BSAC Chart Work and Position Fixing course

Complimenting the BSAC Boat Handling course, the Chart Work and Position Fixing program gives you the skills and techniques for voyage navigation. You’ll learn to navigate to and located dive sites such as pinnacles and wrecks, plotting voyages on a chart and using a GPS. This includes factoring in tidal and weather predictions.

This two day course is involves theory, a practical dry lesson and application of techniques whilst navigating out at sea.

Theory Lessons

We’ll begin by taking a look at nautical charts – latitude and longitude, scale, color codes and common abbreviations. You’ll learn to plot courses and measure distances, before moving onto tides – understanding the implications for navigations and being able to make tidal predications, such as using the rule of twelfths.

Finally we take a look at weather and weather forecasting, learning when it is and isn’t appropriate to go to sea.

The next step of the course is a practical dry lesson where you use all this information to compose a voyage plan, before the best bit…

Practical Lessons

Now it’s time to put it all together by navigating at sea.

After safety checks and startup procedures we’ll run through a number of skills including navigating to a dive site using both compass and GPS, then using a sonar / depth sounder to locate a submerged dive site by running search patterns.

You’ll practice navigating using multiple waypoints, steering on a single transit, marking a dive site using multiple transits, calculating the speed of travel and distance and identifying and steering along a contour line.