Wayne.B wrote:
On Thu, 2 Jan 2020 07:05:19 -0500, "Mr. Luddite"
wrote:
On 1/1/2020 10:50 PM, Justan Ohlphart wrote:
Wrote in message:
On Wed, 01 Jan 2020 13:00:28 -0500, John H.
wrote:On Wed, 1 Jan 2020 16:45:16 -0000 (UTC), Bill
wrote:John H.
wrote: On Tue, 31 Dec 2019 21:13:43 -0500, Alex
wrote: Last night...
https://wsvn.com/news/local/several-injured-after-boat-crashes-into-jetty-near-fort-lauderdale/
Cocktails? Not every jetty shows up on a GPS. That
happened a few times in Deale, MD, when folks would follow
the GPS to get home. Midnight and speed. He was not going
slow to get that far up the rocks ina 42 boat.For sure speed.
Same thing happens in Deale. Going fast and taking the line
offered by the GPS hasbeen the problem more than once. Everyone
knows I am the real Luddite here but I fear modernelectronics is
taking the place of basic seamanship and the importanceof local knowledge.
Why do you fear modern ways of navigating? If you should ever
decide to expand your horizons, you might embrace some of the
newer technology available.
I think that the advent of GPS, chart plotters and radar (if understood
and used properly) have made boating (and aviation) much safer than in
the days of compasses and paper charts.
===
There's no question about it. I started long distance cruising in
1974 when we bought our first sailboat big enough to sleep on. We had
no electronic aids at all other than an old fashioned, flashing light
depth sounder, and an inexpensive radio direction finder which was
cumbersome to use and very imprecise. The RDF and depth sounder put
us ahead of many other boat of that time however, and we navigated for
many years and thousands of miles with nothing else. Dead reckoning
and shore bearings were the gold standards of coastal navigation until
the mid 1980s when Loran-C became widely available. Suddenly we now
knew where we were within 100 yards or so, at least most of the time.
I can remember as a kid in the 1950’s, using a cheap portable radio with a
directional antenna to help navigate back to the Golden Gate Bridge in the
fog from the Farallon Islands. A coupe radio stations had a tower by the
eastern end of the Oakland Bay Bridge which somewhat lined up with the
Gate.