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
Good sailing to you.
w.
I'm not sure where anchorlt made the above comments - they don't show on
my servers or google. But ...
I'm a bit surprised at the comments - Certainly most of the long time
boaters I know have these tools and know how to use them. I'll admit
that most of them have given in to the temptation of relying on GPS, but
I'm sure all of them could cope with a sudden outage. For my own part,
I've lost GPS several times and found that I could revert to traditional
rather quickly if the need arises. As you say, a mental DR is always
maintained.
Although my boat is set up for computerized nav, I usually don't keep a
computer onboard. My GPS is 8 years old, and I haven't bothered getting
the charting chips for most areas I cruise to. Every year I do at least
one trip without GPS, just to stay in practice.
As for tools, I keep a set in a plastic box that comes on deck for
longer trips, or iffy weather. Although I don't often do running fixes
on deck, I usually do a few set and drift calculations a year. Frankly,
there's not much else to do when you're on a 4 hour watch; you might as
well practice navigation. (My wife, OTOH, saves a stack of magazines to
read while she's on watch, and thinks I'm just being geeky ...)