Ocean navigation sans sextant

        

WAY BACK IN 2010 I wrote a column about an American sailor called Marvin Creamer, who sailed a boat around the world without any navigational instruments whatsoever. [1]

Then, just the other day, I received a letter from Kathleen Saville, an extraordinary American lady who holds a Guinness World Record for rowing across oceans. With her husband Curt she rowed 3,618 miles from Casablanca to Antigua in 1981. Then, in 1984, she rowed 4,000 miles from Peru to Australia with Curt. Both voyages were in the 25-foot ocean rowboat Excalibur. [2]

In the course of some research she was doing lately, she came across my old column on Marvin Creamer, and this is what she had to say about the man whose navigational techniques may well have saved the lives of the Savilles on that second voyage:

Hi John,
Today I was doing some research for my ocean rowing memoir and I thought I'd look up Marvin Creamer, whom my late husband Curt Saville and I met a couple of times in the 1980s. The first time was at a boat show where we were exhibiting our ocean rowboat Excalibur after our 1981 Atlantic row. The second time, we were on the South Pacific in the same rowboat. Our meeting was a lot more meaningful the second time because Curt had fallen overboard and dropped the sextant before I could get him back on board. [This was before SatNav and GPS, of course.] Crazily, we didn't carry a spare so we really had to improvise until I remembered Marvin and his technique of voyaging without navigation instruments.

The maritime net people we regularly chatted with on our TR7 ham radio located him and we talked to him. Since we were rowing for Hiva Oa in the Marquesas, Marvin suggested we aim to get under Kappa Orionis in Orion. To make a long story short, it worked! It took over 40 days of navigating with the stars (63 days total from Galapagos) until we got there but we managed to save ourselves with his method that he so patiently described to us. When Curt asked him if it was good enough for our 25-foot rowboat to reach the Marquesas, he said yes. He has always been a hero to us.
BTW, your description of his method is spot on. It's exactly what we did.
Best regards,
Kathleen Saville

[1] http://johnvigor.blogspot.com/2010/11/how-creamer-did-it.html

[2] https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Kathleen+Saville%2C+rowing&rh=n%3A283155%2Ck%3AKathleen+Saville%5Cc+rowing

Today’s Thought

No star ever rose

And set without influence somewhere.

— Owen Meredith, Lucile

Tailpiece

“My neighbor’s dog keeps barking all night. I can’t sleep. I’m at my wits’ end. What can I do?”

“Buy it from him. Then HE won’t be able to sleep.”

Panic strikes at sea

IT STRUCK ME the other day that there must be a lot of feelings that a sailor experiences that are unknown to your average landlubber. And one of those feelings is the anxiety, verging on controlled panic, you experience when land should appear, but doesn’t.
It happened to me once long ago. After 16 days at sea in my 30-foot sloop I was approaching the Caribbean island of St. Vincent, specially chosen as my landfall because of its height and therefore its visibility from a great distance.
This was in the days before GPS, and when my calculations showed I was within sighting range, there was nothing but blue sea and sky. Hour after hour went by as I fussed with my navigation and did my sums over again and again. My alarm was contagious. My crew started to worry alongside me. Ten miles to go, and no St. Vincent.
With sinking feelings in our stomachs we wondered out loud. Could the compass be wrong? Were we completely lost? Was the sextant giving false readings? Was our chronometer acting up? Were the charts wrong? Did we have enough food and water to find some land somewhere, anywhere?
Five miles to go. Nothing. Had there been an earthquake? Had St. Vincent been blown off the face of the earth? If so, wouldn’t we see some trees and wreckage? Our minds  ran amok with reasons for our worrisome situation.
Suddenly there was a flash of light high up to starboard. I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was sun reflecting off a car on a mountain road. We were about to run into St. Vincent. I was so startled, I automatically jibed and reversed our course.
In the next few minutes, the whole island revealed itself and we were, in fact, about four miles off, dead on course. Oh, what a relief. You can’t imagine our joy. The island had been hidden by a sea mist that had blended on the horizon to make one seamless view of the blue sea and sky. So much for the pilot books, and their tall tales of how far away St. Vincent is visible.
I have to tell you that we all felt physically drained after the gamut of emotions that had wracked our minds and stomachs for so many hours, so perhaps the landlubbers are, after all, quite happy to be spared that particular experience.
Today’s Thought
“We are lost!” the captain shouted,As he staggered down the stairs.
-- James Thomas Fields, Ballad of the Tempest
Tailpiece “Who’s the gorgeous girl over there?”
“She must be the village belle.”
“How do you know?”
“She’s wringing her hands.”

(Drop by every Monday, Wednesday, Friday for another  Mainly about Boats column.)

Navigating without instruments

ONE OF THOSE New York Times Magazine articles that goes on forever came to my attention the other day. It said that Alson Kelen, the world’s last-ever apprentice in the ancient art of wave-piloting, had just successfully found the atoll of Aur in the Marshall Islands.

