Capt. Daley's Sea Stories

Third Mate Unlimited

Testing with the US Coast Guard

15 September 2011

It may strike you unusual that I would be so happy and proud to have earned the Third Mate Oceans Unlimited License after having been a captain for such a long period of time, but my current captain license is limited to vessels of 6000 tons. Granted, that is a large vessel (300 to 500 ft. long depending on shape), but the Third Mate License begins a three year process of obtaining my captain license for any ship any ocean.

This process was complicated by a series of bureaucratic oversights (or mistakes) which required me to hire a consultant to appeal incorrect decisions. What should have been a three month process turned into a one year struggle to have the rules administered correctly. In the end we prevailed. Unfortunately, I anticipate a similar nightmare upgrading from second mate to chief mate. In a perfect world, I should be able to achieve Master Unlimited by 2014. We’ll see what transpires.

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Once authorization to test was received, studying began on my boat in Africa for four months. Then I continued self-study under the guidance of Mr. Ken Bruce at Fletcher College in Houma, LA. Ken has patience unmatched by anyone. Some of the students were challenging, but he was able to see them through at their own pace.

While in Houma, I stayed at a Fairfield Inn. As you can see, there were quite a number of subjects to study, most without formal textbooks. Ken has his own syllabus to ensure you cover all the topics and has been successful for years assisting people obtain licenses, renewals, upgrades and endorsements.

Three weeks in a hotel and attending Fletcher was a long time. It flew by quickly and at times I wondered if I had enough time to cover everything. Ken discourages people from obtaining the Oceans on the first pass by eliminating the Celestial Navigation Exam and obtaining a Near Coastal license. I decided to go for the Oceans.

Just to make life interesting, Hurricane Irene decided to visit Houma while I was there. It rained for four days with minimal flooding and wind damage. I purchased a Canon MX 880 for the testing and was glad I did. What a great printer / scanner!

This is a gnomic chart. A straight line on this chart gives a great circle route (the shortest distance between two points on a sphere. These were used in the Sailings portion of the Celestial Navigation Exam

After three week 0f studying I drove from Houma to New Orleans, crossed Lake Ponchatrain and stayed in Covington for the following week to test. In New Orleans, I passed a café d’Monde and had to stop and have Beignets and Café au lait. For those of you not from Louisiana, this was made popular in the Farmers Market in the French Quarter of New Orleans.

The doughnuts are fried dough covered with enough powdered sugar to kill a diabetic. The coffee is chicory flavored and very strong. The milk (lait) added is hot. It may have be an extravagance in calories, but it brought back many childhood memories growing up in New Orleans.

In Covington I stayed in a Courtyard Hotel and was upgraded to a King suite and was very grateful for the much needed space.

There are many additional topics covered on the unlimited tonnage tests that are not covered on the limited tonnage ones. Next time you see a captain, know that he/she had to pass an incredible series of tests to obtain their license. It is one of the very few “Renaisance Man” (or woman) jobs left in this world of specialists.

The Courtyard was a very comfortable hotel to complete my studies while testing at the Coast Guard REC in Mandeville about five miles south of Covington. Mandeville is an interesting place for the Coast Guard to choose for a testing center as it used to be the location of the Louisiana Insane Asylum!

The testing consisted of seven tests, each 3.5 hours long. The proctor gave me a copy of my score sheet. The topics ranged from legal issues, to weather, to navigation, to safety and firefighting, to tides and currents, to life rafts, to ship construction & handling, to first aid, to old World War II loading techniques using boom cranes and on and on and on. I was very pleased with my results.

Twelve days later, I received three pages of “stickers” which I stuck in my Merchant Mariner Credentials. I added the green bar to the photo to block out the official numbers. The other two stickers cover the international license.

This has nothing to do with my new license, but now that you know what a beignet is, you can learn how to fry an Oreo cookie. A restaurant in Lafayette (Deano’s) stuffs an Oreo into a raw beignet and then fries it. In addition to powdered sugar, it is covered in chocolate sauce. Now you know.