's address "Stability". The 4th edition is in my opinion flawed as a text for the self taught mariner. The 4th edition has doubled in price but is much less useful. The new editions approach has omitted all the end of chapter exercises in favor of a chapter of Coast Guard questions in the back half of the book To the casual observer this may seem a good idea but the problems with this approach are many: 1) There is no review or reinforcement of each chapters material nor any way for the students to work key concepts before moving on to the next chapter; 2) there does not seem to be a directed approach to applying the material in the book to the CG test bank questions; and 3) useful as they are as examples given the long intervals between editions the CG questions will soon become obsolete as the Coast Guard adds and deletes questions from the test bank. "Stability" is a well written and prepared book but outside the context of a formal classroom setting it is no longer suitable for the independent student. Cornell Maritime Press produces excellent books and I generally recommend them highly but 4 ed "Stability" is not a book I can suggest. If Cornell wishes to improve the text restoration of the end of chapter exercises and better integration of the CG test bank would be useful to the student.

"Ships Business" was a well written and and put together book. I am still reading it now but having read the previous edition sometime ago can heartily recommend it.

I also used Lapware to drill Rules of the Road. I found the responses from Richard Plant to my questions to be timely and informative. In my particular case I run Vista 64 and was concerned that I would pay for the service an but be unable to use it due to software incompatibility. This was the case for disc based software I tried earlier in the year who's demo worked great but the software didn't run at all (because the copy protection wouldn't work with Vista 64). For me Lapware was perfect I was able to study Rules and then have reports that identified areas of weakness. As a result I managed to get a perfect score on Rules (on the 3rd try mind you). While I only experimented with the other modules they seemed to work well and had worked solutions for everything I tried that needed a solution. Highly recommended.

That's enough for tonight. Goodnight.