April252009
Posted in Merchant Navy | Comments Off
So thats week one of phase 5 at Warsash down. We all arrived back nice and early at 9am on monday to the wonderful news that the MCA had decided that the “NARAS” component that is built into the foundation degree course is rubbish and that we have to do an individual 36 hour NARAS theory course!
For those doing this course a year behind us, its not a big problem, the college just added it to their phase 3 timetable, however for us they are fast running out of time and have replaced what we expected to be 3 weeks of Orals preparation with 9 – 5 NARAS theory with a bit of Orals preparation dotted around.
One bonus is we now have 3 copies of the notes with 3 different covers – but still with the same mistakes in them!
So… moving on, after the next 2 weeks we all start our short course period. There are 6 short courses in total, which in no particular order are;
- CPSC – Proficiency in Survival Craft & Rescue Boats
- EDH – Efficient Deck Hand
- AFF – Advanced Fire Fighting Course
- MFA – Medical First Aid On Board Ship
- GMDSS – General Operator Certificate
- NARAS Simulator
These take place randomly dotted throughout the months of May and June with me finishing my last short course on the 3rd of July.
The timetable for the next two weeks remains a mystery at the time of writing, however I shall assume it’s probably going to be much the same as last week.
April142009
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off
Since my last entry a few weeks ago I have updated the web site with a new design and switched my blog to using a program I designed for another web site. If you have been visiting over the past few weeks you may have noticed lots of one line entries – these were imports taken automatically from Twitter, I have decided however that this was a bad idea as a lot of the messages were pretty random and not really of interest to people outside twitter, I have since removed the automatic Twitter importing, so if you want to see what I am up to regularly you can follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/alistairuk.
Speaking of Twitter I was playing around with Photoshop this morning and changed the way my profile looks, inspired by Justine who did a similar thing a few months ago.
In other news videos I place on YouTube automatically import too, so there are now two videos of me at Maho Beach on the joint Dutch/French island of St Marten in the Caribbean.
On the merchant navy front I am returning to Warsash Maritime Academy (who have a new web site by the way) on sunday for what is hopefully my last time there.
I believe I have 3 weeks of revision/finishing off the foundation degree and then around 9 weeks of short courses such as GMDSS, Advanced Fire Fighting, Emergency First Aid, NARAS and EDH. Before being able to sit my orals examination with the MCA.
Anyway, this was meant to just be a quick update, I shall start writing more when I return to Warsash.
