On 10/27/2017 10:00 PM, Wayne.B wrote:
On Fri, 27 Oct 2017 10:44:41 -0400, wrote:

On Fri, 27 Oct 2017 10:14:15 -0400, Wayne.B
wrote:

On Fri, 27 Oct 2017 06:47:19 -0700 (PDT), Tim
wrote:

Two women and a couple dogs lost at sea finally rescued after 5 months.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/27/us/wom...rnd/index.html

===

An incredible tale of survival with more than a little bit of
incompetence thrown in to the mix. Anyone with a modicum of sailing
skill, and navigation skill/preparation, would not have ended up 2,000
miles off course. Fortunately they had plenty of water and food.

The boat looked intact. Sails etc. They must have just been lost. In
2017, no GPS (or 3)?
Hell even a sextant and a decent chart should have found something
that was inhabited.

===

Exactly. Celestial navigation is becoming a lost art unfortunately
but you can get pocket GPS units and a 5 year supply of batteries for
a few hundred dollars. Did they have charts? Who knows but you have
to wonder.



Running well off shore of Georgia on the Navigator and running on
autopilot following a course I had programed into the chart plotter, I
took a break from sitting at the helm to take a ****. I asked one of
the guys with me to just watch from the helm station in the event
anything came up visually or on radar. Went down to the head and
suddenly felt the boat heel over hard in a turn. Ran back up to the
helm and the guy had decided to turn the autopilot off for some reason
and had the boat well off the course I had programmed in the chart
plotter. Unknown to me at the time, the flux gate compass that gives
the boat's orientation and bearing on the plotter had been installed on
a bulkhead in the engine room, too close to the washing machine motor
that was on the other side of the bulkhead. Troubleshooting later, it
was determined that if the boat went off course by about 10 degrees, it
caused the flux gate compass to lose it's orientation and the little
boat display on the chart plotter spun around to it appeared we were
cruising in reverse at 19 knots. The guy was trying to turn the boat
around, looking at the boat icon which was all screwed up.

It was totally disorienting. We were well out of sight of land, so there
were no visual clues, so I pulled back on the throttles to make some
sense out of where we were really heading. The only thing that made
sense was the traditional compass so, figuring that if I headed west, I
should eventually run into Georgia. In time an offshore buoy appeared,
I headed for it, got it's number and found it on a paper chart. After
that, I was able to "re-sync" the flux gate compass and all was well
again. I probably could have extended the radar range and see the shore
line but I didn't think of it at the time.

When we finally got to Jupiter, FL, one of the first things I did was to
relocate the flux gate compass. Worked fine after that.