Now, wave-piloting is the art of looking at the sea and deducing which way the nearest land lies, and how far away it is. This is the art that allowed to ancient Polynesians to find and inhabit the far-flung islands of the Pacific.

Wave-pilots can apparently detect very subtle wave trains in the deep ocean that are reflections from the steep-to volcanic islands, and even, it seems, from the low reefs surrounding atolls. But now everybody is getting worried that the Polynesian navigators who possess the gift of wave-piloting are dying out, and the ancient art might be lost to mankind forever.

Alson Kelen is the man in the Marshall Islands who seems to know most about wave-piloting, so it was arranged that he should give a practical demonstration of his abilities to some scientists and a journalist by navigating a sailing canoe from Majuro to Aur. Which he managed to do, apparently, without any navigational instruments or tables.

The New York Times writer was obviously very impressed with this feat, but I can’t help wondering if he has ever heard of Marvin Creamer.  The distance that Kelen covered, between Majuro and Aur, is about 70 miles. You could do that trip reasonably easily using dead-reckoning alone.

On the other hand, 68-year-old retired college professor Marvin Creamer, of New Jersey, sailed his yacht Globe Star right around the world in the 1980s. For 18 months he navigated without a compass, sextant, electronic instruments, or even a wristwatch.

“What we demonstrated,” he concluded, “was that information taken from the sea and the sky can be used for fairly safe navigation. How far pre-Columbians sailed on the world’s oceans we do not know; however, it is my hope that the Globe Star voyage will provide researchers with a basis for assuming that long-distance navigation without instruments is not only possible, but could have been done with a fair degree of confidence and navigation.”

Creamer discovered he could depend entirely on the sun, moon and stars. In overcast weather he studied currents and wind patterns. Further clues came from the composition and color of the sea, cloud formations, the horizon, drifting objects, and different types of birds or insects.

He got latitudes by identifying stars with a known declination that lay directly overhead, something that must take a lot of practice on a small yacht heaving and rolling on waves, but then, of course, he had only to sail due east or west to make a landfall.

I guess that wave-pilots are the short-range navigators who find the atolls and islands when they’re fairly close to them. I have tried to detect the deep-sea wave trains that they say come back as reflections of the land masses, but I’ve never been able to feel them among the regular waves and swells,  and neither has anybody else I’ve sailed with.

In any case, it seems that Polynesians aren’t the only ones with the gift of navigating by natural clues alone, and if the art of wave-piloting does die out, it won’t be a disaster. All we need to know is right there in Professor Marvin Creamer’s notes. Google his name and see what I mean.

Today’s Thought

If you will be a traveller, have always the eyes of a falcon, the ears of an ass, the face of an ape, the mouth of a hog, the shoulders of a camel, the legs of a stag, and see that you never want two bags very full, that is one of patience, and another of money.

— John Florio, Second Frutes

Tailpiece

“I’ve just sold my second novel.”

“Great! What did you use for the plot?”

“Oh, a brand new idea: the film version of my first novel.”

(Drop by every Monday, Wednesday, Friday for a new Mainly about Boats column.)

Navigation is not precise

ONE OF THE THINGS that small-boat navigation teaches you is that nothing is precise. The best navigators make allowances for the unknown factors that always affect small boats, especially sailboats. They plot their positions within a circle of uncertainty and if they’re seeking landfall at a particular spot on a coastline, they aim way off to one side or the other, so they know which way to turn when they sight land.

When I was a lot younger I thought I knew how to navigate with precision. This misconception was confirmed when I sailed a 17-foot dinghy across the English Channel from Dover to Calais. I studied the tide tables and figured out the speed and direction of the tidal stream (or the set and drift as I used to call it then) for every hour. I then drew my course on the chart and adjusted the compass heading to account for the distance the tide was pushing me sideways in each hour. And thus, with a great sense of triumph, I arrived off the rather featureless French coast exactly at Calais.

It was beginner’s luck, of course. Nobody can forecast the exact speed of the current, or its exact direction. Nobody can tell you how much leeway your boat will make. Nobody can forecast your exact speed or distance covered during any one-hour period, and so the detailed markings you make so carefully on the chart turn out to be nonsense. In my case, it was probably a matter of all the errors canceling each other out — a minor miracle in other words.

Years later, when further experience had taught me some humility, I read The Yacht Navigator’s Handbook, by Norman Dahl. In the introduction he says: “When I was first taught navigation (in the Royal Navy) errors were thought of as being rather disgraceful, the sole result of poor technique by the navigator. Whilst I always accepted (and still accept today) that I was not the most brilliant navigator in the world, I was disappointed to find that, however hard I tried, errors never seemed to go away. Navigating a submerged submarine, and later, yachts of many kinds in many situations, eventually made me realize that errors are an integral part of navigation and need to be studied in their own right.”

