NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Role of CN at sea, was Re: Averaging sights ...
From: Jim Thompson
Date: 2004 Oct 18, 07:16 -0300
From: Jim Thompson
Date: 2004 Oct 18, 07:16 -0300
> -----Original Message----- > From: Navigation Mailing List on Behalf Of Bill > When the boaters among you head out do you have a compass even though you > have GPS or other electronic navigation equipment? Perhaps a hand-bearing > compass as well? Definitely. I can say with confidence that most (all?) boaters in our communities have a compass mounted at the helm station. In our region boaters frequently talk about compass bearings for familiar crossings, which of course are all less than about 60 nautical miles at a time. Few have handheld compasses. I have two, one in the boat's binoculars, and the other a good handheld. I use them to shoot anchorage bearings, check danger bearings, and verify the GPS in tight situations. > A manual bilge pump to back up the electric one. A > flashlight. Spare batteries? Both are required by law. Most boats in our community submit to an annual "courtesy inspection" by the Coast Guard each spring, obtaining a sticker for the port side. > Paper charts and plotting tools? Yes, but as we have discussed, short-distance coastal cruisers in home waters tend not to use them for constant plotting in the classic DR plot sense. The plotting tools are usually left in a drawer all season, if a boater carries them, because they just are not useful, and on modern boats our size there is no chart table. Paper charts are usually carried in plastic envelopes for reference. A log? For recording guests. Some of us record our day trips, most do not. In familiar waters near home boaters here do not maintain a nav or VHF log. During crossings ("cruises") a few of us (small minority) record a few positions and observations. GPS is so reliable that there are very few tales in the community of GPS failures. The grounding stories that we hear about every summer have more to do with cutting too close to familiar points, probably not even watching the GPS, or navigating in less familiar locations by electronic and paper charts that are out of date because we have shifting bottoms that are only surveyed every few decades. Jim Thompson jim2@jimthompson.net www.jimthompson.net Outgoing mail scanned by Norton Antivirus -----------------------------------------