Great Lakes, Ill. (September 11, 2020)—Surface Warfare Engineering School Command (SWESC) Great Lakes Quartermaster (QM) “A” School is where Sailors develop a base line navigational knowledge to use throughout their career.
The school is eight weeks broken down into four distinct sections; terrestrial navigation, celestial navigation, voyage management system (VMS), and finally a course capstone.
“The Quartermaster rating is one of the oldest in the United States Navy,” said SWESC Great Lakes Commanding Officer Cmdr. Shawn Gibson. “In 1775, when the Quartermaster rating was created, their responsibilities included antiquated duties such as monitoring the helmsman, heaving the log, and shooting azimuths. Today, not only do they serve as the watch-to-watch representative of the ship’s navigator, they also advise the officer of the deck on navigational matters, maintain the ship’s deck log, plots the ship’s position on the chart, obtains and plots fixes, and maintains a dead reckoning plot of the ship’s projected position.”
Training begins with terrestrial navigation. Within the first two days of class, they are in the chart lab learning how to plot on paper charts. Teaching them to plot early in the training allows them to grasp more advanced concepts later in the course.
“Once students are proficient with terrestrial navigation they move to celestial navigation,” said QM 1st Class Yuwadeh Ramirez, instructor for SWESC QM “A” School. “During this portion of the course students are taught celestial calculations using both strip forms and STELLA, which is a computer program. They are also taught how to use a sextant properly. Students are taken to the shores of Lake Michigan to take measurements of the sun with their new sextant skills.”
Students continue their training by learning how to operate the VMS system, creating voyage plans, and much more. Upon completion of the VMS course students are certified to use VMS version 9.
“The final portion of QM ‘A’ School is the course capstone,” Ramirez said. “Students are tested on everything that was covered throughout their time in the course. Following the completion of the capstone, students graduate and head to the fleet with a great foundation level navigational understanding.”
Upon completion of the course, Sailors will be able to operate electronic navigation equipment. They will be able to conduct weather observations, determine compass and gyro errors, compete tide and tidal current data, keep logs and records, determine their ship’s position by visual and electronic means, compute times of sunrise and sunset; and follow the nautical rules-of-the road to prevent collisions at sea.
The implementation of the SWESC Great Lakes “A” School courses is part of the MyNavy HR Sailor 2025 initiative to improve and modernize personnel management and training systems to more effectively recruit, develop, manage, reward, and retain the force of tomorrow.
A pillar of Sailor 2025, Ready, Relevant Learning (RRL) delivers a modernized learning continuum that aligns training with fleet requirements and warfighter needs. QM “A” School serves as an example of how traditional classroom instruction is changing offering measurable improvements to a Sailor’s ability to learn and to retain the knowledge and skills required to be successful at a given point in his or her career. The long-term vision of RRL is to take that kind of modernized training to the point of need in the fleet at the waterfront.
| Date Taken: | 09.11.2020 |
| Date Posted: | 09.29.2020 07:48 |
| Story ID: | 379227 |
| Location: | GREAT LAKES, ILLINOIS, US |
| Web Views: | 202 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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