BoatBanter.com - View Single Post - GPS -- Ending?

On 21 Dec 2004 15:15:35 GMT, (Baybyter) wrote:

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

I also have a nav table that can take a chart folded in half. When we
are offshore, as when crossing the Gulf of Maine, we plot the GPS
and/or Loran (not DR) position hourly.

Any anomalous behaviour will show up long before it matters under
those circumstances.

But, inshore near rocky coasts, like a lot of Maine, we plot danger
bearings whenever we are tacking to windward. It is a great
convenience to know the bearing angle you can safely reach on the next
headland, without having to see exactly where you are along the
course.

On smoother or sandier shores, with spaced-out contour lines, we can
tack by the depth sounder.

The common thread in all of these is awareness of surroundings, and
how they matter for pilotage.

Rodney Myrvaagnes J36 Gjo/a

The destruction of the World Trade Center was
a faith-based initiative. -- George Carlin