Ashore Classes

Overview
Our off season classes help keep sailing fresh in everyone's minds and also help hone your navigation and sailing skills. These courses, offered from October through March, cover theory of navigation, weather, and radar.
Coastal Navigation
 Students learn the navigational theory and practical skills required to safely pilot a sailing vessel in coastal or inland waters with a focus on real world, practical navigation. The course is taught in a classroom setting with plenty of chart work to exercise various learning segments.
Electronic Navigation
Paper charts versus electronic devices have flip flopped in priority with paper being the backup. It is an essential backup but nevertheless a backup. Sailors for the most part are carrying handheld phones and devices which rival the most advanced chart plotters and GPS devices. Learn how easy these iPad and Android devices are to operate and which programs are reviewed and recommended.
Basic Celestial Navigation
 The Basic Celestial course provides students the basic knowledge needed to fix their position at sea when completely out of sight of land. There are no prerequisites for this class. Basic Celestial does not require students to learn and master the more cumbersome calculations required in ASA’s 107 level Celestial Navigation course. Students will get hands-on experience with the sextant and learn the fascinating concepts that make celestial navigation possible. We highly recommend this course not only as an important skill set for emergency navigation, but also as a fun learning exercise that will allow you to better understand everyday occurrences such as the changing length of the day throughout the year and why the sun never sets in the summer in most of Greenland. 
Celestial Navigation
 In addition to the material covered in Basic Celestial Navigation, ASA 107 teaches students how to do sight reductions and navigate with the sun, moon, planets and stars other than Polaris. ASA 107 is a prerequisite for ASA-108, Offshore Passagemaking. This more advanced course covers how to find your position at sea plus other routine and special procedures for safe, efficient offshore navigation. No previous navigation experience is required and the only math involved is arithmetic.
Marine Weather
 This course teaches boaters how to take weather into account in the planning and navigation of voyages, both local and global. Anyone who ventures onto the water will benefit from this course. Weather is a big subject with many facets, but when it comes to marine weather it really boils down to wind prediction. Wind drives a sailboat and creates the waves. Although severe weather is a concern, sailors spend far more time dealing with too little wind rather than too much. This course teaches you how to find more wind when there is little to be had, in addition to avoiding extreme weather whenever possible.
Marlinspike Seamanship
 Marlinspike seamanship is the mark of an able seaman to choose, care for, handle, and make work a variety of rope in any way needed.
Whether you want to make a built-in handle at the end of a water bucket, lash oars or other deck gear in place, attach a foot of a sail to a boom, or even extend a towing line, this course will prepare you with the right tools.
Radar for Mariners
 A practical guide to safe, versatile, and efficient use of small craft radar, covering brief overview of radar principles and operation, definition of terms, navigation by range and bearing, use of VRM and EBL in navigation and collision avoidance, identifying radar targets and interpreting their motions, and how to apply the Rules of the Road. Also, how to interpret land masses seen on the radar. Rules of thumb on what can and cannot be seen (resolving power).

[Back to Northern Breezes Sailing School schedule.]

TOP