Dahl said a major purpose of his book was to show that errors in navigation are normal and natural, and that a major skill in navigation lies in your ability to interpret the results in terms of the likely errors. He goes on to show boat navigators how they can actually use the errors to help make sensible decisions about their positions and a future course of action.

As one who had never experienced any difficulty in making errors I found Dahl’s advice very comforting, and I never again tried to do anything as impossibly precise as maintaining a rhumb line from Dover to Calais.

I expect Dahl’s book is out of print now because it was first published in 1983, before the great revolution in navigating that finally did bring near- precision to position-finding. We don’t think of errors now, because GPS doesn’t allow for that. It will tell us our position to within a boatlength in any kind of visibility, day or night.

And yet people have run aground using GPS, often because GPS is more accurate than the charts you plot your position on. There have been many reports of yachts wrecked on rocks, reefs, and islands that were where the GPS said they weren’t.

So we now all find ourselves in the position that I was in all those years ago, when I knew precisely and without doubt how to cross the English Channel. It’s surely time we started doubting again. It’s time we listened to Mr. Dahl, time we started taking all the possible errors into account. Time to accept that navigation is never precise, even with GPS.
Happy New Year
I wish you all health and happiness for the coming year. May 2016 also bring you prosperity in all meanings of the word.

Today’s Thought

The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.

— Carlyle, Heroes and Hero-Worship: The Hero as Prophet

Tailpiece

“What made you marry old Bella?”
“She was different from all the other girls I’ve met.”

“In what way?”
"She liked me."

GPS's unfortunate downside

 AS A NAVIGATOR in the dark days before GPS, I used to do a lot of guessing. Most of it was informed guessing, however. I had my reasons.

For example, I discovered that a right-handed helmsman sailed a course farther off the wind while on the beat on the port tack than did a left-handed helmsman. The opposite applied when the boat was on the other tack. The left-handed helm was using his right hand on the tiller, his weaker arm, and so the boat rounded up more in the gusts and carved a course closer to the wind. The right-handed helm was able to use his greater strength to apply more weather helm to stay on course.   

The reason I knew this was because, in between sextant sights, it was the navigator’s task to keep a dead reckoning plot. But he couldn’t stay awake in the cockpit day and night to check that the helmsman was following exactly the course he had been given, so he asked the cockpit crew at the end of every four-hour watch to estimate what their average speed had been and what average course they had sailed. This information was then plotted on the chart to give a dead-reckoning position.

In the ancient days of commercial sail they used a traverse board for the same purpose. It was a very clever little device that allowed the navigator to see at a glance the speed and course the ship had covered during the last watch. It was nothing more than a wooden board with a compass rose on its face and 32 radial rows of holes. Every half-hour, when the sand-glass was turned, the helmsman placed a peg in the hole of the compass point that matched the average direction the ship had been steered during the last 30 minutes.

At the same time, the crew ascertained the ship’s speed on a chip log, and a peg was placed in the appropriate hole on a special speed grid. So the navigator could now come on deck and see what had been happening in the way of speed and direction while he was down below, allowing for all the zigs and zags and wavy wake lines.

He would make a note of these averages and start guessing about leeway and current and a few other things that his instinct supplied corrections for, and then he could plot a dead-reckoning position on a chart. Then all the pegs were pulled out of the board for the next watch to play with.

Nowadays, with all those clever satellites twinkling away in the sky, there’s no need for a traverse board or dead reckoning. GPS does all the grunt work and makes navigation so easy that nobody has any respect for the job any more. Ordinary foredeck hands used to step back in awe when the navigator came strolling along jauntily with his sextant box under his arm and a roll of charts in his hand. Skippers used to address navigators with civility, offer them drinks, and treat them almost as if they were human. No longer, I’m afraid. All that has gone. GPS is very clever, but it has a lot to answer for.

Today’s Thought

Navigation is what tells you where you are, and, what’s just as important, where you aren’t.

 — John Vigor

Tailpiece

“Why do all those cows in Switzerland wear bells around their necks?”

“Dunno. Maybe it’s because their horns don’t work.”

Normal and natural errors

ONE OF THE THINGS that small-boat navigation teaches you is that nothing is precise. The best navigators make allowances for the unknown factors that always affect small boats, especially sailboats. They plot their positions within a circle of uncertainty and if they’re seeking landfall at a particular spot on a coastline, they aim way off to one side or the other, so they know which way to turn when they sight land.

When I was a lot younger I thought I knew how to navigate with precision. This misconception was confirmed when I sailed a 17-foot dinghy across the English Channel from Dover to Calais. I studied the tide tables and figured out the speed and direction of the tidal stream (or the set and drift as I used to call it then) for every hour. I then drew my course on the chart and adjusted the compass heading to account for the distance the tide was pushing me sideways in each hour. And thus, with a great sense of triumph, I arrived off the rather featureless French coast exactly at Calais.

