The paper presents a concept of elemental manoeuvres that may be used for analysis of ship handling training (including the training with manned model ships) and for simulation of complex manoeuvring scenarios. It shows a set of postulated elemental manoeuvres. A fuzzy clustering method is introduced and applied for the classification of manoeuvring patterns. The fuzzy clustering algorithm is used for the extraction of elemental manoeuvres from the records of ship handling manoeuvres of LCC model ship. The best set of variables for the extraction of elemental manoeuvres consists of normalised ship velocities and controls