NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: sign conventions and units.
From: George Huxtable
Date: 2001 Apr 23, 3:02 AM
From: George Huxtable
Date: 2001 Apr 23, 3:02 AM
Paul Hirose writes- >Too bad our compasses are not marked in grads (400 grads in a circle). >Mentally figuring reciprocals, right angles, and 45s becomes child's >play with this system. Sadly, I've never seen grads used, though my HP >calculator can deal with them. ======================== Just like Paul, I had only come across grads as an option for trig calculations on a pocket calculator. However, on one occasion about 15 years ago we were making our way South towards Belle-Isle, South Brittany (Western France). We had good detailed admiralty chart coverage, but because of the way the coast trended, and the way the corners of the charts matched up, we were, ever so slightly, crossing a corner which our charts didn't cover. Although I knew we were in deep water without hazards, I always feel a bit uneasy in that situation. No doubt it's the same feeling that Magellan used to get... My wife, with sharper eyes than mine, had spotted the lighthouse at the North tip of Belle-Isle, which was on one of our charts. For some time there had been another offshore lighthouse in sight to our East. This we knew marked the Plateau des Birvideaux, a shoal patch we were well clear of, but it, too, was off our admiralty charts. However, it was shown on our 1:200,000 one-sheet Michelin Road map of Brittany, which we always carry for inland expeditions, and which, to its credit, shows many other features as well as roads. We had the 1983 edition. Now there was a chance to establish our precise position by compass bearings on the two lighthouses. But how do you plot them, to get an intersection, when they aren't on a common chart? Well, simple really. Tape an extra sheet of blank paper to the appropriate edge of the chart, and plot in the missing lighthouse by extending the lat and long scales somewhat. The lat and long values would come from the Michelin road map, which is ruled with lat and long, though not on a Mercator projection. That was the idea, but it didn't work. The values we read off the lat and long scales of the road map just didn't fit at all. They were quite crazy. At this point my wife remembered she had been taught about grads at school, and deduced that this was the meaning of the "gr" markings on the scales of the Michelin road map. There are 100 grads in a right-angle, in place of 90 degrees: a flawed attept to decimalise angle measurements, and to match them to the kilometer. So all we had to do was divide the values in grads by 100, multiply by 90, and plot them as degrees on our extended chart. So we thought. Well, the latitude seemed be sensible, but still the longitude was way, way, out. At this point my wife made the crazy suggestion- "They French couldn't possibly still be referring their longitudes to Paris, rather than Greenwich, could they?" And so it turned out to be. French nautical charts had indeed reluctantly adopted Greenwich in the previous century, but their terrestrial mapmakers had made no such concession! At this point we abandoned the attempt to plot the missing lighthouse from its coordinates, and instead transferred it by estimating bearings from landmarks that were shown on the two charts. At last we were able to plot those compass bearings we had measured some time before, and establish just where we had been. By this time, however, it was all rather irrelevant. The process of sorting out the map scales had taken so long that by now we were well into the passage between Belle-Isle and Quiberon peninsula. I am pleased to report that by the time of the 1990 edition of that road map, Michelin had decided to enter at least the 19th century, by adopting degrees rather than grads and referring them to Greenwich rather than Paris. The moral of this story is to carry charts for wherever you plan to go. It also points out the value of carrying an intelligent mate. George Huxtable. ------------------------------ george@huxtable.u-net.com George Huxtable, 1 Sandy Lane, Southmoor, Abingdon, Oxon OX13 5HX, UK. Tel. 01865 820222 or (int.) +44 1865 820222. ------------------------------