It was beginner’s luck, of course. Nobody can forecast the exact speed of the current, or its exact direction. Nobody can tell you how much leeway your boat will make. Nobody can forecast your exact speed or distance covered during any one-hour period, and so the detailed markings you make so carefully on the chart turn out to be impractical nonsense. In my case, it was probably a matter of all the errors canceling each other out — a minor miracle in other words.

Years later, when further experience had taught me some humility, I read The Yacht Navigator’s Handbook, by Norman Dahl.[1] In the introduction he says: “When I was first taught navigation (in the Royal Navy) errors were thought of as being rather disgraceful, the sole result of poor technique by the navigator. Whilst I always accepted (and still accept today) that I was not the most brilliant navigator in the world, I was disappointed to find that, however hard I tried, errors never seemed to go away. Navigating a submerged submarine, and later, yachts of many kinds in many situations, eventually made me realize that errors are an integral part of navigation and need to be studied in their own right.”

Dahl said a major purpose of his book was to show that errors in navigation are normal and natural, and that a major skill in navigation lies in your ability to interpret the results in terms of the likely errors. He goes on to show boat navigators how they can actually use the errors to help make sensible decisions about their positions and a future course of action.

As one who had never experienced any difficulty in making errors I found Dahl’s advice very comforting, and I never again tried to do anything as impossibly precise as maintaining a rhumb line from Dover to Calais.

I expect Dahl’s book is out of print now because it was first published in 1983, before the great revolution in navigating that finally did bring near-precision to position-finding. We don’t think of errors now, because GPS doesn’t allow for that. It will tell us our position to within a boatlength in any kind of visibility, day or night.

And yet people have run aground using GPS, often because GPS is more accurate than the charts you plot your position on. There have been many reports of yachts wrecked on rocks, reefs, and islands that were where either GPS or the charts said they weren’t.

So we now all find ourselves in the position that I was in all those years ago, when I knew precisely and without doubt how to cross the English Channel. It’s surely time we started doubting again. It’s time we listened to Mr. Dahl, time we started taking all the possible errors into account. Time to accept that navigation is never precise, even with GPS.

[1] The Yacht Navigator's Handbook, by Norman Dahl (London, 1983, Ward Lock Ltd.)

Today’s Thought

The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.

— Carlyle, Heroes and Hero-Worship: The Hero as Prophet.

Tailpiece

“What made you marry old Bella?”

“She was different from all the other girls I’d met.”

“In what way?”

“She liked me.”

(Drop by every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, for a new Mainly about Boats column.)

Latitude hooks and daring feats

I’M NOT SURPRISED that ancient Polynesian sailors managed to find their way from remote Easter Island to the mainland of South America. What interests me far more is how they found their way back. Easter Island is, after all, a tiny speck of land 2,300 miles west of South America, and 1,100 miles away from any other island.

Scientists recently conducted a study that shows interbreeding between the native peoples of Easter Island and those of South America. They believe it occurred between 1300 and 1500, and the genetic evidence shows that it was probably the Rapa Nui people of Easter Island who made the long ocean voyages there and back.

The Polynesians had fast, seaworthy sailing canoes, it’s true, but can you imagine how skilled they were as navigators at a time when most European sailors were clinging cautiously to the coastlines in slow, dumpy vessels that were little better, if any, than those of the ancient Greeks and Romans?

How could they hope to make an accurate landfall on Easter Island after the long lonely trek from South America? It is nothing less than astounding.

I know that one of their tricks was to place themselves on the latitude of an island and then to run either due east or due west until they hit land. And one of the devices they used to determine their latitude was a straight piece of split bamboo with a loop at the top. This straight piece had a shorter piece of bamboo, known as the pointer, tied at right angles to the looped piece.

I learned this some years back when I edited Dennis Fisher’s wonderful little book called Latitude Hooks and Azimuth Rings (International Marine). The latitude hook relies on the fact that the stars appear to rotate around fixed points known as the celestial poles. In the northern hemisphere, for instance, the north celestial pole is marked, as near as dammit, by Polaris, the North Star. With a latitude hook held at arm’s length, and the pointer aligned with the horizon, a navigator knew he was maintaining his correct latitude if he could see Polaris through the loop on the top.

If the star were above the loop, he would head farther south; if below the loop, he’d head north, In the South Pacific, he’d use the constellations Southern Cross and Centaurus to figure out the position of the south celestial pole.

While it sounds very simple, it must have taken some skill to use a latitude hook with any degree of accuracy, and I suspect that the final landfall was achieved with the aid of other navigational tricks learned by the Polynesians, such as their ability to deduce the position of an island still hidden over the horizon from the angle of reflected swells.

