According to information released by the Royal British Navy, Britannia Royal Naval College (BRNC) has taken delivery of the first of eight new Sea Class 15 training boats that will replace the aged picket boats currently used by Officer Cadets for exercises on the River Dart for basic navigation, seamanship, and leadership training. The officer training module will have additional bunks, workstations and teaching space.
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New Sea Class 15 work/training boat for Britannia Royal Naval College of British Navy. (Picture source British Navy)
According to Lieutenant Commander (Lt Cdr) Mike Garner, the boats will be a game-changer in the way we conduct our training. The picket boats are largely riverine craft, operated within the confines of the River Dart. The new boats are much better suited to operating in open waters, allowing them to break away from the confines of the River Dart providing us with new and exciting ways of developing training. The equipment onboard, and the new range capabilities that are now available to us, will allow the college to use them much more like small ships oppose to just river boats
Lt Cdr Garner said: “Our river team is now qualified to drive the boats and our attention is now turning to the larger task of qualifying the wider training staff at BRNC. They work in a completely different way to the picket boats, so we now need to take our time to understand their capabilities and redesign and reinvent our training programs, as we wait for the remaining seven boats to arrive. It’s a huge challenge, but this will eventually result in, arguably, the biggest change to our training for around 40 years and will give us bigger and better options to build that Naval Officer of the future.”
The Sea Class 15 is the ship selected for the Britannia Royal Naval College to train future officers of the British Navy. Eight of the boats will be based on the river Dart for use by officers under training at Brittania Royal Navy College. They will replace the fleet of aging picket boats used by the college for basic navigation, seamanship, and leadership training. The officer training module will have additional bunks, workstations and teaching space.
The Sea Class 15 has a length of 13.8m, a beam of 4.4m, and a displacement of 23,150 kg. The ship is equipped with different types of training equipment including a whiteboard, workstations, chart table, and flatscreen displays.
