I'm in the beginning throes of Department Head school at the Surface Warfare Officer School (SWOS) in beautiful Newport, RI. This is the first time in... oh... about three years that I'm actually being a SWO again, minus our brief foray in Dahlgren, Virginia playing in our imaginary combat fighting an imaginary war. At SWOS, they instruct you in "basic" SWO skills... like driving ships.
First off, driving ships is not like riding a bike. I may have been the GQ OOD, or one of the most reliable OOD's on my last two ships, but you don't magically remember exactly how to drive a ship the moment you return to a bridge, especially a virtual bridge. So far, we've gotten to spend three days driving a virtual ship during a virtual transit to three homeports I've never been to in real life... which brings me back to my motto as a young Ensign:
"Whether you miss it by a meter or miss it by a mile, the important thing is that you missed it."
Unless, of course, you're being evaluated by a civilian mariner. In that case, you'll fail.
At least, though I was lucky enough to not be in one of the other groups who failed on the "real" evaluated exercise. One classmate summarized what went wrong succinctly, "It was the softest grounding I've ever seen. So soft in fact, there was water under the keel."
So no matter what anyone else tells you, driving ships is NOT like riding a bike.