However they did it, it was a marvelous achievement for the times, and if you’d like to try your hand at it some time, get hold of a copy of Fisher’s book, because it also tells you how to build and use 18 traditional navigational tools, including the astrolabe, the cross-staff and the octant. Even if you don’t build any of the instruments, it’s a fascinating read.

http://www.amazon.com/Latitude-Hooks-Azimuth-Rings-Navigational/dp/0070211205

Today’s Thought

Navigare necesse est; vivere non est necesse.

— Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus

Tailpiece

“Paddy, you should be more careful about pulling your drapes at home. When I drove past your house last night I distinctly saw you kissing your wife.”

“Ha, well, then the joke’s on you, O’Riordan. I wasn’t home last night.”

^{(Drop by every Monday, Wednesday, Friday for a new Mainly about Boats column.)}

Don't overdo electronic thingies

A MESSAGE FROM A READER who signs off as “57 Degrees North” says:

“It fascinates me how many people these days are simply terrified of leaving the harbor without GPS, chart plotter, radar, and satellite weather download thingy for their laptops.

“Back in my salad days we used to work offshore in the Gulf of Alaska all the time. This was pre-GPS of course, and while there was Loran-C it was notoriously wonky, and generally no better than dead-reckoning anyway, so many folks didn't bother.
“To get home, you simply steamed a reciprocal heading, which was usually in the ball park. After all, missing the coastline of Alaska would be no mean feat of navigation. Coastal charts and a smattering of local knowledge usually did for the rest.
“One of those odd geographic features is that on clear days the tallest mountains always pop over the horizon first, which gives you a nice visual fix on position. Obviously not as accurate as that electronic thingummy, but plenty good enough for us Neanderthals.”

Yes, it’s an interesting thing, how people have become so reliant on their electronic aids. I can remember when a couple of us went to sea on a 24-foot sloop, a Harrison-Butler Thuella design, with nothing more than a compass, a chart, a pair of dividers and a parallel rule. Oh, and a number 2 pencil, of course.

We didn’t even have en engine. Well, actually, we did, but it was only there for ballast because the hole for the propeller shaft hadn’t yet been drilled.

We set out from the Indian Ocean port of Durban, where my friend Ray Cruickshank had built the boat, bound for exotic Lourenco Marques 300 miles to the north. I was a teenager then, and I was invited on the trip because I knew how to sail, and Ray didn’t. Neither of us could navigate, of course, so we didn’t have a sextant or any form of electronics, not even a radio of any kind.  We weren’t bothered about this. It was the norm, or close to it, for those times, as 57 Degree North has pointed out. All we had to do was keep Africa on the left side and we’d surely get there.

We didn’t get there, as it happened. The Mozambique Currrent, flowing south at up to 4 knots, kept sweeping us back so that every time we closed with the land we had to admit we were hopelessly lost. After almost a week of frustration, we turned tail and sped back to Durban with the current. We didn’t need a sextant or any electronic aid to find Durban, with its miles of bright lights and high-rise beachfront hotels.

I’m not suggesting anyone should try to emulate Marvin Creamer and the crew of his 36-foot boat Globe Star, who sailed around the world with no navigational instruments whatsoever, not even a compass or a watch. On the other hand, it’s reassuring to know that common sense and a normal aptitude for direction finding will supply most sailors with most of the knowledge they need for most of the trips they make.

Today’s Thought

Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you, smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, "Come and find out.”
— Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness 
Tailpiece

An old-fashioned sloop pulled in to the dock, and a beautiful woman stepped off with a parrot on her shoulder.
“Where did you get that?” asked one of the dock hands.
“Met her online,” said the parrot.

(Drop by every Monday, Wednesday, Friday for a new Mainly about Boats column.)

The Maddison Project: Take 3

IN THE LAST EPISODE of the Maddison project we learned that maritime progress in the 15th century had shifted to Portugal, where caravels were now exploring the Atlantic. But there were also major improvements in navigation. New instruments were developed, and much better charts were being drawn.

“In the northern hemisphere, the pole star provided a more-or-less constant bearing and altitude,” Maddison points out. “On a north-south passage, a navigator could observe the pole star each day at dawn and dusk, when he could see both the star and the horizon. By noting changes in altitude, he could get some idea of changes in his position. In sailing east-west, he could keep a steady course by maintaining a constant polar altitude.”

All this had been done before, of course, but very crudely, using finger spreads or other rough means of measuring altitude. But in the 15th century the Portuguese developed the quadrant, which made it possible to judge latitudes and distances sailed.

“The sun’s altitude could not be measured with a quadrant, as its light was too bright for the naked eye, so a variant of the astronomer’s astrolabe was developed for mariners. because of the earth’s movement, the altitude of the sun was different every day, so altitude readings had to be adjusted for daily changes in the sun’s declination. These tables were constructed by the astronomer Zacuto in the 14702. After practical tests of the instruments and tables on trial voyages, a naval almanac, Regimento do Astrolabia et do Quadrante, was compiled, which was available to Vasco da Gama when he sailed to India in 1497.”

