The TRB and Reports

[Dwils94]

hey guys just wanted to ask a question of any recent cadets who have qualified and about the TRB and the reports as parts of the navigational work book iv been at sea now 2 months got quite a few signatures and tasks signed of but i haven't made reports as im not sure what to make them on do we make a report for each task we have signed of as making progress ? or what? sorry if this is a stupid question but im so confused the TRB wasnt explained that well to me in college.Thanks

[EH75]

Yeah the navigation workbook wasn't explained particularly well to us either. I I would say just write a report for anything interesting you do. there are no hard and fast rules. If you write a few reports a week you'll be surprised how quickly they build up. They don't have to be massive either. Mine were usually only a couple of pages, often less. Put plenty pictures in as well! You'll find when you get back to college that what each person has done will vary quite a lot but as long as you have done something you should be fine.

[ramfeild66]

I was told to not do a daily report, however when you start you will find yourself learning new things everyday, so I started writing every night about what I did, why we were doing it and making relevant notes from the ships SMM and other regulations (MARPOL, ISGOTT, IBC code, SOLAS etc...) regarding the activity we were doing. At first it's a lot of writing, but once you've done something once, unless you have any new knowledge to add, it doesn't really make sense writing the same thing over and over (I barely added anything to the maintenance side of my workbook after almost three straight weeks painting).
Try and take pictures or if you're on a tanker with flammable cargo, try and find relevant pictures from the internet (Framo make a lot of my ships equipment, so I've been taking pictures from them). Make sure any calculations you do, you put them in the back in hand written form, gyro errors via azimuths for instance is something I do most days, I also make notes of anything I've put in the log books if it's relevant but as I'm phase two, I'm only filling out GE's and observations in the log.
Like EH75 says, the instructions were fairly ambiguous so I imagine there will be a broad variety of report styles.