STCW and onto the Boats!!!!!

Well, that’s done and we’re on to the next thing.

My goal is to write this once a week, but the last two weeks seem to have flown by and I missed out on writing a post about the STCW course that we all just completed. For those that don’t know, STCW stands for…ummm….hold on for a second while I google…..⏰…Standards of Training Certifications and Watchkeeping for seafarers. It a group of five courses that cover firefighting, safety and survival at sea, requirements and safe work practices, first aid, and security of vessels. It’s eleven days long and had some good information to take away.

My issues with STCW though are many, but I am not here to simply complain, so I won’t. The gist of it is that I don’t feel that after completing the course, I am any better off to work on a boat, ship, yacht, etc. The information is good, but with a failure of this course stoping your career working on yachts, I feel, it should just be an 11 day informative and practical application with a completion requirement, not pass/fail.

The first aid didn’t cover much of the information that a RedCross or Emergency First Responder course would cover. I believe the EFR course would be much better suited for ship work than the course we received is. The reason for this is that the STCW course focused more on terminology and some anatomy over what to do in an emergency situation. EFR focuses on real world emergencies and doesn’t really touch on things like what organs make up the lower left quadrant of your abdominal cavity. The security course was interesting, but could be boiled down to simply telling the crew to hide in the citadel until help can arrive.

The best part of the course, in my opinion was the fire fighting. I believe that if someone is faced with a fire emergency without having ever felt the heat and been surrounded by blinding smoke, there is going to be a lot more stress involved. Dawning the gear and working as a team to enter a burning building and put out fires with temperatures reaching 300˚ is an experience to say the least. The course also provided a very good familiarization with the different extinguishers and when/how to use them. Good knowledge for anyone, not just yachties.

And of course, one great thing about STCW was that it brought our crew together prior to getting on a boat and I think we are stronger for the time spent in close quarters in Cape Town.

But…..now that that’s over AND ON TO SAILING!!!!!!!!

Our group traveled from Cape Town to Lagebaan South Africa on the 15th of September. We had a short introduction that night and then woke up the next morning to an orientation covering rules and expectations along with a few more introductions, then…we went shopping and got on the boat. I love the fact that before any instruction on sailing, Sail Due South splits their students on 2 boats for a week with excellent skippers and just gets into it with the Competent Crew course. We had to come up with meal plans and provision, we worked the sails, learned the parts and terms of the boat, and sailed a few races (all 6 of which our crew won), docked, tied knots, and really just learned what it was like to live and sail on a boat for a week straight. For some, it was the longest time spent on a boat of any size. What a way to start our course!!!

Meal plans ended up being one of the humorous points of the week. As one boat took time to plan and shop for quality meals, the other boat decided to have their meals mostly consist of hot dogs and ramen noodles (South Africans call these items Viennas and 2 min noodles respectfully). It wouldn’t be a surprise if I mentioned that the boat that had mostly hot dogs, was made up of all the younger members of our crew and the boat that had the quality meals was made up of the older members of the crew. Our instructor skipper was definitely happy with the boat he got stuck with.

To keep things interesting, after we learned many of the skills of sailing, we put them to use during a series of 6 races over the week. During the fifth race, one of our skippers in training tried to take a turn a bit too sharply and ran head on into the buoy marker. The boat is fine, but I think there was a bruising of an ego. We of course, aren’t going to let him live that one down. It didn’t help much when, later on in the week, we had an exercise rowing boats. The same student ran his row boat into a concrete bridge support.

The same day as the row boat practical application, we all got to go up the mast. For some of us, myself included, that was the first time. Not sure I want to do that again, though the view from the top was pretty nice!

All in all, it was a fun week, with good food (one boat), good laughs, a lot of new knowledge, and some good learning. I keep looking at the beautiful weather, and I am sad that we’re not still on the boat this week. But…we have different types of training in this school, and some of that involves classroom.