In a message dated 12/20/2004 1:43:11 PM Eastern Standard Time,
writes:
How many boats have you been on in the past five or so years that have
on their nav table: a divider, a chart ruler, or anything like these
simple and other nav instruments? I would guess you have found very
few, indeed if any.

Ahoy:

I have to admit that (1) my boat does have a nav table, dividers, and other
simple chart plotting tools, and that (2) I hardly ever use them.... I'm not
sure what other boater friends of mine have, but you've peaked my curiousity to
find out. Having said all this, I also agree that most of us do, in fact,
depend on the GPS alone more often than not. But if you are like me, I also
have something of an "eyeball DR" going on in my head almost all of the time.
This served me well once when I was navigating a course on the GPS to a distant
marker. At some point, the "eyeball DR" in my brain kicked in to say that what
I was seeing did not look right. I was way off course. It turned out that I
had transposed the waypoints for my destination when I loaded them into my
GPS....It was an interesting lesson that happily ended well

Good sailing to you.

w.