A wrong turn

The chart showing our assignment.

The course plotted from Lettie's position.

Over the past couple of days, most of the senior class has been deeply engaged in "navigating" or "operating" the simulator from point a to point b. The task involves the joint effort of two people. Today, I served as the navigator. Our mission was to travel through the York Spit Channel in Chesapeake Bay towards an exploded barge. Our vessel was nicknamed "Indy 7". However, as I looked at the sample chart, I mistook the position of Lettie for our position. Not realizing my mistake, Mohammed, my partner, and I continued to sketch a Dead Reckoning Plot and find the ETA from the point at which Lettie was situated. We discovered that the distance was 9.4 nautical miles. At 10 knots, we should have reached the destroyed barge in 56.4 minutes. Feeling proud of our findings, we set off to take our seat at the simulator, "student 3". Yet, one glance at the visual section of the screen left me confused. After going back and forth between our chart and the simulator a couple of times, I realized my mistake. Unfortunately, this meant we had to re plot the points from where "Indy 7" was truly located. Fortunately, this gave us both more practice with plotting points and discovering the compass angle at which the course we set out was going. The high-speed ferry we set out on could do a maximum of 30 knots. After calculating a new ETA, we determined that it would take us 43 minutes to reach our destination. This wasn't good because we only had 30 minutes until class ended. Regardless, we trooped back to "student 3". As I found out today, carelessness can result in extreme confusion and double the amount of work. In the future, I can be sure that I will double check each step on the way towards any task.