In 1569 the Flemish mapmaker, Gerard Mercator, developed a projection technique to represent the world’s sphericity on a flat surface. On his charts, parallels of latitude and meridians of longitude cut each other at right angles. Meridians were spread apart as they approached the poles, and to compensate the spacing of latitude degrees was increased progressively toward the poles. The result of this was on a Mercator chart, the line of a constant compass bearing was straight. This made it much easier to plot and maintain a course at sea, but strangely enough, Mercator charts were not generally used until the 17th century.

In 1594 the English navigator, John Davis, invented a simple back staff that could be used to measure the altitude of the sun without sighting the sun directly, and by the end of the 17th century it had replaced and seaman’s quadrant and astrolabe.

The backstaff, in turn, was superseded by a much more precise instrument, the reflecting octant, in 1731. It was the work of the English mathematician, John Hadley. It was further improved in 1757 by a sextant developed by the British navy. The sextant permitted a quick and accurate reading of any celestial object against the horizon.  

Today’s Thought

One ship drives east and another drives west

With the self-same winds that blow,

‘Tis the set of the sails and not the gales

Which tells us the way to go.

— Emma Wheeler Wilcox, Winds of Fate

Tailpiece

Seattle police arrested two kids yesterday.  One was drinking battery acid, and the other was swallowing fireworks. They charged one and let the other one off.

(Drop by every Monday, Wednesday, Friday for a new Mainly about Boats column.)

Thank you, dear Followers

O JOY beyond all understanding! O glory be, and hallelujah! The number of my followers has swollen to more than 200, thanks to several kind persons who reacted promptly to my last column. You have made me very happy folks. It feels s-o-o-o good to have 200 in the bank, and I’m very grateful to you.

So here’s your reward:

The Disease Called Cruising

2.  First landfall

ON OUR 23rd day at sea, the skipper called me at 2 a.m. for my watch. “No sign of land,” he said skeptically.

He was still not convinced that I could navigate. And, to tell the truth, I wasn’t too sure myself. It was my first time navigating out of sight of land. We were 2,900 miles out of Cape Town, en route to Rio de Janeiro, and we were about to come within sight of the first piece of land on the way — if I’d got it right. And this was long before the days of GPS.

From the companionway hatch I scanned the horizon with the night binoculars. It was hopeless. All I could make out in the moonlight was the usual battlements of cloud all the way around the edges of our little world, and none overhead.

I was fairly sure we had passed Trindade Island, because the wind had come back in the night. Not much, but enough to allow our little sloop to make a steady 4 knots.

When dawn came I started to look for the island on the port quarter. The British Admiralty Pilot showed silhouettes of Trindade. It was just 3 miles long and 1 1/2 miles wide.

Miles away, down on the southern horizon, the cloud ramparts were beginning to break up and dissolve into early morning mists.

But one cloud stayed put. Trindade! Right where it should have been, 30 miles away to the south-south-east. Its lofty, detached pinnacles were soon easy to see without binoculars.

I called softly to my watchmate, Eddie.  I didn’t want to waken the sleeping watch. “Have a look at the island,” I said excitedly.

He beamed from ear to ear, and leaning through the hatchway, fumbled in the tool box for the foghorn.

Nick, who had heard him scrabbling, jumped out of the quarter berth and leaped on deck. But the skipper got wakened by a raucous blast from Eddie. He came topsides rubbing his eyes and looking shaken.

 It was a first ocean landfall for all of us, but nobody was more excited than I. I thought my face would burst from all that smiling.

I kept saying: “Wow! Pretty good, huh?” and behaved abominably. “I think it should be named after me,” I said. “Vigor Island. How about that?”

They had the good sense to ignore me, and when I had simmered down I reflected that it would be fairer to call it Blewitt Island after the woman who had written the simple little book from which I had taught myself celestial navigation.

At 6 a.m. we drank her health in rum, drowned in apple juice. “Mary Blewitt,” I said, “you’re a bloody fine woman.”

They treated me with more respect after that. They began to believe in their hearts that I really knew what I was doing with that sextant. I was interested to find out, too. I was still beaming long after the island disappeared into the haze.

I’ve experienced many landfalls since then but none stays in my mind like the first. Nothing compares with the first time, when I acquired the faith a navigator needs to guide a little ship accurately over the featureless ocean with the help only of the sun, the stars, Mary Blewitt, a borrowed sextant, and a wrist watch his wife gave him for his birthday.

Today's Thought

Skill’d in the globe and sphere, he gravely stands,

And with his compass, measures seas and lands.

— Dryden, Sixth Satire of Juvenal, 1

Tailpiece

At sea, with low and falling glass,

Soundly sleeps the careless ass.

