Open Awards · RQF Level 3
Open Awards Level 3 Diploma in Maritime Studies: Officer of the Watch on Merchant Vessels of less than 500 Gross Tonnage (Near Coastal) (RQF)
You don’t just earn this. You learn to use it, one-to-one, on your own real work.
- LevelRQF Level 3
- Total credits39
- Guided learning355 hours
- Units in this qualification7
Awarded by Open Awards · on the Ofqual register
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What you’ll learn
What each unit actually teaches you to do
Open Awards is a National Awarding Organisation, Access Validating Agency and End-point Assessment Organisation specialising in the delivery of Functional Skills, Alternative Education and Vocational qualifications.
These are the units Open Awards registers against this qualification. It is a catalogue, not a syllabus. Which of them you take depends on the combination the qualification requires, and that is set by the awarding body rather than by us. Every unit here is regulated, and every one you earn is yours to keep.
Chartwork and TidesReal unit · Open Awards
What you'll be able to do
- Use Mercator charts
- Plot positions on a chart
- Convert compass and true headings applying variation
- Convert compass and true headings applying deviation
- Convert compass and true headings applying gyro error
- Convert compass and true bearings applying variation
- Convert compass and true bearings applying deviation
- Convert compass and true bearings applying gyro error
- Establish Dead Reckoning position from measurement of course
- Establish Dead Reckoning position from measurement of log speed
- Establish EP from measurement of course
- Establish EP from measurement of log speed
- Establish EP from measurement of tidal information
- Establish EP from measurement of leeway
- Make tidal calculations
- Use Admiralty Tide Tables to perform tidal calculations
- Use tidal software to perform tidal calculations
- Maintain marine charts and publications
- Summarise types of charts used in passage planning and navigation
- Summarise nautical publications to be carried on board
- Explain chart storage and handling procedures
- Explain procedures for ordering charts and publications
- Explain Admiralty Notices to Mariners
- Explain correction logs
- Explain use of the chart catalogue
- Understand Mercator charts
- Explain properties of Mercator charts
- Interpret chart symbols
- Identify Water Track
- Identify Ground Track
- Update the voyage plan
- Explain the principles of passage planning
- Summarise regulations and guidelines on passage planning
- Explain implementation of adjustments to the plan
- Understand tides
- Explain causes of tides
- Summarise definitions associated with tides
Contribute to Vessel Stability and Watertight IntegrityReal unit · Open Awards
What you'll be able to do
- Ensure watertight integrity of a vessel.
- Perform relevant actions to maintain watertight integrity in accordance with established best practice.
- Monitor watertight integrity.
- Establish the watertight integrity of a vessel in accordance with legislation.
- Instruct crew to ensure vessel procedures are fully met.
- Provide information for maintaining accurate records relating to watertight integrity.
- Establish the stability of a vessel.
- Perform relevant actions to maintain stability in accordance with established best practice.
- Contribute to ensuring a vessel’s weight distribution maintains the stability and stress condition within safe limits.
- Monitor vessel stability.
- Establish that stability of a vessel is maintained in accordance with legislation.
- Instruct crew to ensure vessel procedures are fully met.
- Provide information for maintaining accurate records relating to stability.
- Understand how to maintain seaworthiness of a vessel.
- Explain how to maintain seaworthiness in accordance with legislation and vessel procedures.
- Explain how to apply the basic principles of ship stability.
- Understand regulations relating to vessel stability and watertight integrity.
- Summarise statutory regulations on stability and watertight integrity.
- Explain guidelines on stability and watertight integrity.
- Understand organisational requirements relating to stability and watertight integrity.
- Explain organisational instructions and guidance on stability and watertight integrity.
- Explain vessel contingency plans for stability and watertight integrity.
