NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Taken aback
From: Peter Fogg
Date: 2002 Oct 21, 05:13 +1000
From: Peter Fogg
Date: 2002 Oct 21, 05:13 +1000
Am enjoying this thread on the finer points of turning a square rigger. Of course far from being enthusiasts the crews of those good ole days were often shanghai-ed, men from (literally) the gutter who may have fallen down drunk and found themselves the next morning not just hung-over but with a whole new career before the mast. They were unlikely to be capable of reading and writing, let alone having enjoyed any other education, yet some of them succeeded in rising through the ranks and even acquiring their own commands. That this was most likely to happen by treachery and violence is not the point here, they had to learn to navigate and it is a credit to them that they did, by hook or by crook. Of course this may have meant little more than running a DR log and taking a noon sight for latitude when they could. My favourite story is of one of these old scoundrels who would sit happily in the sun with his wooden leg crossed over the other, and reduce his sight with a pencil on the timber. It was all he seemed to need, the rest - declination and so forth - was (according to legend) carried in his head. Usually he was in no hurry. However my own sails were taken aback by Dan Hogan wrote: 'find a technique/system that you are comfortable with and practice with it until you can reduce and plot a FIX in five(5) minutes' Wow. For a 3 body fix 5 minutes would be about right using the electronic nav. calculator; but to begin with, using my own pencil would take a few days, an hour or so at a time as opportunity and concentration permitted. I was feeling pretty happy about now being able to do the whole process in an hour or so. At sea my routine is to reduce the evening sights with the calculator, but in the morning like to spread all my books etc over the main table (those nav. desks are far too small) and reduce and plot and plan away in a scene of increasing disorder until I am thrown out, which I am ashamed to say is inevitable come lunchtime. I'd better keep practising. Coastal nav. gets done on the spot, LOPs plotted right onto the chart with a soft pencil. We are lucky to have mild tides, I know the strong tidal flows of some places complicate coastal navigational calculations greatly. 'When you start on your journey to Ithaca, then pray that the road is long, full of adventure, full of knowledge ................ that the summer mornings are many, that you will enter ports seen for the first time with such pleasure, with such joy!' (Kostas Kavafis)