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Robert Gainer's contribution contained a lot of commonsense, and I hope we
will read more from his pen.

But it brings a question to mind. He has renounced engine and electronic
equipment, and proceeds by traditional methods only (such as taffrail log,
I was pleased to note). Just think of the complexity that this allows him
to leave behind.

But he refers to being "on soundings", and I wonder if he has accepted
modern echosounder technology, or if he confines himself to lead and line
(with a bit of tallow, animal-fat, in the hollow in the end of the weight).
It's the tallow that gives lead-and-line its advantage over the
echosounder.

The tallow, by the way, was to sample the "quality of the bottom", whether
it was mud, sand,  ooze, or gravel, and the type of shells within it. A
navigator would compare what came up with his own experience of that area,
and with the annotations on the chart. This information was regarded as
particularly valuable in the Western approaches to the English channel. The
navigator would inspect the sample closely, sniff it, even taste it, but I
wonder if the tasting was done for show rather than anything else. It's
hard to imagine that it tasted of anything other than salty tallow.

George.

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