Control Vessel Mooring, Anchoring and Securing OperationsReal unit · Open Awards
What you'll be able to do
- Anchor the vessel
- Prepare for anchoring in accordance with recognised procedures
- Control anchoring operations in accordance with organisational procedures
- Secure anchors after operations anchoring in accordance with vessel’s procedures
- Moor the vessel
- Prepare for mooring in accordance with recognised procedures
- Control mooring operations in accordance with safe working practices
- Let go moorings operations in accordance with safe working practices
- Shift the vessel in accordance with recognised procedure
- Ensure equipment is properly stowed and secured on completion of operations
- Provide safe access to the vessel
- Control the rigging of access arrangements in accordance with statutory requirements
- Control the watch while at anchor or moored
- Communicate instructions to personnel
- Confirm instructions are understood
- Control the watch in accordance with guidelines
- Take relevant action if problems arise with anchoring, mooring, watch or securing operations
- Maintain effective safe working practices during operations
- Know the equipment used for anchoring, mooring and access to the vessel
- Describe the common types of anchors, cables and associated gear
- Explain mooring terminology and mooring systems used
- Explain the characteristics, safe handling and use of mooring ropes
- Describe rigging and safety requirements for safe access
- Control operations
- Explain safety precautions to be observed during anchoring, mooring and securing operations
- Explain how to direct the anchor party in bringing the vessel to a single anchor
- Explain how to conduct a deck watch alongside or at anchor
- Prepare a vessel for sea
- Explain how to confirm vessel openings are closed for sea
- Explain how to confirm objects on board are secured for sea
- Explain preparations for heavy weather
- Apply relevant health safety and environmental requirements
- Explain the application of statutory regulations
- Explain the application of organisational instructions and guidelines
- Explain the application of vessel contingency plans
Interpret Meteorology in the Near Coastal AreaReal unit · Open Awards
What you'll be able to do
- Understand how to make meteorological observations
- Explain the use of meteorological instruments, including aneroid barometers
- Explain the use of meteorological instruments, including barographs
- Explain the use of meteorological instruments, including Mason’s hygrometers
- Explain the use of meteorological instruments, including marine (Stevenson’s) screens
- Explain the use of meteorological instruments, including whirling psychrometers
- Explain the use of meteorological instruments, including sea temperature apparatus
- Explain the Beaufort wind scale
- Explain principles of non-instrumental observations, including waves
- Explain principles of non-instrumental observations, including wind
- Explain principles of non-instrumental observations, including horizontal visibility
- Explain principles of non-instrumental observations, including cloud types
- Summarise weather services available to shipping
- Understand meteorological processes
- Explain characteristics of the troposphere
- Explain causes of geostrophic wind and surface wind
- Explain causes of surface wind
- Explain the formation of clouds and precipitation
- Explain the causes of reduced horizontal visibility
- Understand synoptic charts
- Explain weather associated with air masses affecting north Europe, including polar air masses
- Explain weather associated with air masses affecting north Europe, including tropical air masses
- Explain weather associated with air masses affecting north Europe, including arctic air masses
- Explain weather associated with air masses affecting north Europe, including antarctic air masses
- Explain the weather associated with synoptic patterns and features, including depressions (frontal, families and secondary)
- Explain the weather associated with synoptic patterns and features, including non frontal depressions
- Explain the weather associated with synoptic patterns and features, including anticyclones
- Explain the weather associated with synoptic patterns and features, including ridges of high pressure
Respond to Navigational EmergenciesReal unit · Open Awards
What you'll be able to do
- Assess situations
- Make an initial assessment of the type of navigational malfunction or emergency in accordance with recognised procedures
- Make an initial assessment of the scale of malfunction or emergency in accordance with recognised procedures
- Identify a distress or safety signal promptly
- Take prompt action to respond to navigational emergencies
- Apply action to minimise the effects of the malfunction or emergency in accordance with recognised procedures
- Maintain safety of personnel in accordance with vessel contingency plans
- Maintain safety of the vessel in accordance with contingency plans
- Respond to a distress signal in accordance with international maritime requirements
- Provide a prompt and accurate report to appropriate persons and authorities
- Respond to navigational emergencies
- Explain what constitutes an emergency
- Explain how to respond to an emergency
- Explain how to respond to a distress signal
- Explain how to apply all regulations and guidelines relevant to emergency situations
Ship ConstructionReal unit · Open Awards
What you'll be able to do
- Understand the key features of a vessel’s construction
- Summarise standard ship construction terminology
- Identify the significant structural features of a vessel, including framing systems
- Identify the significant structural features of a vessel, including features of the hull
- Identify the significant structural features of a vessel, including features of holds