Only when it’s high and rising,

Safely rests the careful wise ’un. 

(Drop by every Monday, Wednesday, Friday for a new Mainly about Boats column.)

No need for navigation precision

THERE MUST BE VERY FEW of us who don’t use GPS for navigation these days, but I get the feeling that we often wonder what would happen if those faint electronic signals from those distant satellites suddenly stopped coming.  Would we be able to navigate with sufficient precision to get safely into port?

I was often bothered by that nagging thought until I realized that yacht navigation wasn’t what you might call precise in the days before GPS, and still doesn’t need to be now.  The very movement of the boat rules out 100 percent precision at sea, whether land is visible or not.

At first, you might be dismayed and frustrated at how difficult it is to get decent cross-bearings of features on shore, for example.  Working with a hand bearing compass in a seaway can drive you crazy.  Then, gradually, you realize that whatever you can get is good enough, and you relax, just as the old-timers did.

You develop a kind of feeling for it, and if you suspect your bearings aren’t accurate within 10 degrees either way, you sort of adjust them before you plot them on the chart, and you use with animal cunning the scraps of information they provide. This is why navigation is as much an art as a science.

The point is that you’re not kidding yourself, whether you’re working with a hand bearing compass on a costal passage or a sextant at sea. Any fix is better than no fix — but at the same time, you know that only a fool would trust it implicitly.  You, on the other hand, not being a fool, would interpret your fixes in the most pessimistic fashion and set a course that might not be the shortest or most convenient, but should certainly be the safest.

I often hear long-distance cruisers say that their back-up, in case of GPS failure, is another GPS receiver.  But the problems that might lead to a lack of navigation data do not necessarily stem only from hardware or software glitches on your boat.  The U.S. military has shut down the system for a short period before now, and who knows when a GPS satellite will develop a fatal wobble, and crash into the others, and bring the sky down on our heads?  A second GPS isn’t going to help in that case.

When all is said and done, you can still trust your arm, your eye, your compass, your sextant and good old man sun far more than you can trust a silicon chip or a bunch of wire and solar cells hurtling around the ionosphere.

Today’s Thought

Science is some kind of cosmic apple juice from the Garden of Eden. Those who drink of it are doomed to carry the burden of original sin.
— Lewis M. Branscomb, Director, National Bureau of Standards, 9 Apr 71

Tailpiece

“What’s that bite mark on your arm?”
“Oh,  I was at the vet’s office when a man came along with a basket and said: ‘Watch out, there’s a 10-foot snake inside.’ ”
“What did you do?”
“I laughed and said: ‘You can’t kid me. Snakes don’t have feet.’ And I opened it.”

(Drop by every Monday, Wednesday, Friday for a new Mainly about Boats column.)

Navigating by barometer

NOT MANY OF US would define a barometer as a piece of navigational equipment. But two very experienced South African round-the-worlders, Barry and Patrick Cullen, introduced many skippers to the concept of barometer navigation during the first ocean yacht race from Cape Town to Rio de Janeiro in 1971.

The racing fleet had to skirt the South Atlantic High, a disk-shaped area of high pressure with wind strengths gradually increasing from zero in the middle to Force 4 at the outer edges.

The dilemma facing each navigator was whether to sail close to the center, thereby lessening the distance to be traveled, or to go farther north, the long way around the edge, thereby getting more wind.

The Cullens were sailing a famous 47-foot Colin Archer ketch called Sandefjord. They solved the problem by finding the wind they wanted and noting the barometer pressure. If the pressure dropped, they edged closer to the center of the high.  If the pressure rose, they headed out toward the edge. And so they automatically stayed almost equidistant from the moving center of the high-pressure area, carving a huge but efficient semi-circle across the South Atlantic.

Now this is, admittedly a comparatively crude method of rounding a high, but the Cullens stood no chance of taking home a trophy, so they were quite happy to know that they were probably doing the best that dear old Sandefjord was capable of, without all the stress and nail-biting that normally accompanies  electronic weather forecasting and optimum course-finding.

There are highs in all the big oceans that can be navigated the Sandefjord way. The only thing you have to watch out for is the natural variation of the barometer, the diurnal variation, which rises between 4 a.m. and 10 a.m., and also between 4 p.m. and 10 p.m.  The barometer falls between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. and also between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m.

How much does it rise and fall?  Well the range of the diurnal variation varies according to latitude. It’s about 0.15 inch (5 millibars) at the equator and about zero at the poles.  And it occurs with great regularity, regardless of local weather patterns, although they may mask its presence, of course.

Incidentally, you need a brass-cased aneroid barometer for this business. A mercury barometer has no place on a small boat because the boat’s motion makes it “pump” up and down. But we now also have available the digital electronic barometer with a liquid crystal display screen that shows you a history of the changing pressure plus a current reading.  That’s very handy and a great safety feature — but there is still much to be said for the aneroid barometer. It’s very simple, extremely reliable, doesn’t need batteries, and doesn’t throw a fit if it accidentally gets wet.

