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How To Deal With Navigational Warnings, A Complete Guide: Written by On May 2, 2016

This document provides guidance on how to properly handle navigational warnings. It discusses the importance of navigational warnings and outlines the key steps to take when receiving, plotting, and managing warnings. These include receiving warnings from various sources like Navtex, EGC, websites, and Chartco; plotting them clearly on charts while avoiding clutter; and maintaining an organized system to track which warnings have been plotted on which charts so they can be easily removed if cancelled. Maintaining an up-to-date understanding of navigational warnings is an important part of safe passage planning.

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Panagiotis Mouzenidis
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188 views23 pages

How To Deal With Navigational Warnings, A Complete Guide: Written by On May 2, 2016

This document provides guidance on how to properly handle navigational warnings. It discusses the importance of navigational warnings and outlines the key steps to take when receiving, plotting, and managing warnings. These include receiving warnings from various sources like Navtex, EGC, websites, and Chartco; plotting them clearly on charts while avoiding clutter; and maintaining an organized system to track which warnings have been plotted on which charts so they can be easily removed if cancelled. Maintaining an up-to-date understanding of navigational warnings is an important part of safe passage planning.

Uploaded by

Panagiotis Mouzenidis
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 23

How to deal with Navigational

warnings, A Complete guide


Written by Capt Rajeev Jassal on May 2, 2016

Most of the external agencies consider navigational deficiencies as


most serious one. Not only because these can lead to accidents but
also because these are avoidable. External agencies consider any
navigation deficiency as the reflection of ship’s management system.

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

Handling navigational warnings is part of the passage plan. And we all


know, planning a passage helps to bridge the risky gaps so that we can
conclude our voyage safely.
IMO has defined the way as to how we should go about preparing the
passage plan. We all have read about it so many times.

I am sure you remember Appraisal, planning, execution and


monitoring. There are different things that form part of each of these
stages. And chart correction is one of these.
If you ask me one important thing in chart correction, I would say
Navigational warnings. This is because these are the warnings which
need urgent attention of navigators.

Well I am not saying permanent and T&P corrections are not


important. These are also important.  But remember the times when
weekly notices used to arrive on board in two months time.

So the chart correction used to delay sometimes by two months. But


we used to sail on that. And we sailed safely even when the charts
were corrected with a notice that was two months old. How ?

Well, navigation warnings used to make sure that we move on a safe


passage. And that is the reason I say that navigation warning are more
important.
In fact, many of the permanent as well as T&P corrections are derived
from the nav warnings.

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.

Sources of Navigation warnings

There are two sources of navigational warnings we receive on board.


Through Navtex and through EGC. Here we will discuss EGC warnings
and how to plot EGC warnings on chart.

There are three sources from where we can get EGC warnings
onboard. Sat-C, Chartco and from the website of the Navarea co-
ordinator.

Receiving warnings from the web


Many discourage receiving nav warnings through the internet.
Because seafarers might by mistake take the warnings from wrong
source or website. For nav area warnings from internet, many
companies have a procedure to request these from shore office only.

Do you want to know the website links of all navarea coordnators


where you can get the list of nav warnings ?
To get website link to download navarea warnings, take out ALRS Vol
5. Scroll through the MSI section and you will get all the details of each
navarea coordinator. On the bottom of the details, you can see the link
mentioned as “warning URL”.

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.

As you would know, there are 21 navigational areas. To get the


navigational warning from any area, that area need to be selected in
Sat-C equipment.

To select a navarea in JRC equipment, go to EGC option and then


choose Navarea option.
From the Navarea list, enable all the navareas that are applicable to
your voyage.
At commencement of voyage it is a good practice to select all the
areas you will be entering on your voyage.

Receiving Navarea Warnings from Chartco


Chartco is the most preferred source of receiving updates related to
charts and publications. To get the nav warnings from chartco, from
main menu go to Navarea manager
Here you will find the nav warnings applicable to your voyage. There
are few sections that helps to retrieve any nav warning easily. These
sections are New, in force, Cancelled, Archived, Reports and set up.

