How To Deal With Navigational Warnings, A Complete Guide: Written by On May 2, 2016
How To Deal With Navigational Warnings, A Complete Guide: Written by On May 2, 2016
Even Oil major companies take the navigation related deficiencies very
seriously. For example BP considers any deficiency related to
navigation as high risk. A single observation on navigation can fail the
BP SIRE inspection.
Navigational safety deficiencies were on the top for past three years
for Indian MOU. And when so much is at stake, we cannot afford to
have navigation related deficiencies.
So what can we do to avoid these deficiencies ? Well the answer is…
By knowing what is required and then doing exactly what you know.
This guide will look into everything about dealing with the navigational
warnings. Lets begin….
Navigation warning
But does that mean permanent and T&P corrections are not
important? Yes, they are important. For example, did you know that a
valid nav warning is removed two months after it is incorporated in
NTM as permanent or T&P correction ?
Now that we have discussed some of the facts about navarea
warnings, lets see how best we can handle these.
There are three sources from where we can get EGC warnings
onboard. Sat-C, Chartco and from the website of the Navarea co-
ordinator.
If you are using digital publications, to get the URL for Navarea
warnings in force,
click on ALRS 12345 icon on the desktop where digital publications are
located. You can also go to this section from Chartco main menu.
Next go to “view” on top menu and click on “Show navareas”. This will
show the boundries of all the nav areas. Then right click anywhere
inside the nav area boundry of the navarea you are looking for. Then
click on option Navarea/Safetynet -> Navarea.
This will bring a pop up with the details of the navarea coordinator.
This also includes the website URL where you can find the in force nav
warning for that area.
Receiving Navarea warnings from Sat-C
In Sat-C, apart from EGC warnings you can receive routine messages
on Sat-C. In Sat-C, you can select if you wish to get routine messages
or not. But you cannot switch off receiving EGC messages.
Once you click on the “Sjow nav warnings” option, it will magically
display all the nav warning on your route.
If you take you mouse over a warning sign, it will display the warning
number. You can double click on a nav warning to display its detail.
In Chartco, you can also get the inforce warning list for a navarea. To
get the in force list, go to reports and then select “in force warnings”.
Select the area for which you want “in force warnings” list and then
click on “get report”.
This will display the in force list of navarea warnings for that area. You
can print this or save this as pdf.
Now that we have all the navarea warnings, how to manage these ?
Anyone can plot the navarea warning on chart. It is no big deal. But
plotting a navarea warning is one thing and doing a good job with
this is another thing.
I see few of us, plot it as by pointing to the buoy and writing the text
as it appears on nav warning
I won’t say this is wrong but it is not that we can call a better way.
The better way is to point to the buoy on chart and just write
“missing”. That’s it.
Now first things first. How would you know if a nav area warning has
been cancelled ? This is important because we may have plotted a
warning on our voyage chart on which we will arrive in 4-5 days.
Before our arrival on this chart, the warning might have
been cancelled. How can we know that ?
This is because your last in force list may be 5 days old. And if you sail
on a chart which has a warning cancelled, you would come to know
even if you did not cancel it.
Now when we receive new in force list of nav warnings, this is how we
should proceed
4) Destroy the one which has not been plotted on any chart.
6) Go through the nav warning and rub out where the nav warnings is
plotted on the chart. Then rub off the navarea warning number from
the bottom of the chart. If you are still using chart correction log,
remove the nav warning number from the log of this chart.
7) Once you have removed the Navarea warning from all the charts
that it was plotted on, destroy the warning.
8) Do this with all the cancelled nav area warnings.
You see how easy it was to cancel a nav warning. But it was easy
because of the two systems of managing Navarea warnings that we
talked earlier in this post.
Conclusion
Navigation has changed a lot from last few decades. Today there are
number of options to get the navigational warnings.