Today’s Thought

There be triple ways to take, of the eagle or the snake,
Or the way of a man with a maid;
But the sweetest way to me is a ship’s upon the sea,
In the heel of the North-East Trade.
— Rudyard Kipling, The Long Trail.

Tailpiece

A soldier applied for a weekend leave pass.
“What for?” asked the lieutenant.
“My wife’s going to have a baby.”
“Very well.  It’s good to see a man with family pride.”
On Monday morning the lieutenant asked the soldier whether the happy event had taken place.
“What happy event?” said the soldier.
“Did your wife have her baby?”
“Jeez, have a heart, lieutenant. Don’t you know it takes nine months?”

(Drop by every Monday, Wednesday, Friday for a new Mainly about Boats column.)

Demystifying celestial navigation

IN THE DAYS before GPS, navigators were much sought-after on deep-sea racing yachts. Many thought themselves to be mighty fine fellows, and strutted around like minor royalty with their charts and sextant boxes tucked under their arms. They maintained a high hedge of mystique around the art of celestial navigation.

Then, in 1950, along came a woman called Mary Blewitt who mowed down their hedges and called their bluff. She wrote a modest 60-page book called Celestial Navigation for Yachtsmen that showed everyone how to find their position at sea with no more math than a few simple additions and subtractions.

That book is still in print but I expect sales are down now. There’s not much call for celestial navigation when you can get your position in an instant by pushing a button on a GPS receiver.

But if you want to experience the sheer pleasure and profound satisfaction of handling a precision instrument to measure the sun and the stars and plot your position on the chart like centuries of seamen before you, clutch Mary Blewitt to your heart. Then you, too, will be entitled to strut your stuff.

Incidentally,  you can practice taking sights with your sextant at home by shooting the sun in a tray of old engine oil or an artificial horizon.

Today’s Thought

There is no greater disloyalty to the great pioneers of human progress than to refuse to budge an inch from where they stood.

— Dean W. R. Inge.

Tailpiece

“Excuse me waiter, how long how you been working here?”
“Only about a week, sir.”
“Oh, you can’t be the one who took my order, then.”

(Drop by every Monday, Wednesday, Friday for a new Mainly about Boats column.)

Fathoming the way to land

SOMEONE IN RATHER A HURRY to get away and sail south before the start of the winter storms once asked me if he should make time to study emergency navigation. A friend had given him a copy of David Burch's [1] excellent book named (appropriately enough) Emergency Navigation, but it was rather long, and while some of it was simple and obvious, other parts required a fairly deep knowledge of physical science and the movements of the heavens.

The best advice I could give him was to read through the book, simply to know what was possible, and to stop worrying about emergency navigation until it happened.

Like most sailors who have ventured over the sea horizon, I have read books on emergency navigation with great fascination. But I came to the conclusion that much of it was plain common sense and some of it depended entirely on luck (what charts, instruments and tables were left available to you). The rest was rooted too deeply in the actual science of navigation for my liking and, indeed, my capabilities.

It is indeed fascinating to understand the movements of the heavenly bodies and to use simple mathematical formulas to make them divulge information of use to you, but it requires more study than I was prepared to devote to it.

As I pointed out in one of my books, deep-sea voyaging covers so many different disciplines, from medicine and aerodynamics to culinary arts and mechanical engineering, that there just isn't time in one human lifespan to plunge headlong into the depths of each and every one.

Anyone with common sense, a reasonable amount of reading, a broad-based education in the arts and sciences, and enough guts to attempt an ocean crossing, should be able to fathom a way back to land if it's at all possible.

If I were forced to make a choice, I would rather devote time to studying survival techniques than to emergency navigation. The ability to catch fish, find plankton, and gather fresh water might be worth far more to a sailor than a deep knowledge of navigation.

This is purely a personal observation, of course, and in no way diminishes the value of reading books like David Burch's (which I urge every deep-sea sailor to do) nor the added pleasure, interest, and satisfaction such books can bring to a voyage.

But I am sure most sailors would find it easier to head toward a large piece of land they can't possibly miss, such as South America or Australia, while surviving indefinitely off the sea. They don't really need to study in any great depth the very fine techniques of emergency navigation that might—or might not—guide them to the safety of a smaller but nearer island.

[1] David Burch is the Director of the Starpath School of Navigation in Seattle.

Today's Thought

The stars above would make thee known,
If men here silent were;
The sun himself cannot forget
His fellow traveller.
— John Owen, Epigram on Sir Francis Drake

Tailpiece

I dislike all puns, but jokes about German sausage are truly the wurst.

(Drop by every Monday, Wednesday, Friday for a new Mainly about Boats column.)