- Identify the significant structural features of a vessel, including features of tanks
- Identify the significant structural features of a vessel, including arrangements to ensure watertight integrity
- Identify the significant structural features of a vessel, including arrangements in areas liable to damage by heavy weather
- Identify the significant structural features of a vessel, including openings in the hull or deck
- Identify the significant structural features of a vessel, including continuity of strength
- Identify the significant structural features of a vessel, including piping and pumping systems
- Know the salient features of a range of ship types
- Describe the salient features of ship types, including tankers (oil, gas and chemical)
- Describe the salient features of ship types, including general cargo ships
- Describe the salient features of ship types, including Ro-Ro ships
- Describe the salient features of ship types, including container ships
- Describe the salient features of ship types, including bulk carriers
- Describe the salient features of ship types, including passenger ships
- Describe the salient features of ship types, including support vessels (supply, standby and tug)
- Describe the salient features of ship types, including special vessels (surface effect and high speed craft)
- Understand ship stresses
- Explain the cause and effect of ship stress in still water, including racking
- Explain the cause and effect of ship stress in still water, including centre loading
- Explain the cause and effect of ship stress in still water, including wing loading
- Explain the cause and effect of ship stress in still water, including dry-docking
- Explain the cause and effect of ship stress in still water, including alternate hatch loading
- Explain the cause and effect of ship stress in still water, including hogging
- Explain the cause and effect of ship stress in still water, including sagging
- Explain the cause and effect of ship stress in a seaway, including panting
- Explain the cause and effect of ship stress in a seaway, including pounding
- Explain the cause and effect of ship stress in a seaway, including hogging
- Explain the cause and effect of ship stress in a seaway, including sagging
- Explain the cause and effect of ship stress in a seaway, including torsional bending
- Explain the cause and effect of ship stress in a seaway, including longitudinal bending
- Identify structural features to resist stresses
- Use stress calculating machines
- Understand the basic principles of hydrostatics
- Explain the terms light and load displacement, volume of displacement and buoyancy
- Explain the meaning of Archimedes Principle, mass, volume, density and relative density
- Explain the terminology relating to the main dimensions of a vessel
- Explain the function of loadlines, and sketch their layout
- Understand the principles of static stability
- Explain the meaning of the terms centre of buoyancy, centre of gravity, initial transverse metacentre, righting lever, righting moment
- Explain correctly the terms stable, neutral and unstable equilibrium at small angles of heel
- Explain the meaning the concepts of metacentric height and stiff and tender vessels
Vessel Navigation and TidesReal unit · Open Awards
What you'll be able to do
- Use and care for compasses.
- Identify types of compass, their use and care, including standard, steering, projector, reflector, transmitting magnetic, and gyro compasses.
- Describe the use of azimuth mirrors.
- Take readings from a magnetic compass and identify card graduations in degrees.
- Identify the basic causes of variation and deviation in compass readings.
- Take a compass error using a transit.
- Take readings and compare gyro compass, repeater and magnetic compass.
- Describe how to respond to compass alarms.
- Determine position using a marine navigation chart.
- Identify chart symbols, features and abbreviations.
- Identify the navigational properties of the Mercator chart and alternative projections e.g. gnomonic, stereographic.
- Plot a position on a chart by latitude and longitude, bearing and range, using natural scale, distance measurement, chart co-ordinates and geographic datums e.g. WGS84.
- Demonstrate how to use and care for navigation drawing instruments, parallel rules, dividers and compasses.
- Identify alternative charting systems and describe the differences between them.
- Describe how chart accuracy is maintained.
- Understand the causes and features of tides.
- Describe different types of tides, their causes and features.
- Describe tidal terminology e.g. chart datum, tidal range.
- Understand buoyage and its purpose.
- Describe the need for buoyage.
- Identify the International Association of Lighthouse Authorities (IALA) region A, including marks using shape, colour, topmark and light.
- Demonstrate the direction of buoyage and state the action to take on meeting marks.
- Make a basic passage plan.
- Describe the factors to be taken into account when appraising, planning, monitoring and executing a passage at sea.
- Produce a basic passage plan.
The honest bit
You’ve started things before
Most courses were built for a room full of people who aren’t you. A cohort moves on whether or not your week allowed it, and by the third week the thing you’re behind on becomes the reason you stop opening it.
There’s no cohort here, and no timetable to fall behind. Before anything starts, Zavmo asks when you’re sharpest and how long you can realistically sit down for, then builds the sessions around those answers. A bad fortnight changes your pace. It doesn’t put you behind.
And you only pay once you start learning. Searching and planning are free, and you can cancel any time — so the cost of finding out is an afternoon, not a year.