To select or deselect a navarea, you can go to set up and choose the


areas applicable to your voyage.
Now best way to use chartco for nav warnings is by use of routes and
passages option. Lets see…

From main menu on chartco, go to route and passages.


Next either use the automated routing option by entering the from and
to ports and then clicking on “calculate route/Distance. Or you can
choose from the previously saved routes.
This will give you the route between two ports. On the right bottom
cornor, click on ‘Show Navarea warnings”. This option is located as
icon on right bottom corner with few other icons.
 

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 ?

What to do on receiving a Navarea warnings ?


Irrespective of from where we receive the Nav area warnings, these
need to be dealt in same way. And the correct way is

1) We receive a navarea warning

2) Officer on watch who receives Navarea warning will check if it is


coming on our voyage route. If No, he will sign and file the navarea
warning. If yes, he will plot it on chart and bring to the attention of
other watch keepers.

3) On plotting the navarea warning, he will write the warning number


on bottom of the chart.

3) On Navarea warning printout, OOW mentions the chart number on


which he plotted the warning.

4) 2nd mate updates the in force list of Navarea warning.


Plotting Nav area warnings on chart

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.

Navarea warnings sometime contain a lot of information. The job of


the 2nd Mate is to have all this information conveyed by plotting but at
the same time not to clutter the whole chart.

As far as possible, we should plot the nav warnings in the same way as


we do the permanent correction. As I said the idea is to display as
much information but at the same time not to clutter the chart.

For example, look at the below actual navarea warning

I see few of us, plot it as by pointing to the buoy and writing the text
as it appears on nav warning

“Inchcape buoy at position 26 10.10 N 055 53.16 E is missing from the


charted position. Mariners are cautioned. ”

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.

Take another example


Instead of writing full text, we can just plot two buoys symbol and
write buoy name (YAS 2A and YAS 4A in this case).

Handling Navarea warnings

Now plotting a navarea warning on a chart is one thing. Handling these


navarea warnings is another. There are two things which are important
for handling navarea warnings

1) We should have a system to know that if we have plotted


a particular navarea warning on any chart or not. If we have plotted
then on which all charts we plotted this navarea warning.

This system is in form of writing “Plotted on chart No…” on navarea


warning print out.

2) We should have a system to know that on a chart how many and


which all navarea warning are plotted.

This system is in form of writing Navarea warning number on bottom


of the chart, whenever a navarea warning is plotted on it.
Now why these two systems are important ? When a nav area warning
is cancelled, we want to know if we had plotted this on any chart. If
yes, then before we remove this warning, we need to delete it from all
the charts that it had been plotted upon.

Handing cancelled Navarea warnings

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 ?

Cancellation notice can be given in two ways.

1) Every week we get in force list of warnings through Sat-C for


Navareas that we select.  From there we will know what all notices has
been cancelled. On chartco, we can get the warnings that were
cancelled in last week by going to cancelled option under navarea
manager.

2) Some Navarea warnings have the cancellation date in itself. In this


case, it is prudent to write cancellation date on chart itself alongside
the nav warning.

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

1) Identify the cancelled nav area warnings

2) Update the Nav area warning file by removing all these cancelled


warnings from the file.

3) Segregate the cancelled warnings in two sections. One which has


been plotted on one or more chart and second which has not been
plotted on any chart.

4) Destroy the one which has not been plotted on any chart.

5) For the cancelled warnings which has been plotted on the charts,


take out each 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.

I leave it up to you to imagine the cancellation process for nav


warnings without these two systems. And you would agree that it
would be tough. Rather it would be chaos to handle navarea warnings
if we do not write charts numbers of the charts on which we have
plotted a warning.

Conclusion

A warning is something requiring urgent attention. Navigational


warnings are called so because these too required urgent attention of
the navigators. As such, Navigational warnings are the most important
part of the chart correction.

Navigation has changed a lot from last few decades. Today there are
number of options to get the navigational warnings.

There is hardly a chance that we miss receiving navigational warning.


But only thing that is required is knowledge and intent to take these
warnings seriously and act upon it.

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