Recommended books and math subjects for MARS?

[Pirate]

Greetings everyone!

I recently applied as a DEO MARS officer in BC.  I have yet to hear about the dates of my CFAT, PT Test, Medical Test, and interview.  (I am confident about succeeding in all four).

However, I want to prepare ahead of time and keep busy.  (I only have the typical eight hour job and a large anatomy/physiology university course that I do for fun.  That's an easy life and I get a little bored with that).  Therefore, I would like to prepare ahead of time for the MARS training and trade itself.  I did look for "A Seaman's Guide to the Rules of the Road" from a Canadian dealer online. 

However, I only found one used copy for about $125 from Amazon.ca.  I am checking around with other book sellers to see if I can find it at a more reasonable price.    Yet, I would also like to read other books about navigation, seamanship, international sea law, and other related subjects to MARS (and the navy in general).  Could anyone point me in the right direction and recommend other books?

  In addition, I have one more quick question.  I only took one stastistics course at university, and I am not sure if that would suffice for rapidly learning navigation practices.  If I was to focus on one math subject, which would be more important: trigonometry or geometry?  (Or, if navigation is an entire subject of its own, please tell me ).

Thank you ahead of time to anyone who answers. 

 

[Neill McKay]

One good navigation reference is The American Practical Navigator, a US-Government publication universally known as Bowditch (after its original author).  It's available as a free download here http://www.irbs.com/bowditch/, or you can but it in book form for $80 or so in various nautical bookstores.

A good textbook, perhaps a little easier to read, is Dutton's Navigation and Piloting.  I don't know what it costs, but you could probably find an older edition that would be almost as useful for your purposes at a good price in a used bookstore.  There's a companion book of questions and solutions for practice.

The Admiralty Manual of Seamanship is a British publication that's been around for decades, and the current edition can be had from nautical bookstores.  It's broader in scope than either of the other two, which are pretty well exclusively about navigation.

The document here: http://www.tc.gc.ca/acts-regulations/GENERAL/C/CSA/regulations/010/csa014/csa14.html is known as the Collision Regulations, or sometimes ColRegs, and is something you will have to become intimately familiar with.  You may find it worthwhile to start looking at it now.  The Rules of the Road book you mentioned is really just an aid to learning these, I suspect.

Here's another handy publication, and cheap too: http://www.fedpubs.com/subject/boat/aids.htm  It describes buoys and other aids to navigation.  Again, this is stuff you will eventually have to know very well.

 

[Sailing Instructor]

I think any sort of trigonometry and a good mental math ability are essential.  Not sure if the latter would be a course one could take but that's an important skill nonetheless.  I think the hardest part about navigation is (at least regarding fixes) getting the practice.  Studying all the other information will make that practice more focussed (not having to learn chart symbols while looking for your next fix points &c.).

I cannot remember the specific publications VENTURE uses but I should think you could call them/write them and find out.

 

[Gino]

Have a look at this thread

http://forums.army.ca/forums/threads/37318/post-309948.html#msg309948

 

[Pirate]

Thanks for all of the advice and info, everyone!

And Neil, you just gave me a lot of reading.  I'm starting on the The American Practical
Navigator right now!