Your passport
Every credit is a stamp you keep
Level 3 credits are regulated. They don’t vanish when a subscription ends or a website closes. They travel to any employer, and Zavmo keeps the map of what you’ve earned and what’s next.
Each stamp is a real unit registered against this qualification.
Who’d teach you this
The Evidence Evaluator
Assessor
Helps you show what you can actually do, gathering the evidence that proves it as you learn.
Meet all twelve tutorsWhere this connects
Where these credits take you
A qualification is never a dead end here. See the jobs its credits open, the national occupational standards its units map to, and the future skills they quietly build.
- Assisting in mooring and berthing operations
- Maintain a state of readiness to respond to emergencies
- Present offshore survey information
- Respond to Offshore Installation Emergencies
- Respond to emergencies on offshore helidecks
- Respond to emergency on location
- Review, process and interpret offshore survey data
- Travel safely by helicopter to an offshore installation
Skills it covers
What the job actually needs. These are the standards the units are built against, in the words employers and awarding bodies already use for the work itself.
How you’ll actually learn this
One-to-one, on your own real work
A qualification is usually something done to you: sit the class, sit the exam, hope it sticks. Here it’s the opposite. You learn it one-to-one with a companion, on your own real work, and you keep going until you can use it, not just recall it.
Applied to your own work
Learners will develop skills to use Mercator charts for navigation, including plotting positions and converting compass and true headings and bearings. The unit also covers establishing Dead Reckoning positions and calculating tidal heights and streams.
- Remember
- Understand
- Apply
- Analyse
- Evaluate
- Create
Built for Open Awards Level 3 Diploma in Maritime Studies: Officer of the Watch on Merchant Vessels of less than 500 Gross Tonnage (Near Coastal) (RQF)
7 units in this credential, in the order it lists them, awarded by Open Awards.
- Chartwork and Tides
- Contribute to Vessel Stability and Watertight Integrity
- Control Vessel Mooring, Anchoring and Securing Operations
- Interpret Meteorology in the Near Coastal Area
- Respond to Navigational Emergencies
- Ship Construction
and 1 more in the full unit list below.
One to one, not one to many
No two people run this the same way
A course is written once and handed to everyone. This is assembled around you, and keeps changing as it learns you. Five things it reads, and what each one changes.
- Your actual work Every unit is taught against a live piece of your own work, not a worked example from a textbook.
- What you already know The first conversation finds your starting point, so you skip what you can already do and spend the time on what you cannot.
- The conditions you learn under Not a learning-styles quiz. The evidence does not support those. The dimensions the research does back, read once and used to shape the plan.
- How far you got last time It picks up mid-thought. The tutor knows what you said, what you struggled with, and what it asked you to try.
- Which tutor suits the moment Twelve of them, each for a different kind of thinking. The one who walks you through a first idea is not the one who stress-tests it.
See how you learn, free. Eight questions, no sign-up. A directional taster; the diagnostic inside Zavmo goes deeper and keeps adapting.
Why it sticks
Most courses stop at remembering
There’s a well-known ladder of how deeply you learn something, called Bloom’s Taxonomy. Most courses get you up the first two rungs: you remember some facts, you pass a test, you forget it. Real skill lives at the top. Judging, deciding, creating. And this isn’t a generic ladder: every rung has a named Zavmo tutor who walks you up it.
- 6CreateThe Creative Catalyst
- 5EvaluateThe Evidence Evaluator
- 4AnalyseThe Analyst
- 3ApplyThe Coach
- 2UnderstandThe Connector
- 1RememberThe Builder
Where most courses leave you Where Zavmo takes you
The value
Why the companion is worth £70 a month
You’re not paying for the units. They’re regulated, and the same wherever you earn them. You’re paying for the one thing that decides whether you actually get there: a companion that makes them stick, on your real work.
That is one-to-one on this qualification, every day, on the work you already do, for £70 a month. Your first module is free, so you can see the teaching before you pay for any of it. Billed monthly, cancel any time and billing stops.
Earned on your own work, taught to the top.
Everything you just read, learned one-to-one on the job you already do. Your first module is free, so you can see the teaching before you pay for any of it.
Build my plan, freeNo card. See how this qualification maps onto your role and meet the tutors who’d teach it, free. The learning begins when you subscribe. It’s £70 a month, billed monthly. Cancel any time and billing stops.