Offshore2025
2025 Bluewater IAP Shore School
Bluewater Winter Sessions are a chance to dive deeper into sailing topics than we're often able to do on the water, and to get to know the program if you're new. The slides from certain sessions are below.
Tue Jan 3: Intro to Bluewater Sailing - Teresa Augustin, Scott Dynes
Bluewater Winter Sessions are a chance to dive deeper into sailing topics than we're often able to do on the water, and to get to know the program if you're new.
This session is specifically for sailors new to MIT Bluewater. It's a conversation and Q&A: learn more about how to expand your MIT sailing onto Boston Harbor and beyond.
Note: all Bluewater Winter Sessions will meet in classroom 2-131. You can just drop in. No sing-up necessary.
Slides from this session: File:MIT IAP 2025 Intro to BW 007a presented.pdf
This session is a combination of weather and electronic navigation.
In weatyher, we will be going over:
- Where does the weather come from?
- Fronts and air masses
- Cloud types
- Wind, waves, and warnings
- What can you tell from looking at the skies and barometer?
- Wave heights (wind and fetches)
as well as weather forecasting products and models available online and get usable electronic copies of these products (gribs).
Next, we will be talking about how to use those gribs in a bluewater setting, which is best done using an electronic chartplotter. We will not be demoing the B&G system we have on Mashnee, but will be demoing OpenCPN, which is available for laptiops and android devices like tablets and smartphones. If attendees want to follow along in class, I suggest they install OpenCPN on their laptop with a few charts (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFrByYYN7Is). Charts from Region 2 (Block Is. to the Canadian border) should be adequate.
We hope to cover the following:
- Quick overview of OpenCPN
- Loading and updating charts
- Requesting and importing Gribs
- Using the routing plugin with weather and current forecasts
Slides from this session: File:IAP weather 2025 016a-sw.pdf
