RYA Beaufort wind scale. Interpretation?

[steveeasy]

What, nothing about blowing your cornflakes or salad overboard versus your porridge or lasagne?

No need. I normally go out with three reefs in the main and half the genoa furled. works wonders in strong winds, just dont get anywhere too fast.

Steveeasy

 

[Dellquay13]

My missus is slowly coming to accept that the Beaufort scale does not directly equate to the number of reefs required for each given wind strength. We can now go out in a F3 with only a single reef in the main and a largely unfurled genny, instead of motoring straight back to the harbour in a panic when we get to 10deg heel.
She was much happier when we had the 25kt motorboat which never heeled an inch in 20 years. Or missed an access lock because I misjudged a 2knot foul tide.

 

[Babylon]

Saving people from having to take notes seems dubious to me. I take notes to commit things to memory. If I wrote it down I very rarely need to reread it. If someone else wrote it down I will have to reread it often.

I have that book and don't think it very useful. It's carefully designed to cover the entire syllabus without risking helping someone get the same level of competence without doing the course. As a result it is no use to man or beast. Still, it keeps the publishers of alternatives in business.

I disagree wholeheartedly. I also write things down to fix them in my mind and memory, and I also read copiously to learn and better appreciate the fine-grain of things - but that's not how everyone learns, and that's not what the booklets are specifically designed for. (My now late ex-mother-in-law was a school chemistry teacher who would teach the same topic three times over in a single hour: 20 minutes of words for people who learn with words, 20 minutes of pictures for people who learn visually, and 20 minutes of practical work for people who learn by doing - although of course we all learn in all three ways, just in different proportions!)

Think about the booklet's application and the other booklets in the RYA series from Comp Crew onwards: they are each designed to give a course student a broad visual overview of a pretty wide variety of leaning components at each level, with just enough explanatory text to help make sense of the pictures.

They are not designed to be both comprehensive and detailed to the nth degree - it is in their essence to be as efficient as possible as a visual aide-memoire to a 5-day course (40hrs of classroom learning on the shorebased courses). A student on a theory course will be primarily learning by listening to the instructor, looking at the visuals that they provide, writing things down, answering questions, practicing chartwork, etc, while a student on a practical course will be learning by doing and practicing.

Imagine a world where a day skipper candidate only had Tom Cunliffe or YM to read, or had nothing else to support their training except five days on a boat.

 

[Wansworth]

Univercity students buy notes so don’t write their own