Photo By Cpl. Monty Burton | Coxswain Skills Course students Petty Officer 2nd Class Michael Huey, left, and Pfc....... read more read more
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By Lance Cpl. Monty Burton
III Marine Expeditionary Force
OKINAWA, Japan - After a week of classes covering navigation, boating procedures, maintenance and various other skills needed to be a coxswain, the Marines stood ready for anything that could occur in the water.
The Marines were participants in the Coxswain Skills Course, taught by instructors with the III Marine Expeditionary Force's Special Operations Training Group.
The course started, Aug. 4, 2008 and concludes today.
A coxswain is an individual who guides and operates a boat, in this case a combat rubber reconnaissance craft, or Zodiac as it is often called, and is responsible for the safety of his boat and equipment. The Zodiacs are often employed as part of a boat team which is headed by a chief coxswain. The boat teams work very much like infantry units on the ground.
"It's like a squad, the coxswain is like the point man in the squad," said Cpl. Justin Cook, a former reconnaissance Marine looking to become a coxswain. "Together all the boats work like a formation. We have wedges and formations, just like on land."
The reconnaissance crafts can usually hold up to 10 Marines and travel up to 50-60 nautical miles on a tank of gas. The average speed of the water craft is about 24 nautical miles-per-hour.
During one portion of the course, students were assigned to a boat as a navigator. The job of the navigator was to plot all the points so that the team could effectively travel to each of them in open water, explained Sgt. David Stiehler, the SOTG chief instructor of the course.
The students set out for their evolution at 3 p.m. when the sun was high in the sky. They would not return until well after sunset.
"Since this is their first [navigation mission], they have to come within a half-mile of the points," Stiehler said. "[Navigation] is a lot harder in the water because you don't have any landmarks to tell you if you're there, you just have to trust your equipment."
Through it all, the students exceeded their instructor's expectations and found all their points without hassle, Stiehler said.
Stiehler also said the hardest part of the course is the boat handling portion.
"During boat handling, the Marines have to be very precise while going very slow. It is easy to control the boat while going fast, but when you are going very slow, every single mistake could be costly to the mission," he said.
Stiehler said that because the classes are comprised of a mix of different Marines and Sailors with different backgrounds, it takes students longer to catch on to many of the concepts introduced in the course, but this class caught on quicker than most.
Most of the Marines were training to attain the military occupational specialty of combat rubber reconnaissance craft coxswain, while two, Cook and Cpl. Clay George, an infantry rifleman, were going through the course to become coxswain-instructors themselves.
The Coxswain course is offered three times each year and usually consists of about 20 students.
| Date Taken: | 08.29.2008 |
| Date Posted: | 08.28.2008 01:45 |
| Story ID: | 22943 |
| Location: |
| Web Views: | 256 |
| Downloads: | 188 |
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