Another important skill for the coastal pilot is seeing. Well, yeah,
not many blind people in the game. But seeing is not just watching the
pictures your eyes throw up on the screen of your consciousness and
waiting for things to jump out at you. The signals your brain sends
back to your eyes are at least as important as what your eyes send
upstairs.

I often used to sail back into Boston late at night. This was in the
very simply equipped Pearson 26's. They had navigation lights but not
even a compass light. I rigged up my own portable one that I moved
from boat to boat. Chart, watch, compass, pencil and parallel rule.
That was the full navigation outfit.

I was usually cold and in a hurry by that time so I would take the
short cut between Lower Middle shoals and Governors Island Flats
rather than loop around the main channel. There was never much traffic
in there which was a plus but there isn't much margin to either side
for a deep keeled boat.

I'd swing close around Deer Island Light, check the compass course on
the chart and that was about the last I would see of the chart until
the next time I went sailing. There was too much going on in the
harbor to spend any time looking at it and I didn't want to lose a bit
of my night vision anyway.

The first thing I had to find was the C "1". They were black in those
days and just as dark as the night. I seldom actually saw the can.
Instead, I would sail intentionally a bit off course and watch the
solid mass of city lights behind until I saw one wink off. When a
blink caught my eye, I would watch to see if there was a progression
of lights winking off. When I found a steady progress of lights
disappearing, I would then sail straight towards the spot while
watching for the lights on either side to go out briefly. Cross
referencing with the compass course to be sure I wasn't chasing
something else would bring me right up to the can. The distance I
could actually see it was short enough that I could have hunted for it
all night looking directly. (Binoculars would have helped but I had
good eyes and it hadn't occurred to me to buy a pair.)

I would then head up towards the N "4", pick up the C "3" the same
way and head directly towards it when I found it. Then straight up the
channel again which would give me the bias to move the C "5" against
the lights. Once past this, I was home free.

Obviously this isn't a technique that will work most places but is
shows the difference between just staring off into the dark waiting
for the little guy in your brain to yell "Buoy!" and looking with
strategy and planning at the full picture in front of you.

The brain is capable of some very complex processing when given a
chance. I used to read about grizzled old salts being able to read the
current in the waves and wrote it off as folklore. How can you
determine the speed and direction of the current without a reference
point? One day, I looked at the water and realized that young salts
can do it too if they just learn how to see.

After you have looked at waves for a while, you develop a feel for the
relationship of speed to length (there is an exact relationship) and
the direction is, of course, fairly easy to determine. When you look
"through" the waves to the surface of the water the right way, your
brain can actually synthesize a stationary reference by subtracting
the wave motion. You can then see the bubbles and bits of flotsam
clearly moving very separately from it. I don't know how this can be
taught or even if everyone can do it. Once you've seen it, it's very
striking. It's a very Zen like realization to discover that it was
always there but you couldn't see it.

You obviously wouldn't want to thread a very fine piloting needle
using this as a current correction but it's very useful in an area
where current direction is not obvious and to alert you to the
direction and rough strength of the set.

These are narrow examples of a way of using your brain that should
permeate all your piloting, whether simple clock and compass or the
fully outfitted bridge of a major ship. Everything is just little
pieces for an internal mental model of your situation that you
maneuver within. As soon as you start just pushing a pencil dot across
a piece of paper or a cursor across a GPS screen, you may be standing
into trouble.

--

Roger Long