Homeward Bound

Honolulu came and went without a hitch.  We pulled in Friday afternoon and back out on Sunday around noon.  It’s now Tuesday morning, 2am and we are heading NE at about 10 knots.  The weather is good and the tradewinds are working in our favor.  There’s some large storms brewing up north that are creating some nasty conditions for anyone heading southwest, but that works in our favor and should get us home much quicker.

We run two trips to Hawaii each month, leaving every other Friday.  The boat that was scheduled to leave from Seattle this last Friday was put on hold until the weather conditions lighten up.  We should come sailing in with some good winds on our stern, but they can’t even poke their nose out into it without getting beaten down.

At any rate, all is well and it’s nice to finally be coming home.  The past few months have been draining.  I haven’t been home since the first part of October and it was only for a week.  Prior to that, I was in school for all of September.  The entire Fall season has been spent on a boat or in a class and I’m really ready for some downtime.  I’ll get a few weeks off after this trip for Christmas and New Year’s and then back north for a short week and a half of classes.  At that point, I’m going to hopefully be organizing my packet and application for submittal to the Coast Guard.  I have to show proof of all my seatime, my certificates of class completion, medical exams, drug screening and all the assessments that I’ve had to complete underway.  If all goes well, they will approve my application for testing.  It should take a month or so to get approval and then I just need to schedule a testing date, study and sit for the exams.

I’m shooting for the 3rd Mate Unlimited license, which will include 7 modules (exams).  Each module covers various topics, (i.e. Deck General, Deck Safety, Nav General (oceans and near coastal), Nav Problems (oceans and near coastal), Rules of the Road, Chart Plot, ) and each module will take about 3 hours to complete over a period of 4 days.  Once completed and passed my license will be issued and I’ll be deck officer.  I won’t bore you with the details of what happens if I don’t pass, because that isn’t an option.  :-)

I’ve begin studying, using an ipad/iphone app called Upgrade U.  It’s about a $20 purchase, but well worth every penny.  It lays out all the test pool questions and then tests you repeatedly until your scores are high enough.  We have to score a 90% on Rules of the Road, which is the one that typically haunts everyone the first time around.  I plan on studying as much as I can over the next few months to prepare.  I’ve learned a great deal of information over the past few years, and regurgitating it is going to be tough, but do-able.

Anyhow, that’s all for now….