SBAC Practice Test 11

Keep a Pencil in Your Pocket: Remarks to a Graduating Class of Ship's Officers

¹The following speech was given by Captain Sabine Ward, a retired merchant marine captain, to the graduating class of Northpoint Maritime Academy.

²Thank you, and good morning. I'm told that commencement speakers are supposed to tell graduates that the world is changing faster than ever. I'm not going to say that. Partly that's because every commencement speaker since the invention of commencements has said it. Mostly it's because, at sea, the important things change very slowly.

³When I first went to sea, forty-one years ago, I navigated with a paper chart, a pencil, a pair of dividers, and a sextant that had belonged to my mother. Today the bridge of a cargo ship looks more like an airport control tower. Satellite positioning tells you where you are to within a few meters. Electronic charts update themselves. Radar overlays, collision alarms, automated logs—the machines do in seconds what took my generation an hour, and they do it more accurately than we ever did. I am not here to tell you that the old way was better. It wasn't.

⁴I am here to tell you about a night in the North Atlantic, about two hundred miles from anywhere a person would want to be.

⁵We had a power fault—nothing dramatic, a failure in a single distribution panel—and for about forty minutes the bridge displays went dark. The weather was calm, which I mention because this is not a story about a storm. The ship was fine. The engines were fine. But for forty minutes, the most sophisticated navigation system I had ever worked with was a row of black screens. My second officer was twenty-six years old and an excellent officer. She turned to me, and I will never forget the look on her face. It was not fear, exactly. It was the look of someone who has just discovered that the floor she was standing on was a painting of a floor.

⁶We took out the paper chart. We worked out our position from our last fix, our speed, our heading, and the time. It took us longer than it should have, because I was rusty and she had done it only in a classroom. My second officer checked our arithmetic twice; I checked it a third time. But we did it, and when the screens came back, our pencil mark was a little over a mile from where the satellites said we were. On an ocean, a mile is nothing. On an ocean, a mile is close enough to be safe.

⁷I tell you this story not because I expect your screens to go dark. They probably won't. The systems you will use are more reliable than anything I trained on, and you should trust them, and you should use them, and you should be grateful for them. I tell you this story because of the look on my second officer's face, and because I have seen that look on other faces since—on engineers, on pilots, on a great many people who were very good at their jobs until the moment the tool between them and the work disappeared.

⁸Here is the thing I most want you to take with you. A tool is not the same as an understanding. The screen can tell you where the ship is. Only you can know why that answer makes sense—or notice, on the rare night it matters, that it doesn't. The day you can no longer check the machine is the day you stop being a navigator and become a passenger with a better view.

⁹So I am going to ask you to do something that will seem, at first, a little foolish. Once a month, for the rest of your careers, work out your position the old way. Do it on a calm day, when nothing is at stake. Do it with a pencil. The point is not to be fast. The point is to keep the knowledge alive in your own hands. Get it wrong, and find out why. Your crewmates will tease you. Let them. You are not practicing for the past. You are practicing for the forty minutes you hope you never have.

¹⁰You have spent four years learning how the sea works: the tides, the weather, the ship beneath your feet. Don't let any of it go to sleep just because something else is willing to remember it for you. The ocean has not been updated. It is still there, exactly as patient and exactly as indifferent as it was when my mother handed me her sextant.

¹¹Congratulations. Fair winds. And keep a pencil in your pocket.