A vital skill for any ship's officer is the ability to quickly and accurately determine their vessel's location on a chart. Even in the era of GPS units, a captain who cannot successfully navigate a waterway is certain to have a short career.

As part of our ship activities, we teach the students how to read a river chart, including using the legend to determine distance and locating marked beacons and landmarks.

The fundamental skill of reading a chart can then lead into the more advanced task of determining lines of position.

 

As an optional exercise when the Half Moon is underway, we teach the students how to read the chart, show them our destination for the day, and provide them with our averge speed in knots. (Using the GPS unit, they can also easily determine our speed for themselves.)

The students are then tasked to determine the actual distance the ship must travel to reach its destination (following the course of the river, not merely an as-the-crow-flies straight line) and calculate the amount of time it will take the ship to reach its anchorage.

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