NATIONAL MARINE

The National Marine Correspondence School has successfully been running RYA correspondence courses since the school was established in 1970. We have a full-time administrative team and tutor support devoted purely to the teaching of navigation by correspondence ensuring maximum support for students at all the times. You can enrol for a course at any time of the year and enjoy studying from the comfort of your own home. Combines the Day Skipper, Coastal Skipper/Yachtmaster and Yachtmaster Ocean courses into one.This most comprehensive course includes within it the syllabus for all three RYA shorebased courses and is intended for all those with blue water ambitions hoping at some stage to ‘sell up and sail’. As with Coastal Cruising, we assume no great prior experience as we progress through coastal and offshore waters, starting with a thorough examination of all aspects of coastal navigation and basic seamanship (the stress being on safe practice throughout).

The NMCS was established in 1970 specifically to encourage high standards of safety, responsibility and competence and to provide skippers and crews of small boats with the required knowledge for cruising under sail or power. The first correspondence school to be accredited by the Royal Yachting Association (RYA), we have been conducting courses both in the UK and in more than 50 countries overseas for over 36 years, and we remain the only school whose full-time resources are devoted solely to teaching sailing by correspondence. This experience means that we conduct more courses successfully than any other correspondence school. You may be unsure as to what is involved in a correspondence course. Later in the prospectus we outline the advantages of correspondence tuition, explain how our courses work, describe the study material and present the syllabus for each individual course. But there are firstly three fundamental components essential to any successful correspondence course. At present there are no statutory qualifications required for those of us who sail in small boats for leisure purposes in the UK. Increasingly it can be an advantage to have a recognised qualification for insurance or chartering purposes, but despite the potential introduction of compulsory qualification it remains possible, albeit foolhardy, for anybody to step on board and skipper a boat with little knowledge and no experience. The situation overseas is more complicated with many countries insisting on some written evidence of competence. The RYA training scheme is an attempt to counter both these problems by persuading people of the benefits of formal tuition whilst providing internationally recognised certificates of competence. Learning to sail is a combination of theoretical knowledge and practical experience. It is of little use to be able to manoeuvre a boat sideways out of a marina if, when at the lock gate, the skipper cannot plot and set a course.