AMSA Watchkeeper Deck <3000 GT (Yachts)

AI-drafted catalogue content pending SME review. Sea service and course requirements change; verify with AMSA before relying on this for a career decision.

Free

AUS-WKD-Y-M1 · The Certificate

5 lessons

AUS-WKD-Y-M1-A What Watchkeeper Deck <3000 GT (Yachts) is, and how you get it Practice in examiner →

AUS-WKD-Y-L1.1

What the certificate lets you do

AMSA issues exactly four yacht certificates of competency, under Marine Order 74. All four are deck certificates. Watchkeeper Deck <3000 GT (Yachts) is the first of them, and it is the ticket that puts you alone on the bridge of a superyacht at three in the morning with the master asleep two decks down.

AUS-WKD-Y-L1.2

The sea service

MO74 Schedule 2 sets three numbers for Watchkeeper Deck <3000 GT (Yachts), and they nest inside one another like boxes. Get the nesting wrong and you will present service that does not add up.

AUS-WKD-Y-L1.3

The approved understudy programme

This lesson details the four separate hour-counted tallies within an approved deck watchkeeper understudy programme, the minimum shift length required, how MO74 Schedule 3 converts watch hours into days of sea service, and the distinction between acceptable evidence for domestic versus international certificates.

AUS-WKD-Y-L1.4

The short courses, and the GMDSS trap

The short-course requirements for the four yacht grades are not the same, and they are routinely conflated. Here is what MO74 asks of a Watchkeeper — and, just as importantly, what it does not.

AUS-WKD-Y-L1.5

The Master <200 GT endorsement, the medical and the oral

Three separate hurdles sit between a completed sea-service record and a certificate in your hand. Two of them are administrative, and both are routinely got wrong.

AUS-WKD-Y-M2 · The Navigational Watch

5 lessons

AUS-WKD-Y-M2-A STCW A-II/1 watchkeeping, on a yacht Practice in examiner →

AUS-WKD-Y-L2.1

Taking over and handing over the watch

A handover is a transfer of legal responsibility for the safety of the vessel. It is not a chat. Until the relieving officer says the words, the watch belongs to the officer being relieved, and every consequence of every decision belongs to him too.

AUS-WKD-Y-L2.2

The COLREGs on watch

Candidates arrive at the oral able to recite the light configurations of a vessel engaged in dredging and unable to answer the only question that matters on a real bridge: *is this getting worse, and what am I going to do about it?* Learn the shapes. But live in Part B, Section I.

AUS-WKD-Y-L2.3

Lookout, and the limits of the human eye at night

Rule 5 is one sentence long and it is the most-breached rule in the book. Not by people who do not know it — by people standing on a bridge at 0400 who have been staring at a screen for two hours and could not tell you what is out of the window.

AUS-WKD-Y-L2.4

Bridge resource management and challenge-and-response

Almost no accident has a single cause. What accident reports find, again and again, is a chain — a small error, a missed cross-check, an assumption nobody voiced, a doubt somebody had and did not raise. BRM exists to break the chain at any link.

AUS-WKD-Y-L2.5

Passage planning — appraise, plan, execute, monitor

The plan is not paperwork produced to satisfy an auditor. It is the vessel's thinking done in advance, in daylight, with a cup of coffee and every publication open — so that at 0300, in rain, with a contact closing, nobody has to think it out for the first time.

AUS-WKD-Y-M3 · Navigation in Practice

5 lessons

AUS-WKD-Y-M3-A Position, chart, radar, tide Practice in examiner →

AUS-WKD-Y-L3.1

Position fixing and chartwork

A position is a claim about the physical world. It has a source, an accuracy, and a time — and if you cannot state all three, you do not have a position. You have a number.

AUS-WKD-Y-L3.2

ECDIS — the safety contour and the safety depth

ECDIS is not a chart on a screen. It is a **navigational system** that reads a vector database, applies your settings, and generates alarms on the strength of them. The settings are not preferences. They are the parameters of the alarm that will or will not wake you up.

AUS-WKD-Y-L3.3

Radar and ARPA — capability and limitation

Radar transmits a pulse and listens for the echo. Everything it can and cannot do follows from that one sentence. There is no intelligence in it and no judgement in it, and the moment you forget that, it starts lying to you convincingly.

AUS-WKD-Y-L3.4

Tides, tidal streams and depth

Two separate phenomena, constantly confused. The **tide** is the vertical rise and fall of the water. The **tidal stream** is the horizontal movement of it. They are caused by the same forces, they are not in phase with each other, and you must plan for both.

AUS-WKD-Y-L3.5

The magnetic and gyro compass; errors, and checking them

The gyro is precise, tireless and electrically dependent. The magnetic compass is imprecise, cantankerous and utterly independent of your generators. That is exactly why the magnetic one is still bolted to the deckhead, and why the oral examiner will ask you about it.

AUS-WKD-Y-M4 · Yacht Operations

5 lessons

AUS-WKD-Y-M4-A The parts of the job the merchant ladder never teaches Practice in examiner →

AUS-WKD-Y-L4.1

Tenders, guest operations and the watchkeeper's responsibility

This lesson covers the watchkeeper's responsibilities during guest and tender operations at anchor, including tracking tender movements, managing swimmers and divers safely, enforcing kill-cord discipline, and designing guest activities to prevent predictable accidents.

AUS-WKD-Y-L4.2

Anchoring and mooring

An anchor does not hold by weight. It holds because the **cable lies along the seabed** and pulls the anchor **horizontally** into it. Everything about scope, and everything that goes wrong at anchor, follows from that sentence.

AUS-WKD-Y-L4.3

Heavy weather

A yacht is a badly-prepared vessel by design. She has glass, tenders on hydraulic cradles, jet skis, garage doors at the waterline, a tender bay that is a hole in the hull, loose furniture, an art collection and a wine cellar. None of it was designed assuming a 40-degree roll.

AUS-WKD-Y-L4.4

Man overboard

There are two kinds of man overboard: the one you **saw**, and the one you **discover**. They are not the same emergency and they do not have the same answer.

AUS-WKD-Y-L4.5

Emergencies, muster and abandon ship

The vessel's **muster list** is the document that turns twenty individuals into an organisation. It names the alarm signals, states what each crew member does, who takes which survival craft, who accounts for the guests, and who closes what. Read yours. Know your station and your duty by heart, not by looking it up.

Aligned to the published AMSA requirements and the relevant Marine Orders. Official source (AMSA).

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