Alistair Baillie

We’ll im now back at college for the final 7 weeks (well 6 now). The classes are continuing on from before the Easter break with the addition of 6 lectures on Rule of the Road – apparently the college have finally decided after a lot of complaining to give us a class covering COLREGs.

With the exception of this class, our timetable remains very sparse and you have to wonder why they didn’t compact our lessons and do this college phase in 3 months rather than 10! Most weeks we spent less than 10 hours at college and since Christmas even that’s been reduced!

Its quite scary to think in 6 weeks we will have finished all our college time (with the exception of 3 weeks of tidying up our work based learning and the 2 months of short courses), we will go straight into our Orals on returning from our 12 months at sea!

Anyway.. I still haven’t found out which ships I am going on, but I presume I will be leaving at the start of June.

I also need to go for another ENG1 medical exam and some vaccinations before going back to sea since my ENG1 will expire while im at sea but I will assume that’s being arranged for sometime between college finishing and me leaving for sea.

In other news I have now learned all the International Code of Signals flags and their single letter meanings with morse currently in progress – I did originally start learning morse on the ship but I never really succeeded, so far I am still struggling but I’ve found it slightly easier to group them by the number of characters in the signal. (Eg; E & T have 1 character (dit & dah); A, I, N & M have 2 (dit dah, dit dit, dah dit & dah dah). If anyone has any other suggestions please let me know!