David Burch

David Burch is the author of 13 books on marine navigation and weather and the director of Starpath School of Navigation in Seattle, WA, which had more than 30,000 classroom students, before the school switched to exclusively online training. He has more than 70,000 miles of ocean experience ranging from the Arctic ice edge to Tahiti and Australia in the Pacific and from New York to Panama in the Atlantic. He has sailed across the Pacific to Hawaii ten times, three times winning the Victoria to Maui yacht race, and in 1984 setting the elapsed time record for that passage for vessels under 38 feet long (the record lasted 16 years). In powerboats, he delivered a 65-foot fishing vessel from New York to Seattle, via Panama and has made numerous coastal deliveries between WA and CA, AK, and Mexico. He navigated the only American entry (72-foot Cassiopeia) in the storm-ridden '93 Sydney to Hobart yacht race and later navigated that vessel on the '96 Vic Maui and Swiftsure Lightship Classic when she won first overall in the latter. His magazine articles have appeared in Cruising World, Ocean Navigator, Sailing, and Sea Kayaker. His column "Burch at the Helm" has appeared in Blue Water Sailing magazine since 2009. His textbooks and workbooks are used by numerous schools, nationwide. His work has been recognized with the Institute of Navigation's Superior Achievement Award for outstanding performance as a practicing navigator, and by a USCG citation for his successful weather and vessel performance analysis used in a search and rescue operation. In February, 2011 he was awarded Fellow grade in the Institute of Navigation. In May of 2011 he named a Fellow of the Royal Institute of Navigation in London. From 2005 to 2010, he has served as the editor of the quarterly newsletter of the Foundation for the Promotion of the Art of Navigation. David is the author and developer of several software training programs, including the Starpath Radar Trainer, the world's most popular PC radar simulator and Starpath Weather Trainer Live, both used by individuals and schools, in several countries. On the academic side, he is a past Fulbright Scholar with a Ph.D. in physics.