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.”

Oceans crowded with rowboats

MOST OF US don’t give much thought to what’s going on in the middle of the oceans, but I was surprised to learn how many hardy souls are rowing boats out there, unassisted by sails or motors.  And not only rowing, but racing each other across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans.

In his recent book, Little Ship of Fools (Greystone Books), Canadian author Charles Wilkins describes his role in an attempt to beat the record Atlantic crossing for rowing boats. His boat,  Big Blue was a 40-foot catamaran with a crew of 16. Eight people rowed at a time, all the way from Africa to the West Indies.

But the first people to row the Atlantic in 1896 were two Norwegian-born fishermen named George Harbo and Frank Samuelsen, who crossed from New York to England in 55 days in an 18-foot open dory named Fox.

Since then, hardy extremists have made a kind of game of racing one another, or the clock, across the oceans of the world. Not all of them survive. In 1966 two young Brits named David Johnstone and John Hoare left Virginia in a craft called Puffin, rowed for 105 days in the direction of home, and simply disappeared off the face of the earth.

Two weeks later, a second British team consisting of John Ridgway and Chay Blyth set out from Cape Cod and arrived in Ireland safely to become the first of the “new age” rowers to cross the Atlantic.

In 1972, yet another pair of Brits, John Fairfax and Sylvia Cook, aboard Britannia II, become the first to cross the Pacific from San Francisco to Hayman Island, Australia. They took 361 days. Cook was the first woman to row across any ocean, incidentally,  and saved Fairfax’s life after he was bitten by a shark. She has an extraordinary story to tell, as you’ll discover if you Google her name.

Meanwhile, in his book Wilkins says 30 rowing crews attempted ocean crossings between 1966 and 1982, attempts now referred to as “historic” ocean rows. Only 15 completed the whole crossing. Three were lost entirely.

From 1997 onward the number of successful Atlantic crossings rose to something over 400, largely as the result of the introduction of a transatlantic rowing race, the Atlantic Challenge. In October of 1997, 30 boats, each with one pair of rowers, left the Canary Islands. Twenty-four of them reached Barbados. In 2003 the race become the Woodvale Atlantic Rowing Race, as many as 40 boats setting out every second year from Tenerife in the Canaries.

The sport is now regulated and archived by an English organization called the Ocean Rowing Society, which stipulates among other things that boats must be self-sustaining, must touch neither land nor vessels en route, and must run entirely without motors or sails.

All I can say is that if you thought crossing an ocean in a small sailboat was the height of madness, you need to reconsider that opinion. The prize must surely go to these crazy rowers.

Today’s Thought

I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.

— H. L. Mencken

Tailpiece

An Italian lady always had trouble with English verbs.

“I can’ta weara my wool skirt any more,” she said. “I have send it to the cleaners and they shrinked ... shrank ... shrunk ... Oh!” she broke off in desperation, “I putted on weight.”

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

The power of a human

Dear John:
I have a question for you. There’s a bottle of Gosling’s Black Seal rum riding on the answer. It’s like this: I was having an argument with the yacht club know-all in the bar last weekend. We were talking about inflatable yacht tenders, and how hard they are to row when your outboard motor breaks down. He said he didn’t think a human being could produce much more than 2 horsepower with a pair of oars.

I laughed in his face and said: “Only Superman could produce 2 horsepower. A normal man can’t even produce half a horsepower for any length of time.”

He then gripped me warmly by the throat. The bar tender intervened and suggested we make a bet of it with a bottle of the basic ingredient for a Dark ’n Stormy. So can you help?
— Manny in Minnesota

Dear Manny:
Jeez, if only you people would buy my books instead of fighting in the bar you’d save yourselves a lot of trouble. Probably a lot of money, too. On page 158 of the Boatowner’s Handbook you’ll find these enlightening facts:

“Human Power
“The average man in good condition can produce about 1/4 horsepower for about 40 minutes. He can produce between 1/6 and 1/7 horsepower for several hours at a time. This is sufficient to row a hard dinghy at a reasonable clip—say 3 to 4 knots—in calm water and no wind.

“The maximum power from a highly trained male athlete for a burst of a few seconds is a little less than 2 horsepower.”

So, Manny, I guess you’re both right, but you’re a bit righter than the club know-all because a burst of a few seconds doesn’t really count. It’s not going to get you very far in your inflatable. So the best thing to do is to sit down, get his hands off your neck, split the bottle, and make friends again. Maybe if you bought my book, Manny, YOU could be the club know-all.

Today’s Thought
You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both.
— Emerson, Journals

Tailpiece
“Gimme all the bad fruit and rotten eggs you’ve got in the store, willya?”
“You must be going to see that new comedian in the town hall tonight.”
“Keep it down, willya? I AM the new comedian.”