There's not much to tell about last week. We arrived on Sunday, unpacked and went to the bar ( though not necessarily in that order). In the mornings we have a delightful thing called muster, which involves standing outside in our uniform at 8:30 every weekday morning for the first four weeks, hurrah...
The rest of last week was filled with lots of introductory lectures and being told to not do this, but make sure you do that, remember this and don't forget to bring that. Lots of common sense things and a fun chat from our local friendly PCSO about the many things that cadets in the past have gotten up to, that didn't exactly further their careers.
The week was getting pretty tedious by the end, but thankfully on Friday it was time for something completely different: How Not To Be Seen - Paintballing Edition. The entire phase all went into the forest for a day, and proceeded to shoot anything and everything that moved, occasionally including each other. The day was really good fun, involving lots of different game types like capture the flag, bridge assault, and fort assault which ended in a nice big bang after you flicked some switches in the right order inside a bunker. Smoke and frag grenades certainly add an extra dimension of fun, just make sure you don't fall on your frag grenades like I did, resulting in your pockets being filled with lots of brown pellets!
At the weekend the watersports centre really excelled themselves with taster sessions for: keelboating, kayaking, dinghy sailing and jet skiing. Naturally I just had to give them a go. Jet skiing was definitely a highlight, and I will definitely be looking at doing a PWC (Personal Water Craft) course soon; probably shortly after pay day :)
Thankfully proper lectures started today (although muster is still unfortunately in existence). Today we had Ship Stability, followed by Celestial Navigation, Lunch, and Tides. It was nice to finally get my teeth into some maths again after a 4 year hiatus, even if it was basically just formula transposition.
See if you can manage this.
A ship's displacement is equal to its underwater volume x water density
displacement = underwater volume x water density
If a box shaped barge has a length of 50m, a beam (width) of 8m, and a draft (depth underwater) of 2m, what is its displacement in salt water? Salt water density is 1025kg/m3 or 1.025t/m3
A ship's displacement is 615t. Its length is 40m and it's beam is 6m, calculate its draft in salt water.
Answers will be posted next time :)
No comments:
Post a Comment